Penn State's Trustees Recall Painful Decision to Fire
The board, scrambling to address the child sexual abuse scandal involving the university and its football program, had already decided to remove Graham B. Spanier as president. Then, many of those present recalled this week, the tension in the room mounted. Joe Paterno’s future was next up. Surma announced that an agreement appeared to have been reached to fire Paterno, too — the trustees having determined that he had failed to take adequate action when he was told that one of his longtime assistants had been seen molesting a 10-year-old boy in Paterno’s football facility.
Surma, those present recalled, surveyed the other trustees — there are 32 — for their opinions and emotions before asking one last question: “Does anyone have any objections? If you have an objection, we’re open to it.”
No one in the room spoke. There was silence from the phone speakers. Paterno’s 46-year tenure as head coach of one of the country’s storied college football programs was over, and the gravity of the action began to sink in.
“It was hard for us to want to get to the point where we were going to say that,” said Ira M. Lubert, a board member who works in private equity. “I was laying in bed that night shaking. And I couldn’t sleep — thinking: We just terminated Joe Paterno.” The 100 or so hours beginning with the arrest of Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for the football team, had built to a crescendo by that Wednesday night’s meeting of the trustees. By then, the campus was aflame with discontent. Penn State students and faculty, its alumni and its growing number of outside critics had been roiled by anger and confusion, embarrassment and sorrow. Reporters had inundated State College. It was, plainly put, the most trying time in Penn State’s 156-year history.
On Wednesday, in a conference room in New Jersey, a group of 13 trustees spoke to The New York Times in detail about that week — a somewhat frantic, certainly exhausting week that led to the firings of Paterno and Spanier and to the disturbances on campus that those dismissals set off.
The board decided to share its story because it grew weary of hearing criticism, which included calls from alumni who started a group known as Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship in an effort to replace the current board members. The trustees, over three hours, described how they had felt blindsided by Spanier’s failure to keep them informed of the nature and scope of the Pennsylvania attorney general’s investigation of Sandusky, along with the investigation of university officials.
Spanier, two other senior university administrators and Paterno had all given testimony before a criminal grand jury by late spring of 2011. They had been questioned extensively about what they had done after learning of a report in 2002 that said Sandusky had molested a young boy in the showers of the football building. According to the trustees, Spanier never informed them of any of that before Sandusky’s arrest on Nov. 5.
The trustees also laid out what they said were three key reasons for firing Paterno: his failure to do more when told about the suspected sexual assault in 2002; what they regarded as his questioning of the board’s authority in the days after Sandusky’s arrest; and what they determined to be his inability to effectively continue coaching in the face of continuing questions surrounding the program.
The trustees, who had not spoken publicly in any detail since the firings, also disclosed that, while having fired Paterno, they were still honoring the terms of his contract and are treating him financially as if he had retired at the end of the 2011 season.
To some trustees, Paterno failed in not reporting to the police what he had been told of Sandusky’s suspected assault. Some of the trustees were also upset that Paterno was seen leading “We are Penn State” cheers on his lawn with students and fans who had gathered after Sandusky’s arrest, which some board members viewed as insensitive.
No comments:
Post a Comment