The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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No Vote Tonight —Lubrano

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Found the following from “lubrano” on the BWI/McAndrew Board:

BOT Meeting
No Vote this evening due to a technical legal issue. Please refer to Joel Myers email Friday to the BOT regarding this issue. However, the call will still be held and we will hear from Gene Marsh, PSU counsel to the NCAA; Rod Erickson regarding the Consent best place buy diazepam uk Decree; Steve Dunham, PSU recently hired General Counsel, regarding Dr. Erickson’s authority to sign the Consent Decree; Ken Frazier regarding the Freeh Report; Richard Edelman regarding Public Relations matters; and then the Trustees, in alphabetical order, can ask questions and/or make brief statements. I have no further information to share at this time.

Sudden Impact — Pivotal Board Meeting

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Today at 5 p.m. the Penn State board of trustees will convene via telephone to ratify the July 23 consent decree between Penn State and the NCAA. The board hastily called this meeting on short notice at another meeting last Tuesday that in itself might have been illegal under the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act because it was conducted privately and without notice to the public.

“Penn State should start an immediate search for a new University President, one who will abide by and understand the rules by which he/she is expected to operate.” —Dan Myers, president and publisher of StateCollege.com

Nice background for an important meeting, eh? Our BOT chairwoman, Karen Peetz,wants to put all matters Sandusky behind us and focus like a laser on the future. Well, the BOT seems to be a few photons short of a coherent light beam, if you ask this Turkey, himself an amateur quantum metaphorist. There is little concern by the majority of the board that the NCAA rushed to judgment, Erickson rushed to sign a pre-emptive consent agreement under a direct threat of multi-year shutdown of the football program, and that the board has not done so much as examine the Freeh report, upon which the NCAA has based its sanctions against Penn State, before seeking closure on this matter.

Obviously, many alumni are disgruntled, as are their representatives on the BOT. However, as commenter BigAl pointed out, the trustees elected by the alumni wield little power on the board, to wit:

I’m not sure the majority is all that docile, it’s just that approximately 10 trustees have taken over the board. And they run things by using Politburo rules and sticking together like the “popular kids” in a junior high school student government.

Review of the Board of Trustees’ committee structure makes it obvious that the alumni elected trustees (and by extension the alumni themselves) have virtually no power because the board agenda is controlled by the trustees selected by the business societies with some assistance from the trustees from the agricultural societies.

Every BOT member has a least one committee assignment but the alumni trustees are packed into the least important committees like Outreach, Development, and Community Relations and Academic Affairs and Student Life.

In contrast, the business trustees dominate the committees that hold the real power like the Executive Committee, and the committees on Governance and Long Range Planning, Legal and Compliance, Audit and Risk, and Finance, Business and Capital Planning.

The business trustees’ stranglehold over the Executive Committee is particularly flagrant. All 6 business trustees serve on this 11 person committee and compared to only 1 (Marianne Alexander) of the 8 alumni trustees.

The business trustees also constitute the largest presence on the Audit (3 of the 7 committee members), Finance (3 of 8), Governance (3 of 10), and Legal (3 of 9) Committees. The alumni trustee presence on the Audit (1 of 7), Finance (0 of 8), Governance (2 of 10), and Legal (1 of 9) is obviously less. And the disenfranchisement of alumni trustees is more obvious when one considers that there are 8 alumni trustees compared to 6 business trustees.

Also, if you look at each trustee’s committee assignments , it becomes apparent that the trustees are not equal in power and influence. Only 2 of the 8 alumni trustees appear on more than one important committee – Marianne Alexander and Stephanie Devinney. Based on committee assignments, the other power players on the BOT are Alvin Clemens, Mark Dambly, Keith Eckel, Ira Lubert, Keith Masser, Karen Peetz, Linda Strumpf and John Surma.

I believe that nothing is going to change with Penn State’s incompetent, unresponsive BOT until most of the 10 power players named above are replaced. Unfortunately, only Alexander (term expires 2014) and Devinney (expires 2013) can be removed through the alumni vote. Anybody have any suggestions/ideas for removing the others??

Just to make life more difficult, the governor and his appointees are solidly in favor of burying the matter for good, no doubt for politically expedient reasons.

However, two directors have been active in attempting to sway the rest of the board to slow down: Joel N. Myers and Ryan J. McCombie. Both have written letters to the board that are worth reading. If you have any interest in this matter at all, you will read them. These men are not crackpots or gadflies. Myers is chairman and CEO of AccuWeather, which he founded. McCombie is a retired Navy SEAL.

Another worthwhile read is the editorial written by Joel Myers’ son Dan Myers, who is the president and publisher of StateCollege.com. There are plenty of juicy tidbits in it beyond telling the board to reject the consent decree, including some good links to collateral documents.

I also want to go a bit off-topic (but this is Sudden Impact) in order to point you toward a look inside The Second Mile, the children charity founded by Jerry Sandusky, written by Sara Ganim, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Patriot-News. Among other things of which I was unaware, Ganim writes that a “team of officers from the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are searching records and interviewing people.” I didn’t even know that The Second Mile was under investigation.

I’ve given you enough preparatory reading for today, so that’s it for another issue of Sudden Impact, where we hit you right between the eyes with our .44 magnum detritus.

So, what’s up with Sunday BOT meeting?

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The Penn State Board of Trustees plans to meet tomorrow at 5 p.m. via conference call, with a single item on its agenda: to ratify (or reject) the consent decree signed by PSU president Rodney Erickson and NCAA president Mark Emmert agreeing upon sanctions against the university in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.

Rod Erickson
Erickson signed decree without full board approval.

Much speculation surrounds this impending board meeting, not to mention the obvious controversy introduced by several dissenting board members who have challenged the sanctions and written an appeal directly to the NCAA through their high-priced counsel. The dissenters allege that the NCAA should have conducted a thorough, independent investigation instead of merely accepting the Freeh report as written, warts and all, rushing to judgment and punishment of Penn State. They further allege that the full board should have met to consider the proposition, and that Erickson’s signature alone without board approval nullifies the agreement.

Another appeal letter was sent to the board through the same law firm by a group of former Nittany Lions football players and one former assistant coach. The Paterno family has also expressed its intention to appeal the NCAA decision, especially as the sanctions affect their patriarch’s legacy.

Inasmuch as the NCAA has repeatedly stated that the Penn State sanctions are not appealable, the appeals could represent the groundwork for a Federal lawsuit against the NCAA. However, such a course of action would be unlikely to succeed because courts have held in the past that membership in the NCAA is voluntary. To prove that is more than illusory would require an anti-trust suit against the NCAA, and it is doubtful that the USDOJ, at least as it is composed at present, would initiate such an action.

Karen B. Peetz
Chairwoman Peetz wants to move on

So, what appears to be happening here is a preemptive move by the complacent, docile majority on the board to quash an internal rebellion before it gathers steam and before it garners more public awareness and approval, although Board Chairwoman Karen B. Peetz said that she called the meeting “so there can be no misunderstanding as to we as the board stand.” University legal counsel no doubt advised the BOT to approve the consent decree in order to eliminate one major legal flaw upon which appellants could base their claims.

On Thursday, ESPN reported that there had been a contentious conference call among at least 20 board members last Tuesday, during which straw polls were taken. The majority of the trustees polled did not support appealing the sanctions. Although not all of the 32 trustees participated in the call, a quorum was present for the straw votes. According to spokesman David La Torre, the meeting was a closed executive session whose purpose was for trustees to receive a report from university legal counsel and discuss matters with counsel. La Torre did not elaborate further.

So much for government in the sunshine. No notice was given the public about the conference call, votes were taken, and a quorum was present, which might constitute a violation of the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act, rendering the Tuesday meeting illegal.

As for Sunday’s meeting, La Torre stated that a live audio stream of the meeting would be available at WPSU.org/live and that an audio file and transcription of the minutes would be posted afterward at www.psu.edu/trustees.

Mark Emmert, NCAA President
Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA countersigned the consent decree.

There are a myriad questions to be answered here. For one, if Sunday’s meeting was called during the course of an illegal board meeting, does it even matter what happens there? I know that is kind of getting into legal technicalities on which I’m obviously unqualified to opine, but we’re all Philadelphia lawyers at times, even those of us who are not from the Philly area and are turkeys.

Peetz is resolute in her position. Dismissing the dissenters’ comments and actions, she stated, “…it is now time to put this matter to rest and to move on. As I said in my opening remarks on Tuesday evening, we need a laser focus on the future of the university. We need to be unified and we need to work together.” Sounds good, sorta.

On the other hand, Maribeth Roman Schmidt, spokeswoman for PS4RS, stated, “Nothing less than a complete and total rejection of the baseless NCAA consent decree will be acceptable when the Trustees meet to vote this Sunday. We view this call for a meeting as an acknowledgment that Rod Erickson did not indeed have the authority to sign it.”

Are we not seeing the forest for the trees? Is there too much concentrating on picayune details and not enough concern for putting the whole mess behind us and getting on with our future? Shouldn’t we be tired of rubbing our noses in this stink?

Coach O’Brien would like all the bickering to stop, so he and the university can get on about the business at hand. Unfortunately, too many people would like to see some loose ends tied up. Peetz and the Board think that having a meeting to rubber stamp approval of the consent decree should do just that. Alas, in the minds of many, it will constitute yet another attempt to accept the Freeh report without closer analysis and kowtow to the NCAA.

Why would a governing body act that way? Hurry up and cover their asses in retrospect and then stick their collective heads back in the sand? Wouldn’t it be in everybody’s best interest if there were indeed checks and balances instead of rubber stamps? Some of the newer trustees think so and so does this Turkey. Does the majority of the BOT really think that Penn State should be steamrolled by a backroom deal between its president and the NCAA? I don’t think so. There must be more here than meets the smell test.

One contingent out there in PSU Alumniland believes that there is a deep conspiracy involving Second Mile, Jer, and some highly placed current and former Pennsylvania government officials. I won’t go into great detail here, because I have no new information, and I’m not sure about a lot of the ambiguous stuff I’ve read. There is surely a lot of far-fetched contriving going on out there. However, it certainly makes me suspicious of involvement of higher levels when the board acts the way it has acted. Sometimes smoke is just smoke, but occasionally, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Remember that the governor is an ex-officio member of the BOT, and this particular governor is the former attorney general of Pennsylvania. Feel free to add two and two and get five. But why would all this hasty action be taking place if everything was on the up-and-up? And when is someone going to start investigating The Second Mile, where potential money tie-ins exist.

Sara Ganim, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the Patriot News will publish the chronology of The Second Mile in the Sunday edition tomorrow. This Turkey would love to see her continue on the trail. Follow the money, Sara. Pretty please?

I’ve digressed into the shady world of Internet paranoia and The Second Mile. Back to the business at hand. My neuroses won’t be assuaged by a hasty vote of the BOT tomorrow. Nevertheless, let me reel myself in long enough to opine that the BOT will indeed rubber stamp the consent decree tomorrow. Whether that will be the end of the controversy, as Peetz wants, is doubtful.

After I wrote this, I found that Dan Myers had written an editorial for StateCollege.com that is worth reading.