Dr. Barron: A letter about your Freeh Report 'review'

Dear President Barron,

On Friday you announced that you would conduct your own review of the raw materials that went into the creation of the Freeh Report. Clearly you are responding to the many calls over the last two years to analyze the report, however I must caution you that this attempt you are making is only destined to fail for the exact same reasons the Freeh Report itself did. The internal, secretive nature of your review is the exact issue which got us here in the first place.

Almost immediately after it's release many critical reviews noticed that Mr. Freeh had taken liberties with his conclusions, omitted key information, and flat out lied. It was quite clear from the moment you pick up this report that it was fatally flawed from the start. One has to look no further than the Appendices where Mr. Freeh can't count to ten correctly; omitting Exhibits 1, 4, 7, 8, and 9. Add to that the fact that virtually none of the key players in the scandal were interviewed, and that reports exist that people who were interviewed felt that investigators were looking for predetermined answers.

Recently of course you are aware that court cases have led to the release of hundreds of emails that show that the Freeh report was biased and corrupted from before Penn State even had a legal engagement contract with Mr. Freeh. Thus the announcement when Mr. Freeh was hired that he would be independent and turn over every stone was a lie. The emails unequivocally show that the NCAA, Big Ten Conference, and the Penn State Special Investigations Task Force led Mr. Freeh where they wanted him to go. In the interest of "moving forward", Penn State (the corporate institution, not the community at large) decided it was most expedient to blame our "football culture" rather than search for hard truths like those Jim Clemente wrote about in his report at www.paterno.com, or the fact that the child welfare system in Pennsylvania is severely flawed (see my posts at on the Tutko and Lee cases at www.no1lion99.blogspot.com or many at www.notpsu.blogspot.com).

Now back to your review. What you appear to be doing is looking at everything in private and then making some kind of an announcement about what you find. This is the same thing Mr. Freeh did. It will fail because people view you as just another tool that the 'old guard' Board will use to hide the truth. I have no doubt you are an intelligent man, and know much better than I how to run our great university. I know there is great political pressure to bear. However your actions of recent months show that you are stuck on the wrong side of this fight. First your email regarding "civility", and then your exit from the recent board meeting to (from what I hear) glad hand some big donors. What could be more important than discovering the real truth here? Now this review. Frankly Dr. Barron, no one puts any trust in your actions regarding the Freeh report. I wish I could say differently, but that's the truth. The only thing likely to come of this is further subpoenas and depositions for the emails, discussions, notes, and conversations that go into your report.

It is for that reason that I urge you to halt this review and immediately open a formal public review. Call for Mr. Freeh to return to campus as his contract demands and answer to the Board and the Penn State community at large. If he is confident in his report he will have no problem coming to defend it. Hold public hearings where both the board and the public can ask critical questions, and immediately release ALL source materials on the Progress website. Until this happens, no amount of 'internal' reviews will quell the public anger, and Penn State will never be allowed to move forward. Surely you can see that multiple courts are going to investigate this matter themselves. It is time for Penn State to come clean, and stop hiding from the truths. I look forward to your response.


Sincerely,
John Yonchuk
Biology '99

Who decided to remove the Paterno Statue?

In an earlier post I speculated that the Penn State Board of Trustees helped write the consent decree and the sanctions that came along with it. Ray Blehar has gone into much more detail at www.notpsu.blogspot.com as well. With the two recent releases of emails (here and here) in the Corman v. NCAA suit I wanted to revisit this idea and add to it.

Revisiting my old post I still think there is no doubt that the Board wanted the sanctions and the SITF made sure the Freeh report said this was all a football problem, but I found some interesting items that seem to point towards the NCAA piling on, which may have caught the power bloc of the board by surprise.


The interesting events occurred in the days leading up to the removal of the Paterno statue and the announcement of the consent decree. Don Van Natta reported on July 15th that the Board decided to keep the statue.

Two days later Donald Remy emails Omar McNeil of the Freeh Group to tell him that NCAA President Mark Emmert has requested a meeting with Louis Freeh:

This was the same day that Emmert had scheduled a conference call with the Division I board of directors about the situation at Penn State:

Just two days later Chairman Peetz requested a conference call for all voting members of the board where she attached an article that would foreshadow how the power bloc wanted to play the scandal and its position moving forward:

Shortly after the request for a conference call the NCAA sprung a surprise on the Board, the vacation of all wins.

It was only at this point that the representative for Penn State, Gene Marsh, began to protest, saying he felt that the NCAA was trying to reform college athletics through one case. 

What can we "reasonably conclude" from these exchanges? I think there are two things that were likely to have happened. First, it seems the Board really did want to salvage some of Paterno's legacy and was prepared to leave the statue where it was. They knew that removal of the statue would incense many alumni and they have been trying the whole time in this scandal to play both sides. However it appears that the NCAA and Emmert may have demanded the removal of the statue AND of course obviously demanded the removal of the past wins of Joe Paterno. They conveniently 'forgot' to mention it until it appears most of the consent decree was negotiated. Marsh correctly knew this would be a point of contention because he likely knew that while the Board wanted blame on Paterno, they didn't want too much, as it would keep attention on their failures from angry alumni. 

From the outset of the Sandusky scandal Corbett, the OAG, the Board, the B1G, and the NCAA have made one supreme miscalculation that is a basic principle of conflict. Never underestimate your enemy. They underestimated what Joe Paterno meant to our great school, and how far many of us will go to fight for his good name. It appears likely that the Board underestimated the NCAA's vindictiveness and self-promotional nature when trying to play both sides in the negotiation of sanctions. They will pay dearly for that.