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August 23, 2012

Experts question Spanier's 'I didn't know' defense

The Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA — The story being told by Penn State president Graham Spanier as he defends himself against accusations that he covered up a sex abuse allegation runs contrary into his own reputation as a detail-oriented manager.

But experts in university governance also suggest that if Spanier truly didn't know what was going on, he showed a willful ignorance and a disturbing lack of curiosity about a scandal that stood to ruin Penn State's reputation.

In a series of interviews this week and at a Philadelphia news conference, Spanier and his lawyers have repeatedly portrayed him as somewhat on the sidelines, completely unaware that complaints about former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky were serious enough to warrant much more than passing attention.

The governance experts acknowledge the job of president requires dealing with a continual stream of problems, but they are raising doubts that Spanier took a less than active role in investigating the scandal that engulfed two of his top lieutenants and longtime football coach Joe Paterno.

"You can say I didn't know. You can say I was distracted. You can say they didn't tell me — up to a point," said Stephen Trachtenberg, who spent three decades as president at the University of Hartford and George Washington University.

"But from what we have heard about what transpired, his vice president, his director of athletics, his coaches allegedly were concealing this bad news from him for such an extensive period of time that I find the story implausible," he said.

Spanier said he had no recollection of email traffic involving a 1998 police investigation of Sandusky, triggered by a woman's complaints that he had showered with her son. He also told The New Yorker he had little memory of a 2001 complaint about Sandusky in a team shower with a boy, and that a follow-up meeting on the topic was wedged into his schedule during a busy time.

Sandusky was convicted of various criminal counts in June for both of those encounters, as well as child sexual abuse of eight other boys. He awaits sentencing.

Spanier has not been charged with any crimes, but athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz, who reported to him on the matters, are expected to go to trial in January on charges they lied to a grand jury about the Sandusky scandal and did not properly report the 2001 accusation to authorities.

Spanier, who hasn't responded to requests for an Associated Press interview, told ABC that the 2001 case was only characterized as "horseplay."

But even that should have raised red flags, said Mary Gray, an American University math and statistics professor with an expertise in university governance.

"If he was told that, I would think if I was the university president, I would ask, 'What do you mean by horsing around?'" said Gray. "He should have assigned somebody to look into this in more detail and get back to him."

Penn State has a $4.3 billion budget, some 90,000 students and nearly 25,000 full-time employees — a massive operation by any measure.

"I think that there is a myth out there, to some degree, that university presidents are omniscient about what's going on at their institution," said John Burness, a former senior vice president at Duke University who teaches a course on higher education and the media.

(Continued on page 2)

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