How much information should college presidents share with their governing boards when handling sensitive matters? That question has been at the center of conversations this week as college-governance experts and campus leaders search for lessons from the Penn State child-sex-abuse scandal.
A communication breakdown between senior officials and trustees at Pennsylvania State University in reacting to the case against a former football coach, Jerry Sandusky, contributed to what some crisis-communications experts say was a weak initial response by the institution. And a decision not to notify the full board about the state attorney general's investigation and the charges against Mr. Sandusky may have hastened the departure of President Graham B. Spanier, according to people with knowledge of the board's deliberations.
Some trustees were concerned that university officials had not planned for potential fallout after a March 31 article in The Patriot-News, of Harrisburg, Pa., described a grand-jury investigation into Mr. Sandusky's conduct. Among other details, the newspaper said the coach had made "inappropriate contact" with a 10-year-old boy on Penn State's campus.
It's unclear whether Mr. Spanier notified board leaders about the grand-jury investigation. Neither he nor the board's chairman, Steve A. Garban, would comment about any conversations they may have had about the Sandusky matter.
But some trustees told The Chronicle that they had not been aware of the grand-jury investigation until the attorney general announced charges against the coach, on November 4. Those trustees also said the full Penn State board had not discussed the case before the coach's arrest.
According to two people close to Penn State's senior leadership, top officials did not think the grand-jury investigation would lead to charges, in part because three previous grand juries that looked into Mr. Sandusky's relationships with young boys had not produced an arrest.
Nor did university officials believe they could act on information leaked by the grand jury, because its deliberations were supposed to be confidential, Ron Tomalis, the state's education secretary and a Penn State trustee, said in an interview with Time magazine.
"There wasn't much that could be done, because those were all private grand-jury proceedings," Mr. Tomalis said.
Lawyers and college-governance experts said they were not clear on whether a grand jury's proceedings are off-limits for discussion, even if the case has already been publicized.
"At what point can and should a board step forward when a grand-jury proceeding is being conducted? I just don't know," said Richard D. Legon, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. "It's certainly something more boards need to understand when they assess risk ... and a question that institutional general counsels around the country and others will be looking at as one of the outgrowths to this sad event."
Perplexing Decision
Any college president's job includes speaking openly with the governing board, a job Mr. Spanier, by all accounts, had always taken seriously.
"In my experience with Graham Spanier, it was never his style or his stated philosophy to sweep things under the carpet," said one former Faculty Senate leader who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of events.
Another person with close ties to the administration said it was Mr. Spanier's tendency to encourage full and honest conversations with trustees. "At the end of the day, there was never any tolerance for fudging," this person said. "We were always going to do things the right way, even if we had to take our lumps."
All of that made the decision to not inform the full board about the attorney general's announcement perplexing.
Several people close to senior leaders said that some trustees heard the news on the radio, or from friends or family members who had read news accounts.
"The board learned about this when it became public," and not from university leaders, Kenneth Frazier, chair of the board's committee looking into the Sandusky affair, told reporters after a meeting of the Board of Trustees on November 11.
On November 5, the day after the news broke, trustees hastily convened a conference call, with some expressing their displeasure that the administration had not informed them of Mr. Sandusky's arrest.
Without the full board's notice, Mr. Spanier released a statement describing his "unconditional support" for Timothy M. Curley, the athletic director, and Gary C. Schultz, interim senior vice president for business and finance, but showing little sympathy for the victims. Mr. Sandusky was charged with 40 counts of sexually abusing children. He has denied the charges. Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz were charged with perjury and failing to report child sex abuse. Both have denied wrongdoing.
Mr. Spanier's statement struck some on the board as precisely the wrong message to send. Crisis-communications experts the university brought in that weekend agreed.
By the next day, when the board announced its independent investigation, support for the president was waning. Three days later he was gone.
What to Share
In considering what to tell trustees about a highly charged matter, governance experts say it's not reasonable to expect that every board member will respect the confidentiality of information. The larger the board—Penn State's has 32 members, considered large but not unwieldy—the more likely it will be "porous," said Richard P. Chait, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
"I do think presidents need to share information of great weight or potential magnitude almost immediately with some predetermined subset of the board," he said. That group may include three to five trustees, who will then determine when to share any or all of the information with the entire board.
The more urgent the situation, the more swiftly leaders must decide how much to say and to whom, Mr. Chait said. "It should probably tilt toward more information sooner."
When dealing with negative information, leaders sometimes feel hamstrung. "There are presidents who fear that if they disclose challenges or problems to which they don't yet have an answer, they'll be marked down, not marked up," Mr. Chait said. "They want to come in the room and incite the board with their enthusiasm and demonstrate their proficiency and inspire philanthropy—and sometimes that gives short shrift to issues that fester."
Governing boards should evaluate presidents, in part, on the quality of problems they present to trustees, not the solutions they offer, he said. "There ought to be a system that says, The more candid you are with the leadership of the board, the more favorably we'll evaluate your performance."
Complicating the Penn State board's response were the close ties that the chairman, Mr. Garban, and the vice chairman, John P. Surma, have to Mr. Spanier and the football program. Mr. Garban previously served as senior vice president for finance and operations, where he oversaw the athletic department; as an undergraduate, he was captain of the football team. Mr. Surma is chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. Steel, on whose board Mr. Spanier served until he stepped down last week.
Blindsiding boards is problematic not only when a potential scandal is brewing, but also when trustees aren't given a full picture of the university's weak spots. While their problems were on a far different scale than Penn State's, trustees overseeing the University of Maryland at College Park were surprised to learn this summer that the athletic department had been running deficits for several years. Despite receiving annual reports from athletics, the budget gaps were never articulated to the regents, said C. Thomas McMillen, a member of the University System of Maryland's Board of Regents.
"It's a problem when presidents and athletic departments don't fully inform boards about trouble ahead," he said. "Presidents and boards need to establish a whole new level of relationship where there's much more transparency—and not delayed transparency—so boards can weigh this stuff appropriately."
Like many boards, Maryland's is considering changes in its governance structure to help it meet its athletics-oversight responsibilities.
The governing-boards association offers guidance on proper athletics oversight, and, with help from United Educators Insurance, a company that also advises on risk management, it has offered suggestions for better assessing and managing risk.
While much of that guidance may not have had much relevance in Penn State's case, Mr. Legon, the association's president, said one lesson is a reminder to boards of the importance of regularly monitoring for potential problems.
"They need to know what to ask and when to ask it," he said. "Maybe this will awaken them."
Libby Sander contributed to this article.
