Updated 10:14 p.m. Saturday, June 14 with comments from Barry Fenchak.
Penn State’s Board of Trustees has scheduled a meeting to vote on the removal of one of its alumni-elected members just two weeks before his term is set to expire, bringing to a head a contentious relationship that has involved multiple lawsuits.
The full board will meet in a public session over Zoom at 3 p.m. Monday to vote on removing trustee Barry Fenchak. Removal would require a two-thirds vote in favor and if successful would bar him from serving as a trustee again.
An agenda for the off-cycle meeting lists “Consideration of Joint Proposal Recommending Removal of Trustee Barry Fenchak from the Pennsylvania State University Board of Trustees” as the only action item.
“From my standpoint, this just shows again how obsessively committed they are. They have been for three years,” Fenchak told StateCollege.com on Saturday. “I mean, this has been going on from day one, trying to either isolate me, censure me, kick me off the board. It’s been a three-year ordeal. So, you know, none of it is a surprise.”
It will mark the second time the board has attempted to remove Fenchak.
A committee voted in September to recommend his removal, citing an interaction with a junior female staff member who said she was made uncomfortable by his remark after a July board meeting that when he wears a ball cap he “looks like a penis with a little hat on,” and that she felt she could not exit the conversation because of his position. Fenchak said the comment was a line from the movie “A League of Their Own,” and that he regretted making anyone feel uncomfortable.
The board scheduled a vote for October, but it was halted after Centre County Judge Brian Marshall granted a request for a preliminary injunction, writing that Fenchak “provided uncontradicted evidence of retaliatory behavior” against him by board leadership for his repeated requests for documents related to the university’s endowment and a long-term athletic department deal with ticketing and fan engagement vendor Elevate.
Fenchak filed a lawsuit against the board in July, prior to the interaction with the staff member, after he said his requests for information about the management of the university’s $4.6 billion endowment and its rising administrative fees, as well as information about Penn State’s 10-year agreement with Elevate, were repeatedly denied. He argued the documents were necessary to his fiduciary oversight as a trustee, while the board claimed they were not, and that much of what he sought was protected by confidentiality agreements.
After Fenchak and the board reached an agreement for him to review the documents, Marshall granted Penn State’s request to lift the injunction on May 16, writing that Fenchak “can no longer maintain that he is subject to removal from the Board in retaliation to these specific requests.”
Fenchak said on Saturday that trustees first received an email about scheduling a vote on his removal on May 23, a week after the injunction was rescinded and the morning after the board voted to close seven Commonwealth Campuses. Fenchak said he informed the board that he would be traveling overseas during the initial timeframe they were considering and would be back on June 13.
“I think they felt that it would look bad to try to execute me in absentia, so to speak. So they scheduled the first available day once I got back,” he said.
Fenchak’s first term on the board is already set to end on July 1. In February, he garnered the necessary 50 nominations to be eligible for the ballot as he sought a second three-year term as an alumni trustee. But a new nominating subcommittee with the power to deem candidates “unqualified” and ineligible to be listed on the ballot, created among several bylaw changes last year, voted to disqualify Fenchak.
At the nominating subcommittee’s meeting on Feb. 26, where Fenchak was the only candidate disqualified, trustee Daniel Delligatti cited the incident with the staff member, noting that Fenchak had been advised of seven other “failures to abide by board standards of conduct.”
Fenchak sought an emergency order to be placed on the ballot, arguing that the board had used the nominating subcommittee to circumvent the injunction and that the bylaw changes violated state laws governing nonprofits and freedom of speech.
Penn State countered that the July 2024 incident was part of a “pattern of inappropriate behavior.” Attorneys for the board wrote in a filing that Fenchak has a “bottomless desire for attention” and a “predilection for misogynistic conduct,” citing social media posts that denigrated the board as a whole and specific members.
Marshall ruled in the board’s favor in April, writing that nominating subcommittees are not uncommon among institutions of higher education, nor are restrictions on conduct and speech among board members, which “have for years served the necessary purpose of ensuring efficient and effective operations.” Fenchak had, in fact, already accepted restrictions on speech related to the board when he ran for and won election in 2022, Marshall wrote.
He added that the bylaw changes “are inoffensive and likely not inconsistent with law” and by intervening the court would be unnecessarily involving itself in university governance.
Fenchak ran a write-in campaign and finished 15th among 18 candidates for three alumni trustee seats that were up for election from April 21 to May 8.
He said on Saturday that he planned to speak in his own defense if permitted during Monday’s meeting, but expects the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
“In the last decade, they have never not voted to approve anything that the leadership has put before them,” he said. “At least from my standpoint, I’ve known how they’ve operated for a long, long time. So, when it comes to a vote, that’s just performance theater at that point.”
