A Penn State trustee who played a pivotal role in hiring Louis Freeh stands by his decision, but is expressing some reservations about Freeh’s conclusions.
Kenneth Frazier headed the Penn State Board of Trustees task force that appointed the former FBI director to determine what personal or institutional failures enabled the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal to occur.
Released in July 2012, the Freeh report concluded that several top Penn State administrators hid knowledge of the scandal from the public. The report also condemns what Freeh describes as a football-centric culture that valued an athletics program over the welfare of children.
“I have not regretted the decision to retain Judge Freeh. There have been moments of doubt with respect to how the entire process was carried out,” Frazier said during a Dec. 2014 deposition hearing for the now-settled lawsuit between two Pennsylvania elected officials and the NCAA.
How the board of trustees learned of Freeh’s conclusions is one of those moments of doubt. Frazier said the board originally planned to read the report before it was made public so the trustees could fully understand its contents before making public comment. Instead, the trustees opted to view the report only after it was made available to the general public.
Frazier said that decision was motivated in part by feedback from members of Penn State’s faculty, who reportedly felt that the report could not be objective if it was reviewed before it was released. He says that was based on “good and sufficient reasons,” but thinks it put the board in a difficult position.
“I think that as a result we were scrambling to deal with with the public fallout in a way that we would not have, had we been able to sit down down in quiet room [and] understand what was being said,” Frazier explains. He goes on to say the board was not ready for “the pressure we were under in the immediate news cycle in which we live.”
Frazier’s deposition was made public as a result of transparency advocate Ryan Bagwell’s ongoing efforts with the Penn State Sunshine Fund. It was released through the fund on Thursday, only one day after Penn State President Eric Barron openly criticized the Freeh report in an interview with the Associated Press. Barron has also issued a letter addressing the Freeh Report, the settlement with the NCAA, and the ongoing criminal cases involving former Penn State administrators.
After the Freeh report was released on July 12, 2012, Frazier said the board of trustees put out a statement accepting full responsibility for the failures that occurred in the Sandusky scandal. He was the primary author of this statement, and clarifies that this was not an unconditional endorsement of Freeh’s conclusions.
In the deposition, Frazier says he “wasn’t trying to say that [he] read every line and was saying, ‘I accept this and I don’t accept that.’” Instead, Frazier was acknowledging that children had been abused, and there had been failures that had allowed the abuse to occur — which he felt was something the board had to be accountable for.
Frazier goes on to expresses his resolve that the Freeh investigation was a success, calling it “complete and thorough and rigorous and objective.” However, Frazier says that the conclusions Freeh drew and the facts themselves are completely separate from each other. Specifically, Frazier takes issue with Freeh’s conclusions about what motivated the various people who were involved in the Sandusky scandal.
“I continue to believe that human motivation is an extremely complex subject that has multiple layers… I believe there are other ways to explain that,” Frazier says. “… I can’t say his conclusions were wrong. I don’t believe they were unreasonable. I just don’t think they are as clear and irrefutable as some people seem to think they are.”
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