It’s been a busy day for the Penn State board of trustees as they held committee meetings at the Penn Stater hotel, but the most notable item of trustee news came out of a courtroom.
Centre County Court of Common Pleas judge Daniel Howsare ruled in favor of seven alumni-elected trustees who sued the university to gain access to Freeh Report materials.
Howsare agreed with the trustees’ argument that reviewing the Freeh materials were a part of their fiduciary duties and responsibilities as elected university trustees.
The university has 20 days to provide the trustees with all source material “that is not claimed to be protected from disclosure by privilege or confidentiality obligation or that is already in the public domain.”
The judge ruled that the university has 45 days to provide all confidential or privilege Freeh materials, though they are only allowed to discuss that information in a privileged executive session of the board or in communications with the university’s legal counsel.
“We are pleased with the court’s recognition of the university’s interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the materials, particularly the names and identities of those who were interviewed for the Freeh Report,” a statement from the university said.
“The seven alumni elected trustees’ continuing demand to know ‘who said what?’ is contrary to the university’s efforts to create a climate where people feel safe in reporting possible wrongdoing,” the statement said. “The university offered repeatedly to provide essentially all of the approximately 3.5 million documents collected by the Freeh firm with no redactions whatsoever and all of the Freeh firm’s work product and interview memoranda with redactions of personally identifiable information, all under the conditions of a confidentiality agreement. This legal action was an unnecessary and wasteful expense.”
The judge ordered that the trustees sign an acknowledgement agreeing to the confidentiality order and the contempt of court charges that could stem from a violation of that order.
“While we would have hoped that a confidentiality agreement would have been sufficient to protect the university’s interests, the court’s order provides additional protection from any breach of the court’s confidentiality requirements,” the university said.
The seven trustees — Anthony Lubrano, Alice Pope, Barbara Doran, Robert Jubelirer, Ted Brown, William Oldsey, and Ryan McCombie — were not immediately available for comment on the ruling.
