Transparency and Open Records at Penn State

Earlier this year, the Rock Ethics Institute named me a Stand Up award recipient for “innovative efforts to promote democratic practices and accountability,” including using open records laws to obtain internal documents, otherwise kept under wraps, that shine a light into University leaders’ opaque decision-making processes and deliberations. Here’s one of those documents, a brief history about open records at Penn State, and other thoughts about transparency and accountability at the institution.

In November 2022, Penn State’s president Neeli Bendapudi announced that the Center for Racial Justice—recommended by community members as part of a package of commitments to anti-racism at a predominantly white institution—was no more. Made just days after a high-profile visit by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Bendapudi’s announcement was met with uproar: over 400 faculty signed a letter opposing the cancellation of the Center, and the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus criticized the move. In the preceding months, the University wavered on whether or not it would fund the initiative in light of a structural budget deficit.

But in December, Spotlight PA’s Wyatt Massey reported on the existence of a “confidential” Board-level document from early 2021 that illustrated how “at least some on the university’s Board of Trustees viewed the former president’s plans” for advancing racial justice at Penn State, including the Center. The report asked, in part, “whether teaching America’s exceptionalism remains a core objective at Penn State.” Spotlight PA did not publish the full document.

As part of an effort to trace the recent history of information control at the institution and illustrate tools at hand for the University community to hold administrators accountable, I’m publishing the full unsigned five-page report (which I obtained via an open records request to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture last year + provided to Spotlight) available here. While it’s unknown which members of the Board wrote this report or how many endorsed the presented views, the document still provides a useful insight into how University leaders talked about the Center. More importantly, it frames a broader, needed conversation about how faculty, students, and staff can challenge the administration’s opaque decision-making processes—an approach at odds with the transparent and collaborative production of knowledge that their academic labor enables.

Contesting narratives

The public narrative for the Center’s untimely death, just days after white supremacists’ bear spray settled onto the patio outside Thomas Building, constantly shifted. Privately in preceding weeks, members of the search committee for the Center’s director were told by the President that the university “had no money” for the center amidst a budget crisis, although they never heard an estimate for the center’s cost. Publicly, the University claimed it had exactly the right amount of money, if not more, but wanted to invest it in “existing [diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging] initiatives across Penn State.” In town halls across the institution, including one this spring with the students of the College of the Liberal Arts, administrators insinuated that no one really knew what the center was going to do (was it a research center or a student support program? would it have a physical location and building?). The recommendations out of which the Center blossomed were rather clear, though: the center “would support antiracist scholarship (teaching, research, extension, creative activity, programming) across the University, as well as robust mentoring, faculty release-time, and support for collaborative initiatives.” And the idea wasn’t particularly out in uncharted waters: Temple, Michigan, Boston, and others have pursued similar programs.

The shifting narratives from the administration made little sense. Nor did it, on face, make sense that a president who sought to make her previous institution a “premier anti-racist metropolitan research university” had simply changed her tune.

Still, we have little information, beyond press releases, to know, for sure, why the Center was cancelled: the administration keeps its deliberation processes and internal reports under lock-and-key. One member of the search committee for the Center’s director—essentially, those charged with steering the Center’s future—mourned the lack of “complete transparency about the real reason for not moving forward with the Center.”

Analyses of power at Penn State often end with the Board of Trustees, stacked with corporate executives, calling the shots in some way. It’s not clear that influence is uniformly distributed across the 38 members of the Board: agendas are set by a small executive committee that reportedly convenes in meetings that appear to egregiously violate Pennsylvania’s open meetings laws. But trustees certainly sought a new president that could fix Barron’s mess—namely, a supposedly significant budget deficit. Were those trustees who were so panicked that Penn State wasn’t adequately “teaching America’s exceptionalism” under Barron’s leadership looking for a president that would right the ship?

No one knows exactly why the Center was gutted. Maybe it really was austerity! But the document—which provides insight into how some unnamed Board member(s) thought about anti-racism in early 2021—contests the institution’s shape-shifting narrative with something more straightforward that doesn’t require people to confide trust in an institution that has done little, yet, to earn it. Perhaps, simply, some people on Penn State’s governing board didn’t love the idea of the Center and exerted enough pressure on the president they had just recently selected to shut it down.

Public records

In 2007, Pennsylvania’s legislature reformed its open records policy (called the Right-to-Know Law) which allows anyone to request emails, documents, and materials held by state agencies and officials in the course of their duties. While Pennsylvania’s state-owned universities in the PASSHE system are subject to open records, the odd position of Penn State, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln as “state-related universities” left lawmakers unsure if they should, too, be subject to open records. Graham Spanier, then-president of the university, testified in Harrisburg that bringing Penn State under the purview of the Right-to-Know Law would mean the university would have to “operate in a way that will make us less nimble and less competitive with many other major research universities in the nation.” Many of Penn State’s peers in the Big Ten, most of whom nimbly out-compete Penn State in academic rankings, are subject to expansive open records laws. Many have key protections for academic freedom and research.

At the time of Spanier’s testimony, Jerry Sandusky was under grand jury investigation. The emails that later implicated Spanier and other Penn State officials could (not necessarily would) have been obtainable under the Right-to-Know Law. I don’t know if Spanier was aware of the grand jury investigation at the time, although it seems probable, as the University president, he would have.

Despite the lessons of 2011, Penn State still remains broadly exempt from the Right-to-Know Law, meaning the emails of University trustees or administrators are not readily requestable. But three members of the University’s Board are the secretaries of agriculture, conservation and natural resources, and education. Their emails, held by their respective departments, are requestable public records, as one wise friend noted to me last summer. Where the exemption means that the Board of Trustees is not generally subject to the Right-to-Know Law, these three specific members, as state officials, are. Last July, we requested about five years of information from each, yielding 1,000+ pages of emails and attachments exchanged between Board members. Other materials—like reports and documents the Board keeps private on an internal platform—are likely obtainable, too. Anyone can file a request to those secretaries’ departments for emails—here’s a template.

Image edited to shrink margins around page break — view original on pages 3 and 4.

While the document does not explicitly express opposition for the Center, the authors express clear skepticism about the utility of a research center for Black studies and offer, instead, a paragraph of praise for “Western civilization” that reductively presents American history. It includes a sentence critical of the “modern humanities, with its attendant absorption of resources” and echoes logic used to undermine humanistic inquiry and research (that the “fundamental mission” of the university is “preparing students for the workplace” which, supposedly, the humanities cannot do).

Board chair Matt Schuyler told Spotlight PA that the document “was not presented to the Board of Trustees and therefore did not and does not represent the view of the board;” to the Washington Post, Schuyler said the report “was not presented to the board and did not represent the board’s views at the time.” Indeed, from the records we obtained alone, there’s no indication the full board ever saw the report. One trustee, in an email that included Schuyler and vice chair David Kleppinger, specifically pushed back against the report and its “racially inflammatory language,” particularly the repeated invocation of “Western civilization.” And while the report is written from the voice of “Board members,” it is not publicly known who exactly wrote the report or how many members of the Board it is actually speaking for. It could, very possibly, be a single trustee pretending to speak for many. But that’s still a governing voice at the institution, and we’ll never know what was said about the Center and other related initiatives in private Board sessions with the President.

Information, citizenship, and democratic decision-making

Despite its awful, uninformed, and revealing language, the report is not a smoking gun that explains the real cause of the Center’s closure. It still speaks to a broader issue at Penn State: few really trust the University’s administration at their word, particularly when there is a pattern of going back on policy commitments, and there are few effective mechanisms to ascertain information, independent of what the “strategic” communications office puts out themselves. (Releasing this document was, in part, an effort to attack that second element by challenging the administration with an evidenced counter-narrative that they themselves didn’t first publicize.)

Rather than build a culture of trust where community members are seen as equal partners in realizing the university’s academic mission, administrators rely on PR folks for interlocution. Strategic communications does them no favors in building community trust: in 2020, when a faculty group released an independent report on how the University’s planned mitigation measures were too weak and predicted 2,500 student cases in fall 2020 unless more stringent policies were adopted, the university’s spokesperson complained that the group wasn’t being transparent, the report was “flawed,” and the authors were “anonymous.” In the same statement, the university declined to transparently release any of their internal disease modeling that was actually guiding policy. Close to 5,000 students fell ill. And it didn’t help that the University president recently—and, I am sure, accidentally—used “fake news” to describe local media coverage about potential layoffs and non-renewals due to budget cuts. (Another anecdote: after a faculty member publicly resigned from the headship of the African American Studies department over an alleged broken promise, the university told The Daily Collegian the former head’s claims were “demonstrably false.” I asked the student-reporter if such falsity had actually been demonstrated to her. No, it was not—and still, it publicly has not.)

Had the university had the courage to view concerned faculty as partners with skills worth leveraging for the community’s health, fewer students would have gotten sick and some Centre County residents might still be alive. But the mission of the administration is continually at odds with the mission of the university: the former works to limit information and makes decisions in total opacity, and the latter is focused on the transparent, collaborative production of knowledge for the benefit of all. The administration doesn’t seem to budge when they’re called out: even after the Schreyer Gender Equity Coalition called out Student Affairs in 2021 for selectively omitting survey results about survivors’ experiences with university resources (e.g. to a report of sexual violence or harassment, “did the University respond by responding inadequately…?”), the university omitted similar results yet again in 2023.

For all the comments that “students are the priority” at Penn State, the reality is that students as consumers are first—and students as equal democratic actors are last. That’s what happens when leaders view “preparing students for the workplace,” not civic society in general, as the fundamental mission of the university. This point isn’t remotely new: scholars argued that students rioted and overturned news vans after Joe Paterno’s firing in 2011 because Penn State’s culture, set by administrators, did not value citizenship or political literacy. Ten years later, (wise friend) Nora Van Horn wrote her thesis on how administrators essentially censor speech and undermine civic skill development by limiting information, illustrated by experiences from her four-year tenure: “how can students ‘express divergent viewpoints and opinions on matters of concern’ if the University withholds information about these matters?”. Today, graduate students from other universities are writing their dissertations and theses on the odd ways Penn State administrators interact with students who want to be seen as civic actors.

The university could obviously change decision-making structures to be more transparent and democratic. At Cornell, the President is required to respond publicly with her position on every resolution passed by institutions of shared governance. Even if Penn State is not legally covered by PA’s open records law, it could voluntarily bring itself into compliance with the law’s standards. Administrators could set up an office to actively field policy recommendations from students, faculty, and staff and earnestly consider their implementation. It could even consider notice-and-comment procedures for its administrative and budgeting decisions (did anyone tell them that cutting the scanning operations office would mean departments would just purchase their own Scantron machines, substantially reducing net savings?). And it could do away with choreographed town halls and “virtual conversations” that are simply used to spoon-feed the institution’s narrative to the community, rather than make room for productive discussion.

Administrators at town halls this spring repeatedly implored before frustrated faculty, staff, and students: “we need your help.” Penn Staters are eager to provide it—many do, as the faculty-led COVID analyses and More Rivers to Cross reports on faculty diversity show. But no one has any reason to keep laboring—with little recognition and no additional pay—for the administration when they cast community recommendations off to the side or later recharacterize University-commissioned efforts as independent and unapproved by the administration.

Ongoing advocacy

For everything that’s transpired at Penn State over the last few years, community members are increasingly fighting for institutional transparency, accountability, and democracy. And, hopefully, they’ll continue to.

Alumni twice elected trustees who value institutional transparency and accountability into positions of leadership through Penn State Forward. Know an undergraduate or graduate alum who believes in democratic governance, climate action, labor rights, and educational equity? You can n ominate them to be a future trustee candidate. A university built for Pennsylvania’s working families should be governed by working people—not natural gas magnates and health executives.

Media and student coalitions are calling out the administration’s opacity like the Board’s apparent violations of the PA open meetings law with private executive committee meetings, alongside quiet efforts to raise executives’ salaries amidst a “budget crisis.” It’s not enough to get executives to just make their decisions in public before the University community, though. They should make them with us: the people who know Penn State best because our work makes the university possible every day.

Community members are building counternarratives to the University’s line, so they can set the policy agenda on their own terms: independently modeling COVID transmission to demand better safety measures, using open records to identify alternative explanations for the Center for Racial Justice’s demise, and publishing Board members’ political contributions to legislative sponsors of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation to call for greater investments in LGBTQ+ student and faculty wellbeing. And much of this work has built broad coalitions of undergraduates, graduate workers, faculty, and staff willing to show up in solidarity with each other.

But winning permanent change in University governance means we need to build long-term institutions. By organizing labor power from below, unions can exercise rights to information and bargain for policy change that recognizes the full humanity—not mere market and labor value—of all Penn Staters. Progress on any front runs through labor formations on our campuses. You can support the Coalition of Graduate Employees at cgepsu.org.

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