Penn State Trustee Committee to Again Consider Sale of WPSU

A Penn State Board of Trustees committee will meet Monday to once again consider the sale of WPSU.

The board’s Finance and Investment Committee will meet at 2 p.m. via Zoom with “Proposed asset sale transaction concerning the operating assets of WPSU” as the only item on the agenda. It will be preceded by an executive session at 1:30 p.m.

The same committee on Sept. 11 unanimously rejected a proposal that university administration said would have allowed the public broadcasting radio and television stations serving a wide swath of Central Pennsylvania to continue in the face of financial pressures. Sara Thorndike, senior vice president for finance and business, told the committee at the time that if the plan was not approved, the university would move forward with “a wind-down plan for WPSU ending at the latest on June 30, 2026,” and the university confirmed it would do so in a statement after the meeting.

Under that plan, Philadelphia area public media provider WHYY would have acquired WPSU’s radio, television and digital assets, along with about $4 million in endowed funds, for $1. The university, meanwhile, would have leased WPSU’s office in Innovation Park to the entity and paid $17 million in declining amounts over five years as a post-closing subsidy, which Thorndike said would be similar to what Penn State would have funded over the same time period.

“We acknowledge this is not a small sum,” Thorndike said at the time. “We appreciate the value of WPSU to our community, but can no longer fund WPSU with student tuition, given our declining resources for core teaching and research needs.”

Penn State cut $800,000, or about 20%, from the public broadcaster’s university-funded budget for the current fiscal year, and in July, Congress eliminated funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, resulting in a $1.4 million annual loss for WPSU, or about 17% of its overall operating budget. Thorndike said that the Penn State’s cost-cutting measures to balance its budget combined with the loss of federal funds has made WPSU unsustainable for the university.

Details of the proposal under consideration on Monday have not been made public, and it is unclear if it will involve a similar or different deal with WHYY or another public broadcaster.

Committee members in September were skeptical of the proposal, with some bristling at the prospect of paying $17 million to turn the stations over and others saying it did not protect WPSU’s 44 current employees. In voting against it, the plan could not advance to the full board for a vote.

Trustee Anthony Lubrano said at the time that the university needed to explore more options.

“I don’t think the way this deal is structured maximizes value to this institution, and I think we need to do a little bit more exploratory work for me to be comfortable approving a deal like this,” Lubrano said.

Trustee Robert Fenza added that he did not want “to pay somebody a subsidy to run a business,” and that there was “no guarantees they’ll stay in business.”

Rejection of the proposal was met with immediate public outcry from community members who say it will be damaging to end the university-owned public broadcasting that began with the launch of WDFM (later WPSU-FM) in 1953 and in 1965 added WPSX (later WPSU-TV) as the first educational TV station in Pennsylvania to be licensed to a university. Today, WPSU-FM reaches more than 450,000 listeners in 13 counties and WPSU-TV serves 515,000 households in 24 counties, one of the largest geographic coverage areas in the nation.

One group has set up a fund at Centre Foundation “to provide and sustain public media” in Central and Northern Pennsylvania.

Penn State trustee Jay Paterno, who is not a member of the Finance and Investment Committee, wrote in a StateCollege.com column that a small minority of the board prevented the full body from considering the WHYY proposal and lamented the losses to the community that would be created with WPSU’s closure.

Monday’s committee meeting can be viewed via livestream here.