UNIVERSITY PARK — Penn State President Rodney Erickson said he hadn’t seen the banner plane circling the university with a message of taking down the statue of Joe Paterno, but the university is still looking at the issue of what, if anything, should be done with the landmark.

Erickson said he would be talking to the President’s Council and touching base with the board of trustees. A decision is expected in seven to 10 days.

“I would say within the next week or so we should have that sorted through,” Erickson said.
That was one of the topics Erickson touched on during an interview Tuesday with the Centre Daily Times.

The university president did a string of interviews, linked to the Thursday release of the Louis Freeh report with damning findings about the child sex abuse scandal, after last week’s meeting of Penn State trustees on how to respond.

“This continues to be a difficult and challenging time for the university,” Erickson said. “We’ve been through a lot over the last eight months, especially the last few weeks with the (Jerry) Sandusky trial, the Freeh report being released last Thursday. We really have a lot to think about.

“We’ve got accountability to take for what happened, we’ve got the needs of victims to continue to address, and we are working on that framework. We have openness and accountability to continue to promote in my administration.

“We’re really going to move very quickly to implement the recommendations that Judge Freeh made for the university.”

A board committee will be working with a team of university administrators to address each of the 119 Freeh recommendations. Erickson said some of them — such as improving university culture — are not as specific and concrete as others.

“We want this to be as inclusive a process as possible,” Erickson said.

“Some of the changes are looking into things that are much more subjective, harder to get your hands around, less easily defined things.”

The Freeh recommendations range from tracking required employee training to advertising senior administrative job vacancies externally. That is one issue that has come up since the scandal broke.

The university appointed Dave Joyner — himself a trustee until he suspended his membership — to the position of interim athletics director. Tim Curley, who had held the job, is facing a perjury charge for testimony he gave in the Sandusky case and is on administrative leave.

When asked about an external search to fill the athletic director job, Erickson said “that is still an open and ongoing issue.”

Erickson added: “At this point, I’m satisfied that Dr. Joyner is doing a good job in that role. ... I think he has brought a level of trust to me and the relationship that I have to the athletic department. I know that he’s putting a lot of changes into place.”

Erickson said that he expects “at some point” the senior level position will have to be opened up. Erickson himself is scheduled to retire in 2014.

The Freeh report also addresses the university’s inadequate compliance with the Clery Act — the federal law that sets crime reporting requirements for universities. Erickson said the U.S. Department of Education’s Clery Act investigation is continuing.

The Freeh investigation found multiple problems, Erickson said, including inadequate training, timeliness and nonreporting of issues such as incidents involving Sandusky.

The dearth of incidents being reported, he said, “raised issues of perhaps the fact that there were so few reports coming through was an indication that not a lot of individuals at the university were aware of the Clery Act, certainly to the extent that was required and in place.”

The university has already been addressing those failings — getting new training and reporting requirements up and running.

Erickson said that the question of whether the board leaders at the time the Sandusky scandal unfolded should stay in their positions is something all board members will have to ask themselves.
He also spoke about the role of football at Penn State, saying the game is important, but shouldn’t be overly important.

The university, he noted, has seen high academic achievements including becoming one of about 60 research universities invited to the Association of American Universities. That happened in the late 1950s.

“So we have been a top-flight academic institution for a long, long time, and we continue to be, and we will be in the future,” Erickson said.

“Football has been a part of collegiate life for more than a century. Not just here, but at other universities across the country. ... We need to make sure that we also have a sense of perspective and balance, that the most important reason we are here is to provide the best possible education to the students and to push the frontiers of discovery.”

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648. Follow her on Twitter @AnneDanahy