Updated 6:45 p.m. May 12 to reflect that the May 15 meeting will be an executive session only.
The Penn State Board of Trustees has scheduled a private special meeting for Thursday to consider President Neeli Bendapudi’s recommendations for the possible closure of some Commonwealth Campuses.
The board will meet virtually in executive session at 8 a.m., according to the university. Information about the date and time for a public meeting, during which any vote would need to occur, will be shared after the executive session, Penn State spokesperson Wyatt DuBois said.
A legal notice that appeared only in this past weekend’s print edition of the Centre Daily Times due to Pennsylvania’s archaic public notice advertising laws had stated that a public meeting would immediately follow Thursday’s executive session. DuBois said that had been the tentative plan but was no longer the case.
“At the board meeting on Friday, May 9, the trustees requested additional time to further discuss the Commonwealth Campus recommendation in executive session,” DuBois wrote in an email. “With a full agenda for this regular May meeting, there was not enough time to fully discuss the recommendation. Given the importance of this matter, board members expressed a desire to have more time to examine and discuss the recommendation, so the previously scheduled public meeting for May 15 was changed to an executive session.
“Despite having been notified of the change, the Centre Daily Times mistakenly published the incorrect notice.”
After months of speculation, Bendapudi confirmed in February that the university was evaluating closures of some of its 19 Commonwealth Campuses after the conclusion of the 2026-27 academic year. The 12 under consideration are Beaver, DuBois, Fayette, Greater Allegheny, Hazleton, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Schuylkill, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and York. The other seven, which are the largest of the campuses, will not be affected, nor will Penn State’s special mission campuses.
“We cannot continue with business as usual,” Bendapudi wrote in a message to the university community at the time. “The challenges we face — declining enrollments, demographic shifts and financial pressures — are not unique to Penn State, but they require us to make difficult choices. Across higher education, institutions are grappling with similar headwinds, and we have reached a moment where doing nothing is no longer an option.”
Trustees met Friday morning in a closed-door executive session “to discuss the future configuration of our Commonwealth Campuses,” Chair David Kleppinger said in his report during the board’s regular meeting on Friday afternoon.
That discussion included, according to Kleppinger:
- Potential impacts on personnel and mitigation of those impacts;
- Strategies to address collective bargaining issues associated with potential campus closures;
- The impact of potential closures on the sale or lease of real estate,
- Consultation with counsel on the legal implications of potential campus closures,
- Matters of academic admission and standing related to potential closures
The discussions were conducted in executive session because if they were held in public they “would have violated our lawful privilege and lead to disclosure of information or confidentiality that’s protected by law,” Kleppinger said.
A committee led by Commonwealth Campuses Vice President Margo DelliCarpini, Interim Executive VP and Provost Tracy Langkilde and Senior VP and Chief of Staff Michael Wade Smith was tasked with evaluating the campus system and delivering recommendations to Bendapudi, who said she would make the ultimate decision on the proposal to the board.
In a March update, the committee wrote that a several factors would go into the recommendation, including enrollment and population declines, how the campuses can fit into the university’s land-grant mission and the student experience delivered by campuses.
Bendapudi has asked that the recommendation include a continued Penn State presence in Northeastern PA and the Pittsburgh area.
The administrators added that they would also be working with subject matter experts and shared governance bodies on “critical issues related to forthcoming transitions,” including student transition and retention; faculty and staff transitions; facilities and finance; regulatory issues; accreditation and data; alumni, community and donor engagement; communications; and research and external funding.
The university will continue offering admission to all Commonwealth Campuses for fall 2025. All students who begin a Penn State degree will have the opportunity to complete it at the university, Bendapudi said.
Potential closures have been met with pushback from faculty groups, technical service union representatives, several state lawmakers and some trustees.
In an op-ed published on StateCollege.com, current trustees Jay Paterno and Ted Brown, former trustees Alice Pope and Randy Houston and former Alumni Association Council member Jeffrey Ballou wrote that closing campuses should be a last resort, and that more time was needed to develop innovative options that would “preserve and build upon our land grant mission.”
Academic trustee Nicholas Rowland, a professor at Penn State Altoona, wrote in a separate op-ed on StateCollege.com that the Commonwealth Campuses “are not line items to cut or assets to liquidate; they are integral parts of the whole.” Writing that discussions about the role of the campuses should have been ongoing for years, he urged that the university “not mistake the need for renewal as justification for abandonment.”
The University Faculty Senate, meanwhile, voted 97-62 in late April to approve a positional report calling on the administration to “pause” planning for potential campus closures, citing concerns that the process has moved too quickly, that the impacts have not been fully assessed and that other options have not been adequately considered.
The report expressed “strong opposition to closures of small Penn State campuses” without conducting “transparent, detailed public assessments and thorough community review.”
The nature of the meeting in which trustees may decide the fate of the 12 campuses has also come under scrutiny. It is expected to be conducted only online, which may run afoul of Pennsylvania’s public meetings law, a legal expert told Spotlight PA.
