Investigation finds Penn State lacks transparency, accountability on misconduct complaints
Spotlight PA/Centre Daily Times investigative report shows problems 11 years after Sandusky scandal
Airdate: July 19th, 2023
Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted in 2012 on 45 counts related to sexually assaulting 10 boys.
The Sandusky scandal spawned new laws on the state level and new rules and offices to handle sexual assaults and harassment and other misconduct complaints at Penn State.
Eleven years later, a year-long investigation by Spotlight PA and the Centre Daily Times finds “distrust is rampant and many fear retaliation if they speak up.” The report, which came out Wednesday, is called “Missed Conduct.”
Spotlight PA investigative reporter Wyatt Massey appeared on The Spark Wednesday and talked about one office in particular, “The university created this Office of Ethics and Compliance, which was supposed to be a real central piece of these reforms. It was designed to kind of be an independent investigative unit, so it would answer directly to the board of trustees rather than going through a bunch of administrators. And we found over a two-year period from basically late 2018 to early 2020, that that unit really struggled to handle complaints of misconduct, the types of complaints that that unit was designed to prevent. So, complaints of misconduct allege retaliation, and this was by the chief ethics officer. Basically, the person that was running the ethics office was accused of misconduct within the office designed to stop misconduct.”
The report described that misconduct as the ethics officer of creating a hostile work environment, including mocking employees’ physical appearances.
Massey described a lack of communication at Penn State as well,”The university has kind of a series of offices that do investigative or compliance work. And ten years after creating the system, there is not a university wide system for tracking reports of misconduct. So, one of the examples we found was a professor in late 2021 raised the complaint, and he even admitted it was a relatively minor thing, but he got no response for a year-and-a-half. And the university, when he confronted them, they said, well, there is maybe communication gaps, Maybe your report went to the wrong office and it got routed to another one and no one followed up.”
The report indicates that transparency is an issue at Penn State when it comes to complaints and reports of misconduct. Penn State is not subject to all aspects of Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know law that was enacted in 2008.
