As a lawyer, I do feel compelled to say one thing in favor of the BoT on this, even though I don't want to. You, as a trustee with a duty to supervise the running of the university, could be absolutely appalled by the situation and fine with the NCAA punishment and still be ballistic at the University's CEO thinking he had the power to agree to this without taking it to the Board. Having your legal authority trampled on is totally distinct from your reaction to the Sandusky cover up.
The trustees have committees. One committee is charged with executive actions. This is precisely why only the central part of the committee was told by Spanier of the Sandusky indictment well over a year ago. That committee did not relay ALL the information (i.e. the PSU involvement) to the rest of the trustees. This is why the chairman of the trustees, Garban, just resigned his position recently.
As for this recent stuff, anyone who thinks that Erickson made his decisions outside those committees is reaching. Erickson is there to protect the academic side and be the mouthpiece for the central BOT members. There are recently elected board members as well as a former PSU football player (Adam Taliaferro, you might remember him as the paralyzed football player from a few years back) who -- while nominally agreeing to some of the sanctions -- have taken to talk radio in the Philly area as they blast the BOT. Would it be a stretch to think that all of these unsourced quotes are coming from them? I think not.
Two more things. One, the trustees have specific responsibilities, but they are not quite in charge of running the university (thank God for that). However, something like a fine (anything which deals with bonds and major investments and also fines, would almost certainly include them. Major $$ and hiring a President and Provost is about the extent of their responsibilities. Oversight into university governance would not be, since that's normally negotiated between a President, Provost the Deans and faculty committees.
This story is much ado about nothing. There are maybe 50 or more trustee members, and only two (Taliaferro and Lubrano) are upset. They are recently selected and do not have power on the central committees.
I can say more such as: the entire board should resign, but since the Governor who is an enemy of PSU has a big hand in selecting the next board members, I'm not sure anything would improve. The central committees are themselves undemocratic. On the other hand, when you read about the plans for pet projects at PSU among some of these board members, you can see the wisdom. The central committee in this case was Governor appointed and had a lot of Second Mile members. The idea that they would have done otherwise when Sandusky was hanging out with the AG prior to 2008, and when Sandusky's organization gave that AG $600k in 2010 while he was under investigation, and when the 2nd Mile Board was fully apprised of Sandusky's abuses in PSU showers in both 1998 and 2001, it's hard to know for sure that Sandusky would have been stopped. Having faculty members on that oversight committee, or even the Chief of Police, would likely have been more effective.
If you have an hour to kill, there is a blow-by-blow description on a website by former trustee Ben Novak that describes the intractable problems of the PSU Board of Trustees.
http://www.bennovak.net/2012/03/reflections-of-a-former-trustee/ If you read it, you will know why the culture cannot be changed, because it involves money, a little taxpayer funding, a private university foundation with a clientelist approach all with ties to the BOT, seed money for what can only be described as propagandistic research on behalf of the board and some of the corporations the board represents. It's a big problem. The call for greater oversight is admirable, but it may yield greater powers to the very people who are part of the problem.
