HARRISBURG, Pa | Former Penn State president Spanier loses criminal appeal
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HARRISBURG, Pa | Former Penn State president Spanier loses criminal appeal
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — An appeals court is upholding a misdemeanor child endangerment conviction against former Penn State president Graham Spanier over his handling of a 2001 complaint about Jerry Sandusky showering with a boy in the football team locker room.
A Superior Court majority on Tuesday rejected Spanier’s claims too much time had passed to charge him, he did not owe the boy a duty of care and shouldn’t have been charged because he didn’t supervise children directly.
Spanier’s lawyers say Spanier is deeply disappointed and “plans to pursue his appellate options” in hopes of vindication.
Spanier has been on bail while appealing, so has not served his jail sentence.
Two of Spanier’s top deputies when he ran Penn State pleaded guilty to child endangerment and testified against him last year.
Former Penn State officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz plead guilty to child endangerment charges
Former Penn State officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz plead guilty to child endangerment charges
Two Penn State officials tied to the Jerry Sandusky scandal have pleaded guilty to charges of child endangerment on Monday. Former Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary Schultz entered their pleas to a judge with an agreement to potentially testify against former Penn State president Graham Spanier next week, according to a report from Penn Live.
The NCAA has finally lifted some of the harshest penalties that were levied against Penn State two years ago.
Monday the organization announced that Penn State will be allowed to compete in this year’s post-season and that all their scholarships will be returned in 2015. The Nittany Lions are currently 2-0 and would be eligible to play in the Big Ten championship game at the end of the season.
People have likely forgotten that in addition to all the criminal litigation involved with the Sandusky scandal there is heaps of civil litigation slowly winding through the courts. I was in the courtroom Monday to write about the latest developments of the Paterno family vs the NCAA and today wrote about Graham Spanier's defamation suit against Louis Freeh. Thing is, after the criminal trials end - if they EVER do - there's a possibility of even more civil litigation.
Tim Curley, Gary Schultz, Graham Spanier heading to trial on Sandusky cover-up charges
HARRISBURG PA — All the charges against three former Penn State leaders accused of covering up Jerry Sandusky abuse allegations are headed for trial in Dauphin County.
Judge William Wenner held over on Tuesday the charges that include obstruction of justice, child endangerment and conspiracy after almost two days of witness testimony.
The next step is the formal arraignment, which is scheduled for Sept. 20, though the men do not have to appear.
Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2013/07/30/3712122/curley-schultz-spanier-heading.html#storylink=c
The lingering awkwardness of Graham Spanier in Happy Valley
Published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 21, 2013
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- He looks strangely familiar, this pale man at the Penn State recreation center wearing a powder blue Penn State T-shirt and thigh-hugging shorts, wielding a racquetball racket. He has silver hair, wide eyes and an odd yet worldly smirk. But surely that can't be him, can it?
As many people in State College have found out, that is him. That is Graham Spanier. Just your average ousted university president preparing to work up a sweat.
In his previous life as a respected university president, Mr. Spanier was known for being a goofy everyman, popping up in random places. He'd perform magic tricks for new students and play music at the popular student bar the Phyrst.
In his present life, facing a preliminary hearing later this month for his criminal charges related to the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal, these random appearances haven't gotten any rarer. They just strike with the thick air of peculiarity and novelty, eliciting a "who invited him?" reaction.
Mr. Spanier still visits State College's best-known restaurants, such as the historical Corner Room and The Tavern, where employees say he has eaten lunch twice in the last six weeks (the Turkey Bacon Deluxe, if you must know). Mr. Spanier came to the Allen Street Grill for dinner about two months ago, also ordering a turkey sandwich. He arrived before his dining companion.
"It was kind of awkward," said a server, Sean McGuire. "He walked in and sat by himself and everybody stared."
But Mr. Spanier is clearly not afraid of being center stage, even now, even when the stage is his former place of employment and even when the stage is literally a stage.
Last weekend, The Deacons of Dixieland, an eight-piece traditional jazz band, performed at Arts Festival, State College's biggest event of the summer. Mr. Spanier, a member of the band since he became president in 1995, played the washboard on a stage situated on the lawn of Old Main. As he performed, he was looking at the exact building in which he worked as university president until November 2011.
"I think he just enjoys it," said Jim Ressler, the group's trumpet player and front man. "It's an outlet. He's been doing it for quite a number of years and there's no reason to quit."
Students have used Twitter to catalog their encounters with Mr. Spanier, often taking pictures. In the past few months, Mr. Spanier has been seen at Penn State volleyball games, men's basketball games, the Olive Garden, the Penn Stater and the Autoport hotels, among other places. This summer he was seen browsing for Penn State tank tops at an outdoor festival. He looked kind of sunburned.
Seeing him like this suggests a conundrum once expressed by The Clash: Why would he stay, but where else would he go? Mr. Spanier has other options, including a residence in New York City and family in Iowa. State College must hold some appeal.
After all, he does always have racquetball companions here. Squash and racquetball players say he usually comes to play racquetball with friends at Rec Hall, Penn State's recreation center, once or twice a week, usually in the afternoon. Mr. Spanier is a past intramural champion at Penn State.
He declined a request to talk about his life around State College for this story. Mr. Spanier said via email, "Thanks for reaching out to me, but I'm unable to do any media interviews now."
He has not spoken publicly since he was charged in November with perjury, endangering the welfare of children, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.
Before then, Mr. Spanier spoke with Louis Freeh's investigative team for the Freeh Report and did an interview with The New Yorker. On July 11, he filed notice in Centre County Common Pleas Court that he intends to file suit against Mr. Freeh and his law firm for slander and defamation.
As university president, Mr. Spanier earned $3.2 million in 2011, although much of that is deferred compensation, severance and retirement pay. He made $600,000 this past school year as an on-leave, tenured professor.
A reporter mentioned this to a group of servers at The Tavern. They weren't happy. His tipping skills apparently weren't commensurate with his income.
Perhaps Mr. Spanier just hasn't adjusted to life as a former president facing felony charges. He no longer resides at the president's Schreyer House mansion, he lives in a condo at the south end of town, according to court documents. Rather than drive a university car, he has been spotted at a bus stop, a switch that hasn't come without complication.
On Twitter in February, student Brian Salvesen posted that he saw Mr. Spanier boarding a bus. Mr. Spanier, he wrote, "cut the whole line."
Crisis Communications for Colleges, or, Time for Schools to Remove the Dunce Caps and the Blinders
The current Public Relations crisis engulfing Rutgers University and its athletic department is surprising only in that it occurred at all.
For my new book, Crisis Communications, I researched extensively Penn State’s inept bungling of its pedophilia crisis. In the chapter, “Say It Ain’t So, Joe!”, I enumerated the many crisis management and crisis communications blunders that brought one of the nation’s largest universities to its knees, and took the school to task for failing to retain competent crisis management counsel in its time of need. At no time did the school ever gain control of its crisis communications message, which compounded the situation and enabled the accuracy-challenged Freeh Report and devastating NCAA sanctions to unfurl unchecked. Every college should have gone to school – pun intended – on Penn State’s errors. Rutgers slept in.
Chief among Penn State’s failings was that it turned a blind eye to easily recognizable crisis prodromes (warning signs of potential problems) since it was easier to look the other way. Thus, when it was first reported to former university president Graham Spanier that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was “horsing around” in the school showers with a ten-year old boy, both of them naked, the school did nothing to fully investigate. This “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mindset imperiled the school and sent it reeling down a sordid, decade-long crisis path. Another lesson lost on Rutgers.
We always advise our crisis clients that learning from your mistakes is prudent, but it is always better to learn from the mistakes of others, especially those in the same field. Those are tangible prodromes. Publicly funded universities, like Penn State and Rutgers, have a tougher row to hoe because there are more constituents with microphones and megaphones, and those institutions deal with kids – always a potential lightening rod for controversy and crises – which raises the stakes exponentially.
Rutgers’ crisis first erupted when former basketball coach Mike Rice was videotaped, repeatedly, verbally and physically abusing players in practice, and on a YouTube video that went viral. He was eventually – but tardily -- fired, and then-athletic director Tim Pernetti was ousted for his poor handling of the matter.
You would thus expect Rutgers to learn from this saga and thoroughly and exhaustively vet its next AD in a manner befitting Caesar’s wife. Instead, the school hired as its new AD Julie Hermann, with enough documented baggage of abusing her volleyball players from her days as a coach at Louisville and Tennessee to more than fill a redcap’s wagon. What was Rutgers thinking?
Good crisis management and common sense dictate that you should not hire as a replacement someone who has been tarred with the same abusive brush as the miscreant that caused the uproar in the first place. Any hint of impropriety should have been a red flag, and in Ms. Hermann’s case there was more than a hint. Plus, search committees and search firms for some reason seem to shy away from interviewing former students and players when hiring for academia, and that is a huge mistake. It seems that many of Ms. Hermann’s former players would have gladly provided an earful.
Like Penn State before it, Rutgers’ crisis management counsel – if they have one – should play an active role in assessing and alleviating the current crisis situation. Penn State failed in doing that and its president was ousted. Rutgers has yet to learn this lesson and its even money whether Rutgers’ president, Robert Barchi, is the next to go.
