An update has been appended to the bottom of this post.
This was not how Graham Spanier expected to spend his sixty-fifth year. He still lives in State College, but no longer in Schreyer House, the president’s residence. Last November, his sixteen-year tenure as the leader of the Penn State system—which includes the main campus and twenty-three others, with almost a hundred thousand students in all—came to an abrupt end as a result of the Jerry Sandusky sexual-abuse scandal. He remains a tenured professor in the College of Health and Human Development—and his wife, Sandra, is an English professor at Penn State—but he is today a man clearly at loose ends. Two of his closest associates, Gary Schultz, a former senior vice president of the university, and Tim Curley, the athletic director, are facing criminal charges that they failed to report a sexual assault and lied in the grand-jury investigation of Sandusky. They have both pleaded not guilty; their trial is scheduled to begin early next year. Spanier has not been charged.
Until last November, Spanier had an enviable reputation. He joined the Penn State faculty in 1973, as a sociology professor specializing in research on family dysfunction, including child abuse. Over the course of a decade, he moved into university administration, eventually becoming associate dean of a major undergraduate college at Penn State. In 1982, he became vice provost at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, then became provost at Oregon State. He spent four years as chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, then became president of Penn State, in 1995. There, he says he raised $3.5 billion in private funds and presided over a period of growth at the university.
On July 12th, an investigation led by Louis Freeh, the former director of the F.B.I., found a “total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.” Freeh further concluded that “four of the most powerful people at The Pennsylvania State University”—including Spanier and Joe Paterno, the coach of the football team from 1966 to 2011—“failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.” Specifically, Freeh said that “Spanier failed in his duties as president.” He said that Spanier and others “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the University’s Board of Trustees, the Penn State community, and the public at large.” Penn State, which is now led by Rodney Erickson, who had been Spanier’s second-in-command, accepted Freeh’s findings in their entirety.
Eleven days after the Freeh report was released, the N.C.A.A. imposed unprecedented sanctions on Penn State. The school was fined sixty million dollars, banned from bowl games for four years, and had all of its football victories since 1998 vacated. Penn State accepted the penalties without protest.
Over two days last month, I visited Spanier at his apartment in State College, and we talked about the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath. Spanier's lawyers held a news conference Wednesday, but Spanier himself has not spoken publicly. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
On whether Spanier knew Joe Paterno during Spanier’s first tour of duty at Penn State, in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties:
No. I’d never met him. He was the head coach the whole time I was here. When I was associate dean for undergraduate education, one of the things that impressed me then, and it's very relevant, I was amazed that never once did we have in my college—and a lot of our athletes, including football players, were in my college.... never once did anybody in athletics ever try to interfere, intervene. Once, a professor caught two very prominent football players cheating. I expected, “Oh we’re going to hear from them,” because they were punished with academic sanctions. No intervention. The word came back—“You do what’s right, you do the right thing.” And that’s been true over the years. And, of course, as president, I insisted on it, and I insisted on it at Nebraska, and I insisted on it at Oregon State.
On how often Spanier saw Paterno once he became president of the university:
Once I became president, I would see Joe Paterno sometimes once or twice a week. Occasionally you’d go a month and you wouldn’t see him. It was up and down, but in the course of a year, it would be fifty times.... I would see him regularly, much more than I saw Tom Osborne [the coach at Nebraska], or that you would expect a president to see the head football coach.
Why the two saw each other so often:
Because Joe Paterno was a citizen of the university and the community. In fact, rarely did we ever meet to talk about football. When I saw Joe Paterno, it was in conjunction with fundraising ... He would show up to give pep talks to the lead fundraisers ... What people didn’t understand about Joe Paterno is—this is my take, he never said this to me—the reason he never wanted to retire, and why he kept coaching so long, was not because he wanted to be on the football field coaching. For him, being the head football coach at Penn State gave him a window of visibility and influence and access from which he could do other great things for the university, like helping us raise money, and encouraging us to build new facilities, and helping the university become something beyond what it was when he came in 1950.
Spanier describes Paterno’s personality:
He was very personable; you could talk to him about anything. He had the most remarkable memory of any human being I’ve ever met. I’m not exaggerating. I can’t tell you how many times we would bump into somebody—let’s say it’s 1996, or 2010. And we’d be at an event somewhere and he’d spot somebody and he’d say, “Weren’t you on the Syracuse team in 1953, when that play occurred and you blocked so-and-so?” … He also had tremendous energy. I remember being at events with him, not when he was in his eighties, but when he was still in his seventies, where there’d be a party honoring somebody, and then there’d be some dancing afterwards, and he’d get on the dance floor and dance with everybody. And I’m all worn out, saying, “Joe, don’t we have to get back to State College? Are you about ready to go?” And he’d say, “Oh, you know, let me dance with a couple folks!”
He had tremendous energy, he had great enthusiasm for life, he had tremendous integrity, and I would say this to anybody—he was tough on the rules. He was always trying to do the right thing. He was always talking to student groups, giving guest lectures, and going to events, about making the right decision, doing the right thing. There were many cases where he benched a player, or even kicked a player off the team, or held them out of a bowl game that we might have won if we had that player, but he wouldn’t stand for something. Sometimes that something, believe it or not, was missing a class. So he was a person of great integrity, but he was also in charge of things. And I’ve said this to Sue Paterno, and the truth is, he could also be a handful—because he had strong opinions about things. We would talk to him about N.C.A.A. rules, rule changes, Big Ten issues. I always consulted with him, because he had opinions, and sometimes he would persuade me and sometimes I would persuade him. But anything that you have heard about how Joe was the boss of the university—not so.
It had been widely reported that in 2004, Spanier, Curley, and select board members “twice went to [Paterno’s] house in efforts to get him to retire.” Paterno’s rebuff of the senior leaders was seen by some as a sign that the coach had the upper hand in his relationship with the university president. Spanier’s response, when asked about this:
That’s become legend, and it’s not the story. Nobody’s ever been able to tell the real story....
As you may know, we’d had some tough seasons in terms of winning and losing. And from the time I became president, every year Joe and the athletic director and I would have our annual reviews, and every year for sixteen years Joe would say, “You know, I’m not going to be around here much longer, I’m going to be retiring before long.” But after he had those losing seasons, I think he began to think, “O.K., maybe it’s time.” He was clearly starting to think about it. We had a series of meetings — three or four. Those discussions were initiated by Joe Paterno—not by me, not by Tim Curley. At the end of the season, Joe asked to speak to us. He knew that at the meeting would be me, Tim Curley, and Gary Schultz ... But Joe asked if we could include in the group Steve Garban.... Joe wanted him there I think because he felt Steve was the voice of history. [Garban was a longtime administrator at Penn State and later chair of the Board of Trustees.]
Those discussions all took place at the Paterno home, around Joe’s kitchen table. We only ever met at two places. Meetings with Joe always took place in my office except on a few occasions if it was a weekend meeting, we would give him the courtesy of going to his home and meeting at his kitchen table. Sue always had chocolate-chip cookies out for us. And Joe believed, I was the president, he should show me respect, so most of those meetings we had over the years were in my office....
Joe felt the time was getting closer, and he wanted to talk about the possibilities of retiring. He began to reach out to other coaches around the country to talk. He made calls to people, saying, “I’m going to retire soon, would you consider being the next coach at Penn State?”
Everybody he approached was interested, and there were periods of time when they all thought they were going to succeed Joe Paterno. So that’s just to tell you that he was serious about thinking about it. But after that third or fourth meeting, whichever it was, Joe said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think we can get this back. I think we just need to make a few changes, some of my staff here, I might need to change a person or two, and I’m not ready. I know I can turn this around.” And we said O.K.
Spanier’s thoughts regarding whether anyone should be coaching into their eighties:
Well, he wasn’t in his eighties then. He was late seventies at that point. We felt we owed it to him; he’d been one of the great people ever at Penn State, one of the great coaches, and if he says he wants to keep doing it, he can do it. Now, we never got into big issues about contracts. Joe was underpaid as head coaches go, and he would always say, “I don’t need a contract, I don’t want a contract.” I mean, he did have one, but we would always say, “O.K, go another year and we’ll revisit it.”
And then guess what? He turned the whole thing around. We ended up the season ranked No. 2 or something.1
The story got out the way it did was because Joe Paterno, at one of his media briefings, somebody asked him about it, and I think he was probably joking. Maybe not. But he said, “Ah, yeah, they came over and talked to me about retirement, and I kicked them out!” People took that very literally. He didn’t kick us out. It was something that he initiated.
Now to round out the story, that is not to say that there weren’t a lot of people sending me e-mails and letters saying, ”It’s time for Joe to go,” including some members of the board of trustees. But the board of trustees at Penn State had an ethic that the president had to be ultimately responsible for athletics, and it is not good when governing boards meddle in day-to-day athletic matters and coaching decisions. So I always kept the leadership of the board informed about these discussions—very super informed. Like, every time I met with the board leadership, we’d have a little Joe Paterno update, on where he was and where his thinking was. But the trustees were fairly disciplined as a group at that time, even when a couple of them would say, “We’ve got to do something about the coach,” some would say, “Let the president handle it, he’s handling it well, it will be fine.” And you know, it worked out pretty well.
What people perhaps don’t know, and it’s probably important to know this for the whole story, is that this was going to be Joe Paterno’s last year.
On whether Spanier was certain of this:
Oh, yes. We had a signed agreement with him. There’s no doubt. If you were to talk to any one of the Paterno family, they would say, “Yes, we know.” We had discussions with Joe that this would be his last year, and the board of trustees knew that when they made their decision. The leadership of the board was very much in the loop in that, now the extent to which all of the trustees knew that I don’t—probably not. They knew it by the time they made the decision to dismiss him that night, of course. But the fact that we had this signed agreement was confidential. And the agreement was written the way that Joe had the courtesy of announcing it. He needed to be the one to announce it, not me, not the athletic director. But yes, we had an agreement.... And we were hoping — I was hoping, always — that he would have the opportunity to go out on a very high note.
Spanier discusses how well he knew Jerry Sandusky. (Sandusky was an assistant coach on Paterno’s staff from 1969 to 1999. In 1977, he founded the Second Mile, a charity purportedly dedicated to assisting disadvantaged children. Earlier this year, he was convicted of forty-five of forty-eight counts of child abuse over a period of fifteen years.)
I only had one conversation with him in my life. That was shortly after he retired, and I couldn’t tell you if it was a few months, or a year, or how long it was after he retired. But that one conversation was prompted by the person we would now call chancellor of the Altoona campus of Penn State. He had ambitions for the campus to substantially grow in enrollment. And one of the things he thought would give visibility to the campus is if they had a football team. He wanted a Division II football team. Very expensive; I said no. But he wanted Jerry Sandusky to come out of retirement and coach it.... As a courtesy, I met with them, just to hear them out, and then afterwards we said, “No, we’re not going to have a football team.” ...
That was the only substantive conversation I ever had with Jerry Sandusky. I had seen him on other occasions; I remember seeing him at a picnic once. Somebody got a picture of us there, and that’s a picture that’s been out and about, but I don’t think we had a conversation. And the only other times I would have seen him would be after a game. I would often go down to the locker room just to congratulate the players as they were coming in, so we might have had a high-five or a congratulations on the win, but no conversation, because they just come right in and have their postgame conference and that’s that. He wasn’t ever, as far as I know, at any social events I attended, and really it was Joe Paterno who represented the team at events. His assistant coaches—none of them got brought into university events. So no, I didn’t really know him.
Freeh’s case against Spanier focusses on two incidents, one in 1998 and the other in 2001. On May 3, 1998, Sandusky took an eleven-year-old boy, whom he had met through the Second Mile, to a Penn State gym. They wrestled and then showered together. The boy’s mother was disturbed by the events and reported them—first to a psychologist and then to the police. After an investigation, the district attorney declined to prosecute Sandusky. On June 9, 1998, Schultz e-mailed Spanier that the investigators “had met with Jerry on Monday and concluded that there was no criminal behavior and the matter was closed as an investigation. He was a little emotional and expressed concern as to how this might have adversely affected the child. I think the matter has been appropriately investigated and I hope it is now behind us.”
Spanier’s memory of the 1998 incident:
I have no recollection. I am aware, as I said in my letter to the board of trustees, that I was apparently copied on two e-mails. I didn’t reply to them. The first e-mail that I saw didn’t mention anybody’s name. It simply said something to the effect of “The employee will be interviewed tomorrow,” something like that, no name mentioned. Then, about five weeks later, I think it was, I was copied on another e-mail that said, “The interview has been completed, the investigation has been completed, nothing was found, Jerry felt badly that the kid might have felt badly,” I’m not quoting directly, of course—“And the investigation is closed and the matter is behind us.”
Spanier had seen the e-mails after the investigation broke, in 2011. His response when asked if he had any independent memory of the 1998 events:
I have no memory, and I still don’t today. I can’t even swear that I saw those e-mails. Because first of all, back in that era, every so often, maybe once a month, our I.T. folks would say, “All the e-mails today have been lost, if you were expecting any you need to write people and tell them to resend them because the system went down.” Honest to goodness, I had no recollection of 1998, didn’t in 2001, have no recollection now, what I’m telling you I’m only for the sake of not wanting people to think that I’m hiding something. I apparently was copied on those two e-mails, but it obviously didn’t raise any awareness in my mind to the point where I went back and said, “Who are we talking about? What’s the issue? Is there a problem with somebody, do we need to push further?” I don’t recall any conversations, and it was also obviously not on my radar screen when, in 2001, something popped up again.
The 2001 incident is the most notorious event in the entire Penn State saga. According to Freeh, Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant on the football team, was in the Lasch Building, which houses the football offices, at around 9:00 or 9:30 on a Friday night. “Upon opening the locker room door,” according to Freeh, “McQueary heard ‘rhythmic slapping sounds’ from the shower. McQueary looked into the shower through a mirror and saw Sandusky with a ‘prepubescent’ 10 or 12 year old boy. McQueary saw Sandusky ‘directly behind’ the boy with his arms around the boy’s waist or midsection. The boy had his hands against the wall, and the two were in ‘a very sexual position.’ McQueary believed Sandusky was ‘sexually molesting’ the boy and ‘having some type of intercourse with him’ although he ‘did not see insertion nor was there any verbiage or protest, screaming or yelling.’” McQueary visited Paterno the next morning to report what he saw in the locker room. The next day, Paterno related McQueary’s information to Curley and Schultz. The following week, the two men told Spanier of the incident.
Spanier’s memory of the 2001 incident:
... After a meeting, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz came to me with a heads-up.... I don’t know if they said it was from Joe Paterno or if it was obvious that it came from Joe Paterno. They said we received a report that a member of the athletic department staff, after a workout in one of our athletic facilities, saw Jerry Sandusky in the locker room with one of his kids, meaning one of his Second Mile kids. And it was reported that they were horsing around in the shower. Now they either used the word “horsing around” or “horseplay.” And the staff member wasn’t sure what he saw, because it was indirect and around a corner.
And I remember asking two questions. “Are you sure that’s how it was described to you, as ‘horsing around’?” And the answer was yes from both Gary and Tim. And, “Are you sure that’s all that was said to you?” And the answer was yes. I remember, for a moment, sort of figuratively scratching our heads and thinking about what’s an appropriate way to follow up on “horsing around.” I had never gotten a report like that before.2
We agreed in that meeting ... that we needed to do two things ... Tim Curley needs to talk with Jerry Sandusky and explain to him that this is unacceptable to us. We didn’t know what [Sandusky] would say; I didn’t know him, I’m not sure if Gary Schultz knew him. Tim probably knew him well. But he needed to understand that it didn’t feel right to us, it wouldn’t look right to people, it’s not appropriate. He was no longer an employee at the university; he’d been retired for three years. So we didn’t have any hold over him in that way. But he was with the Second Mile, and we thought, we should tell the president of the Second Mile that we’re going to give Jerry this directive, and we’d like their support for that, and we don’t want any Second Mile kids being brought into the athletic shower facilities.
Spanier says that he didn’t know that Mike McQueary, a former Penn State football star, had made the initial report:
I only learned that Mike McQueary was associated with this two days after the grand jury presentment came out last November, by reading it in the newspaper. So Mike McQueary’s name was never mentioned.... I didn’t know it was the Lasch Building, didn’t know the time of the day, didn’t know the age of the child, I assumed it was a high-school kid. That’s all I knew. I don’t recall hearing anything else about it—don’t recall hearing anything else about it—until Tim Curley told me sometime later, two to three weeks, maybe, that he had had those discussions both with Jerry Sandusky and the head of the Second Mile, and they went well, and the matter was closed.
I am able to reconstruct, however, from an e-mail exchange that the Freeh report gave great credence to, that I apparently did know a little more. There was a follow-up. A couple of weeks after that there was another kind of heads-up meeting, probably very brief, because I had been out of town on a fundraising trip for several days. And because I had been out of town for a few days, my secretary had loaded up my calendar with a series of, you know, everybody needs you on Sunday, some physical plant project, there was a women’s basketball game, there was some other meeting later in the afternoon, and sandwiched in there, on my calendar the notation is “Stop by Tim Curley’s office on the way into the basketball game.” Apparently that meeting was moved to my house, because the meeting before and the meeting after were going to be there or something.
The e-mail exchange that was a couple of days after that was Tim Curley saying, “I’ve thought about things some more since Sunday, I’m going to touch base with the coach, and here’s my plan now.” And I wrote back that evening basically saying, “Sounds like a reasonable plan, and a humane approach, and I hope he hears the message, because if he doesn’t hear the message we could be vulnerable. ”
Specifically, Spanier’s e-mail of February 27, 2001, to Curley and Schultz said: “This approach is acceptable to me…. The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road. The approach you outline is humane and a reasonable way to proceed.”
Spanier has received a great deal of criticism for that e-mail, because it seems to put being “humane” to Sandusky ahead of any concern for his victim.
What I meant by “humane” was I thought it was very humane of Tim to want to go the extra mile by meeting with Jerry and saying, “Jerry, I hope you understand that we don’t want this to happen, and we’re going to tell this to Second Mile, and if you want to accompany me to that meeting with Second Mile you may come with me. ” I thought that’s a very humane way to follow up on something like that....
I think what many people wanted to read into it was that it was humane for us not to turn him in for being a known child predator. But I never, ever heard anything about child abuse or sexual abuse or my antennae raised up enough to even suspect that. So I know that’s been taken out of context, and I suspect that whoever leaked those e-mails wanted them to be taken out of context.... At that Sunday meeting, I don’t recall that anything in particular was agreed to, only Tim and Gary apparently had been conferring along the way about what to do and what the process was, and I was brought into it at the end....3
The Pennsylvania authorities ramped up their investigation of Sandusky in early 2011.
I think maybe the next time I heard about it would have been in early, very early, January 2011, maybe in the first few days. It could have even been the last few days of December.... Somewhere in that vicinity.4 And what I recall hearing from the university’s general counsel [Cynthia Baldwin] is that Tim Curley, Gary Schultz, and Joe Paterno had been subpoenaed before a grand jury, and I presume she told me then that the topic was Jerry Sandusky. I remember very early in 2011 saying to Cynthia, “I recall something about that, about a decade ago I remember that I had received a heads-up about an incident in the shower,” but I said, “You know, I don’t remember a lot, but if I could ever be helpful to the law-enforcement folks, I’d be happy to do that.” She said they’re not interested in talking to you; the others are going to be talking to them at some point.
Spanier says that he didn’t yet know the investigation was about child abuse:
No, oh no. I had no idea. It surprised me, because I was thinking, “Well, why would they be looking at something in the shower?” I had no idea, and [Baldwin] didn’t say anything to me.
I either heard or surmised it had something to do with that [2001] incident, but I didn’t know the magnitude of it.5 In fact, until I read the grand jury presentment very quickly on Saturday, November 5th, [2011], I think it would have been, I had no idea that it was anything about more than that one shower. In that period from January, February, March, she [Baldwin] only gave me a report that these folks are going to the grand jury. She told me somewhere along the way that they were interviewing staff in the football program, and she would be there for all the interviews. But she never told me what was asked about in the interviews, never told me what came up with Curley and Gary Schultz in their testimony. Paterno had his own attorney in the grand jury, so she wasn’t there for that. I was very much in the dark about it. And I had reiterated to her, if they ever want to talk to me, I’d be very happy to talk to them.... At some point she came to me and said, “They would like to talk to you.”
So I met with them in State College. They asked me some questions about that incident, and I told them just what I told you. And they said, “Do you know anything about an incident in 1998?” And at the time I said, “No I don’t recall knowing anything about that.” They were pretty straightforward questions, and that was that. And I didn’t really think much about it.
Spanier on whether he ever asked Baldwin what the grand-jury investigation was about:
Yes, I did. I did. She said, you know, this is the third or fourth grand jury. They seem to be pursuing this horseplay shower incident, and they don’t seem to have anything. There’s nothing there.... She seemed pretty confident that this did not rise to a higher level. But then she came to me and said, the grand jury does want to see you, and I said, “Oh, I’m happy to go...”
The early questions in my grand jury meeting were just the usual, very routine stuff. “What do you do for a living?” ... But then about halfway through my grand jury testimony, something changed. There was a level of tension that was elevated. The assistant attorney general said to me in a very strong way—he mentioned the word “sodomy.” I can’t remember exactly what the question was—whether it was, was I aware of sodomy, or did I approve of sodomy, or did I know what sodomy was, something about sodomy.
This is April of 2011. I was stunned. I said, this is the first I have heard anything like that. I had no idea that that’s what you were asking me about.6 But you know, even when he used that term, I wasn’t sure if maybe they were just doing it to get a rise out of me, or why they would at this point, ask about something like that, when all the discussion was about horseplay in the shower—which I was conjuring up snapping towels or something like that. I just had no, no idea, no concept. That was the first I heard that they might be thinking about something more serious. But up until November 5th I still thought it was about the one incident in the shower and I had been told by our general counsel that it was about that one incident in the shower, which I knew about only because I’d gotten the report from Curley and Schultz, and nothing was said about anything sexual.
Around that same time ... something was in the newspaper that Jerry Sandusky was being investigated. Right away after my grand jury testimony, we arranged a discussion with the chair of the board of trustees and the general counsel ... to inform the board of trustees in a private session, which we did. And then I kept the chair of the board informed, and other board leaders, when the opportunity arose.7
Going into the very end of October, early November now, Cynthia Baldwin came to see me—this would have been a little more than a week before the grand jury presentment—saying that Jerry Sandusky was going to be charged, and so were Tim Curley and Gary Schultz. I presume she didn’t know what the charges against Sandusky were going to be. If she knew, she didn’t tell me, but I presumed it was about the one incident in the shower. Had I known then that it was going to be forty-five counts of child molestation, I would have mobilized even more strongly to prepare for it. But at the time, he hadn’t been our employee for about thirteen years, and we have no obligation to him and we need to stay away from that. But Tim Curley and Gary Schultz were employees of the university and so right away we informed the chair of the board [Steve Garban], I mean within minutes he came over for a meeting. We talked it through, we began the process.
On November 5th, the day after the charges were filed, Spanier issued the following statement: “The allegations about a former coach are troubling, and it is appropriate that they be investigated thoroughly. Protecting children requires the utmost vigilance. With regard to the other presentments, I wish to say that Tim Curley and Gary Schultz have my unconditional support. I have known and worked daily with Tim and Gary for more than 16 years. I have complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations about a former University employee. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz operate at the highest levels of honesty, integrity and compassion. I am confident the record will show that these charges are groundless and that they conducted themselves professionally and appropriately.”
Spanier has since been heavily criticized for that statement.
If you go back and look at the statement, the first paragraph was a statement of concern about these charges, about our concern for children and victims. That paragraph was ignored by all the media. They went right to the next paragraph, which said I’ve known and worked with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz for sixteen years, and I support them. I was, and probably still am, criticized for being supportive of them. To this day I’m probably the only person who said anything positive about them. Everyone else has run for the hills. The board of trustees has cited their displeasure with the fact that I supported them in any way.
But there’s a little more to that story. That statement was carefully reviewed by the chair of the board of trustees, and I presume by the vice chair of the board because he was supposed to touch base with him. It was reviewed by the university’s legal counsel. It was gone over by our university relations staff. It was not just a rash, “Let’s run out and be insensitive to potential victims and say nothing, just defend Gary Schultz and Tim Curley no matter what.” The chair of the board said, “This is exactly the statement that I would write.” He was very supportive of our issuing that statement. I went over to Joe Paterno’s house that Saturday, just a little before noon. I didn’t know if he was aware of the charges at that point. I wanted to make sure he knew that that was happening and to show him the statement.
Asked if Paterno knew:
He didn’t say. I presume he did. But he appeared very solemn, and quite stunned by the whole thing.
And I then ... called in the administration of the university, all the people who reported to me, [on Saturday afternoon] .... There were about thirty of us in my conference room. All the people who reported to Gary Schultz. I invited Gary and Tim to be there to hear what I was going to say. Tim did not want to come; he was stunned by this, it was a terrible blow to him .... Gary wanted to be there to hear what I had to say. So it was all of Gary Schultz’s direct reports, all of my direct reports; thirty of the senior people at the university, and the chair of the board of trustees was there.
So the first thing I did was to brief them on the charges. Most of them had already heard something breaking on the news. I then turned it over to the chair of the board to ask him to make comments to the group, and he did. And we talked about what a terrible crisis this was in so many ways. Now at this point, these were charges against Sandusky. We had this innocent till proven guilty, so we didn’t want to make any judgments about anybody or anything. But we knew that it was a crisis for the university to have this come out, because we would be associated with it in one way or another.
I said to the staff that there are difficult leadership decisions to be made at a time like this. I said there are two approaches to leadership in a crisis of this sort. I said there’s the public relations approach, and if I were following the public relations approach, I would not issue this statement that I am now handing out to show you. You’re going to find that everyone is going to distance themselves from Gary and Tim, and I said but the other approach to leadership here—and I said I could lose my job over this—I said, I could actually lose my job over this decision. I said every one of you in here has worked with Tim and Gary for years. Some of you, for thirty-five or forty years, because that’s how long Tim and Gary, respectively, were at the university. I said, you’ve worked with them every day of your life, and I have for the last sixteen years. I said if any of you in here were to operate according to how we have always agreed to operate at this university—honestly, openly, with integrity, always doing what’s in the best interests of the university—and if you were falsely accused of something, I would do the same thing for any of you in here, I want you to know that.
At this point, I assumed I was still going to be president for a few years, and I wanted them to know that I was not only sticking by Tim and Gary but that none of them should ever fear doing the right thing, or being accused of wrongdoing when they knew they were doing the right thing and following the law, because this university would back them up.
They appreciated it very much. People left that room saying, this is why we admire you as president, because we all feel the same way. Now that’s not how it’s unfolded at the university. By the following Wednesday, I had stepped aside; Joe Paterno was fired; the board of trustees would not let me get out in front and manage this.
Why Spanier felt Curley and Schultz were innocent:
I don’t know with certainty. But what I did know is what they told me. I can’t imagine today why, on what basis, they would have withheld any information or shaded it differently. I just don’t believe that. You work with people who are in and out of your office every day; you travel with them; you sit with them at a football game, you have hundreds of meals with them .... Penn State isn’t like a lot of other places. The point I want to make about Penn State is, this is a big place, but we’ve always operated as a family. Our personal and social and professional lives were all very intertwined. It’s all wrapped up together, and I would have never had a basis, nor do I now, for doubting them. I’m very stunned by Freeh’s conclusion that—I don’t think he used the word “cover-up,” but he uses the word “concealed.” I’m totally stunned by that, because why on earth would we? There’s no logic to it. Why on earth would anybody cover up for a known child predator? Adverse publicity? For heaven’s sake! Every day I had to make some decision that got adverse publicity. Fortunately over my career I mostly got good publicity. That’s changed recently, but we weren’t afraid of adverse publicity.
“To play devil’s advocate,” I said, “this was a catastrophe for the university, that this came out. If it didn’t come out, it would be better for the university, no?”
Well, I never thought about it that way. But the best thing of all would have been if, way back when, we knew the true Jerry Sandusky, and could have put a stop to it. That’s what would have been the ideal. If you look at my personal and professional background, I mean, first of all, I’m an intervener. Anytime anything popped up, I never shied away from a problem. I was the first one on it. I would never give to somebody else the responsibility for intervening or making a tough decision .... When I got reports of bad news, I never wanted somebody to think they couldn’t make a report because I was going to find out who they were and confront them.
Spanier talks about events after the grand-jury presentment came out:
On Sunday night, we had a meeting of the board of trustees .... I started that meeting by saying to the board, “This is going to be very difficult for the university, and I need to tell you absolutely everything that I know about this, so you can have no doubt about what I know, and my modest involvement, because you need to have confidence in my ability to lead us through that. Then I am going to leave the room so you can talk about me.” I did that with the legal counsel, Cynthia Baldwin, not wanting me to say much, and I finally said to her, “I have to tell them everything.” She said, well, grand jury proceedings are secret, and you have to be very careful what you say and what lines you cross and I said, “Well, if you feel that I’m starting to cross a line, you stop me, but I’m just going to say everything,” and I did, and then left the room. They met for two more hours.
At the end of the night I met with the vice chair of the board. I said, are we O.K., can I get out now in front of this and make a statement? Because people know me, that I’m always out front dealing with things, and they said, you know, we’re mostly talking about Joe Paterno at this point, we didn’t really have a chance to talk about you. The board wants to manage this; the board feels this is a crisis that requires them to look strong and be in charge of this, so no, don’t make any statements, and the board has drafted a statement, or wants to draft a statement. So emerging from that was a statement that came out that we then worked on, and I reviewed again with the chair of the board, we made just a few minor changes. The board later criticized me for revising that document without their permission, but that’s not correct. The statement emerged Sunday night; it was sent out first thing Monday morning....
They set a meeting for Tuesday night, and I met with the chair and the vice-chair Tuesday morning. They were still holding me back, and it was at that point that I realized that this was something the board felt they needed to be in control of. I was not going to have an opportunity to lead us out of this, and that I needed to step down, and began making preparations for that, and then formally notified them Wednesday morning. Wednesday night they made a decision to fire Joe Paterno, effective immediately, and to accept my resignation under a provision that existed in my contract, one of the provisions under which I could exit the presidency, which was called “terminating the presidency without cause,” nothing wrong, we’re just agreeing that you’re stepping aside without a cause.
This was going to be Joe Paterno’s last year. On Wednesday morning, Joe Paterno announced that he was retiring at the end of the year. This made the board very angry, that he announced it. But that was what that letter of agreement that we had called for....
Spanier’s reaction to the riot that occurred after Paterno’s announcement:
I knew it was likely to happen. I called the chief of police. There was a transition of a few days where it wasn’t fully in my head yet that I wasn’t president anymore.... So I’m calling the chief of police saying, “Are you ready for the possibility of a riot? I’ve been president for sixteen years, I can smell them coming.” ... So my reaction to the riot was it was predictable, the university and the board knew or should have known that it was a good possibility; the chief of police in State College is very sensitive to these things, so I think they were as prepared for it as they could be. I thought it was very unfortunate....
What he would have done differently:
I have two answers. They’re different. On the one hand, I would say I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Because based upon what I was told and what I knew, and the reliance that you have on others to follow up on things, there wouldn’t have been a basis for handling that any differently than I handled the other two thousand heads-ups that came up over the years—the two, four, or ten things a day that popped up, where somebody says [something] to you, you give them a little feedback and advice, and they go back and handle it.
But the other answer is that, knowing what I know now, of course there are a lot of things that we would do differently. I wish I would have known what I know now. Or even that I would have had just a little more information, suspicion, awareness, because that could have provided a basis for motivation for a higher level of intervention, and my pushing others to go further with it. And of course this is now a lesson for every university—I can’t tell you how many university presidents more recently have been in touch with me saying, “We have completely reviewed how we deal with such things on our campus.” Every university president in the country now is paranoid that something like this could be happening. So now, going back, I would have a higher degree of suspicion of anything about if somebody’s in a shower, or naked, or even a suspicion that touching could have occurred, let alone something sexual. But we didn’t hear that.
His reaction to the Freeh report:
The Freeh report is wrong, it’s unfair, it is deeply flawed, it has many errors and omissions. I know that they had a lot of very good people on that team working on this. They interviewed, they say, over four hundred and thirty people; many of those folks have spoken to me about their interviews. Many of them describe those interviews to me as a witch-hunt. They felt like it was back in the era of McCarthyism. I don’t want to be overly critical, because I think that’s the style of investigators, maybe. They put a lot of accusatory or threatening questions out there. Many people reported to me that they were asked questions in a very nasty way, like, “We understand you’re friends with Graham Spanier,” as if there was something inherently evil in that.
But if they interviewed four hundred and thirty people, why did they only cite a few of them? If four hundred people, for example, might have said to them, “No, we never saw anything, we never heard anything, we’ve seen Graham Spanier make hundreds of decisions, he doesn’t operate that way,” why not then a single mention of the other side of the story, or the other possible explanation? On what basis did they totally discount my testimony to them, that never in my sixteen years as president of Penn State did any individual ever suggest to me that there was child abuse, sexual abuse, anything criminal. Why didn’t they talk to me further about that? Why did they dismiss that and not give any credence? The report, in some ways, brags that they read 3.5 million e-mails. The N.C.A.A. has reported that because of that it’s the most exhaustive investigation ever conducted of a university. That may be so, but only seventeen e-mails are cited in their body of evidence.
There were hundreds, thousands, of e-mails that would have given a very different view about the checks and balances we had in place with athletics—how we follow the rules, how we deal with the discipline of athletics, how we make the decisions, that the president makes the decision, not the head coach. There is another story that they could have told or should have told, but the report was written as if they had this particular conclusion that they wanted to give, and only cited the few bits of evidence they could that could be interpreted as supporting that conclusion.
Unfortunately, what the university did was to accept the report. Not to receive it, which I think an organization would generally do, but to accept it. By accepting the report, the N.C.A.A. and the Big Ten then said, well, if the university accepts this report, we accept it, so we don’t need to do an investigation. They’ve signed an agreement with us saying it’s a done deal, we accept it, and they imposed the most severe set of penalties in the history of athletics.
His thoughts about the way the N.C.A.A. penalized the school and its football program:
Clearly, the penalties are unprecedented, and the process is unprecedented. I’m a former chair of the N.C.A.A. Division I board. I served on the N.C.A.A. board for maybe a decade, many years. I chaired committees within the N.C.A.A. I was involved in the reform process, so I’m familiar with how it works, and was at the table to construct a lot of the processes. This is very different than anything that’s ever happened before, and I feel, like so many other aspects of this, it was a rush to judgment. The idea of instituting penalties like this, based, apparently, on the crimes of someone who has not been an employee of the university for nearly fifteen years, and getting into that zone is very different. There are crimes committed by athletic department staff throughout the country, and I don’t think anything like this has occurred before. So I think they’re saying their penalties are based on what the institution did, what the institutional leaders did. That means they must be assuming the president, the head coach, the athletic director, and the vice-president, actually, as Freeh believes, were involved in concealing the wrongdoing of this former employee. But I’m certainly not guilty of that, and I’m not sure the others are either. Yet by accepting the Freeh report they are assuming that that’s correct because the university said so. Someday I hope to have my name completely cleared when it becomes evident that this was unfair and untrue. If Paterno, Curley, Schultz, and Spanier were not involved in any concealment—and we were not, not in any conspiratorial way, and certainly as an individual I can assure you I was not, and I do know what Curley and Schultz told me; Paterno and I never had a discussion about it—then it would appear that the judgments that the N.C.A.A. made are all wrong.
His response to the suggestion that the new leaders of the university accepted the N.C.A.A. sanctions without protest because, above all, they wanted to put the incident behind them as quickly as possible:
I believe that’s a good analysis. I think every decision in this process—except for one, which I’ll mention—appears to be made with the objective of putting it behind us. I can understand that as someone who was a president for more than [fifteen] years and spent thirty-four years in higher education administration. You want to get things behind you and get on with it. That is an appropriate approach to things. The problem here is that every single decision has had the opposite effect, unfortunately. It has not put the matter behind the university; it has stirred up more difficulty.
The one decision that may have had a different element was the decision to fire Joe Paterno, effective immediately. I don’t think that was about putting the matter behind us. I think the board had always been divided on when it was time for Joe to retire, and that was a way of making that happen. But part of the thinking was let’s put the matter behind us. But look at all the turmoil that caused for the board, and organizations popping up to unseat the board. Now accepting the Freeh decision and the consequences of the N.C.A.A. penalties, I think we’re going to see a lot of people challenging the merits of the Freeh report....
Like one local paper said, in a letter to the editor this morning, What if Curley and Schultz are found to be innocent? What have we all done by judging everyone to be guilty coming up with this conclusion of concealment and the failure of leadership? You know, hindsight is great, you can look back and wish that so many things would have unfolded differently; I certainly do.
In this case it is so troubling, because you had all these young victims. You had someone who took advantage of his position, his reputation. He took advantage of the access that he had through this charity. Parents believed in him, children believed in him. Donors who gave millions of dollars, very prominent citizens who were members of the Second Mile board believed in him. He did something absolutely horrible, criminal, outrageous, unforgivable, and I do think some people are afraid to look at the larger picture for fear that they would be thought of as turning their back on the victims or the children. It’s very hard to stand up, because you don’t want to be—nobody wants to be perceived as excusing anything that happened. And for me, it’s very troubling, because what Sandusky did is he’s ruined the lives of so many people. He’s affected profoundly the lives of these children, these former children, and their families, but all of the other people as well, who have lost their jobs and who have been pulled into this. And, you know, there are times when I am in a mode of substantial grief about what happened to those kids. And then I switch into times of grieving for myself, and my colleagues, and the Paterno family, who I know so well, and the community that’s suffering here.... We always talked about the Penn State family, and that’s how this place feels and how we operate. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s connected and everybody’s intertwined, and this is a trauma in so many ways and at so many levels.
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1. Penn State finished the 2005 season ranked No. 3 in both the coaches’ and A.P. polls, and Penn State defeated Florida State in the Orange Bowl. The team won the Outback Bowl the following season.
2. According to the Freeh Report, in an interview with the Special Investigative Counsel, Spanier “said that he did not ask, nor did Schultz or Curley define, what was meant by ‘horsing around’ or ‘horseplay.’”
3. The Freeh Report’s take on these e-mails and meetings is significantly different. The report says, “A reasonable conclusion from Spanier’s e-mail statement that ‘[t]he only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it’ is that Spanier, Schultz and Curley were agreeing not to report Sandusky’s activity.”
“It also is reasonable to conclude from this email statement that the men decided not to report to a law enforcement or child protection authority because they already had agreed to ‘report’ the incident to Second Mile.”
The report goes on to say, “[A]t no time did Spanier, Schultz, Paterno or Curley try to identify the child in the shower or whether the child had suffered harm. By advising Sandusky, rather than the authorities, that they knew about the February 9, 2001 assault, they exposed this victim to additional harm because only Sandusky knew the child victim's identity at the time."
4. According to the Freeh Report, Baldwin called Spanier to inform him of the subpoenas on December 28, 2010.
5. The Freeh Report includes details about notes from a March, 2011, conversation between Spanier and Penn State’s general counsel; during that conversation, the report says, “Spanier said he ‘[b]umped into Tim Curley and Tim advised’ that he had a conversation with Sandusky not to bring children into the shower again.”
6. According to the Freeh Report, Spanier testified before the grand jury on April 13, 2011. On March 31, 2011, Sara Ganim of The Patriot-News reported that Sandusky was “the subject of a grand jury investigation into allegations that he indecently assaulted a teenage boy.” Ganim went on to report that the allegation, which was separate from the 1998 and 2001 incidents, “was made in 2009 by a 15-year-old” who “told authorities that Sandusky had inappropriate contact with him over a four-year period, starting when he was 10.” Her article also detailed the 1998 incident. In it, she wrote, “It is not clear whether university President Graham Spanier has testified [before the grand jury] and he declined comment on the matter when questioned earlier this week.”
7. The Freeh Report says that Spanier and Baldwin met with Steve Garban, the chair of the board, on April 17, 2011, four days after Spanier testified before the grand jury. It also says, “Neither Spanier nor [Baldwin] briefed the Board of Trustees about the Grand Jury investigation of Sandusky or the potential risk to the University until the Board’s meeting on May 11, 2011, and, then, only at the request of a Trustee who had read the March 31, 2011 article…. At the May 2011 Board meeting, Spanier and Baldwin briefed the Board about the investigation, but minimized its seriousness by not fully describing the nature of the allegations or raising the issue of possible negative impact to the University.” It also faults the board, saying it “did not make reasonable inquiry of Spanier or Baldwin about the Sandusky investigation or potential risks to the University” and “did not take steps that might have protected the University.”
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Update: after this interview was posted, I was contacted by Charles A. De Monaco, an attorney for Cynthia Baldwin, who recently stepped down as general counsel to Penn State. De Monaco said:
Photograph by Gene Puskar/AP Photo.
