The seven alumni-elected trustees who sued the university for access to Freeh Report material and won have responded to the judge’s ruling in their favor.
“We are greatly heartened by the the court’s decision today granting our petition to gain full access to the source documents used in creating the Freeh Report,” a statement released by the trustees said.
The group of trustees who sued Penn State seven months ago in a bid to obtain access to the Freeh Report source material includes Anthony Lubrano, Alice Pope, Barbara Doran, Robert Jubelirer, Ted Brown, William Oldsey, and Ryan McCombie.
They argued that in order to fully act out their fiduciary duties and responsibilities as university trustees, they needed access to the documents. As the trustees put it in their statement this evening, the Freeh Report has created a number of challenges for the university over the last few years, and their ability to tackle those challenges was hindered by their lack of access to the Freeh material.
“There are numerous remaining financial and legal challenges facing our university which hinge directly on the findings espoused by Louis Freeh in his 2012 report,” the statement said. “In addition, there is consistent ongoing evidence that in its current unchallenged form, the Freeh Report continues to have a negative impact on Penn State’s reputation.”
It seems that the trustees’ plan is to use the source material to try and disprove or draw skepticism to some of the conclusions of the Freeh Report, though that’s purely conjecture at this point.
In the statement, the trustees emphasized that they didn’t just sue the university because they thought they had the right to view the documents, but because it’s their responsibility to view the documents as Penn State trustees.
“We feel its not only our right, but our responsibility, to understand the very foundation of the Freeh Report — a document that our colleagues have refused to formally review or accept, but which had devastating effects on our university and our community,” the trustees said.
They also emphasized that they will follow the judge’s order to keep confidential any documents that are labeled as such. The university had expressed concern about releasing documents such as transcripts with interview subjects promised confidentiality.
The university expressed discontent with the trustees’ decision to sue them for access to the documents, and said in a statement that they would have provided the documents with a confidentiality agreement attached without the need for litigation. The group of seven alumni-elected trustees, however, felt that wasn’t the case and that going to the courts was their only option.
“We regret that petitioning the court became our only available route to exercising our fiduciary duty to Penn State,” the trustees said. “In the end, our single and unbending goal is to seek the truth — nothing more, but nothing less. The only way to determine the efficacy of the Freeh Report is to gain unfettered access to the source material. The court’s ruling today ensures our right to do exactly that.”
