Penn State Trustees Face Blame from Corbett

By Stacy Brown | PA Independent

Gov. Tom Corbett said the Penn State University Board of Trustees could have taken action against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

"It's the responsibility of the Board of Trustees, from their perspective, to determine what they were told, when they were told, why they were told, who told them, who knew what," Corbett said during his speech at the Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon Nov. 21. 

"It's their responsibility, the fiduciary responsibility, to deal with Penn State,” Corbett said. 

Corbett said he told unidentified university officials in March about the story in Harrisburg Patriot News about a grand jury investigation into Sandusky. 

"This is an interesting story. Is anybody looking at this?" Corbett said he told the board. 

"Blame the board, but not the governor, because they knew when it was reported in March," said Kevin Harley, Corbett's spokesman. 

Corbett was the state's attorney general when a grand jury convened an investigation in 2009 about child sex abuse allegations against Sandusky. Corbett led the investigation until he became governor in January, he said. 

Mostly, trustees have been silent on the issue . A grand jury report detailed eight separate incidents in which the former football coach is accused of abusing boys as young as eight years old between 1996 and 2005. 

"There has to be transparency. We should have had earlier knowledge of this," Penn State trustee Keith Eckel said in an interview with PA Independent last week. 

Eckel, a Lackawanna County resident, had given interviews to local media only and, after a brief conversation with PA Independent, said he wasn't talking to them any longer and referred further questions to board chairman John Surma, who didn't return calls for comment. 

A trustee for 11 years, Eckel told The Scranton Times Tribune that he heard of "writings" in the Patriot-News about Sandusky. 

"I absolutely believe that we should have had earlier knowledge of this," Eckel said in the newspaper's Nov. 18 report. 

Messages left by PA Independent were not returned by trustees David Joyner, Paul Suhey, Keith Masser, Carl Shaffer, Jesse Arnelle, Marianne Alexander, Joel Myers and Surma. 

The board consists of 48 members, including ex-officio member Corbett.

Trustees mostly live in Pennsylvania, but Arnelle resides in San Francisco. 

Whether Corbett should have told the board to bar Sandusky from his Penn State campus office is in dispute, but his decision may have helped minimize the university’s liability in any civil lawsuits filed by the victims, said John Capowski, law professor at Widener University School of Law here. 

"Think about it," Capowski said. "If Corbett told (the trustees) and they did nothing and something else happened with Sandusky--another child was hurt--there are more serious liability issues." 

Informing the trustees "would have revealed what we were doing in the grand jury investigation," Corbett said. "We had to be very careful not to tip where this investigation was going."