Former Penn State trustee Lubrano, who supported Joe Paterno, among those seeking board seats
A former Penn State trustee at the center of an alumni-led effort to counter former FBI director Louis Freeh’s report that implicated former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal is seeking election to the board after a two-year hiatus.
Anthony Lubrano, president of a financial services and wealth management firm, is one of four candidates vying for three alumni-elected positions on the board. Jay Paterno, one of the former football coach’s sons and president of Blue Line 409, and Alice Pope, associate professor of psychology at St. John’s University, are seeking reelection and Jeffrey Ballou, news editor of Al Jazeera English who ran last spring, is seeking first-time election.
Ballots for the board of trustees alumni election will be available to alumni April 10. All online voting must be finished by 9 a.m. on May 7.
“I left the board in 2018 for personal reasons, having served two terms,” Lubrano said in press release. “But now I can once again provide the level of commitment required to effectively serve as a trustee.”
Lubrano and Pope were part of a group of seven alumni-elected trustees who sued Penn State in 2015 to access source materials used in the university-commissioned Freeh report, which investigated the university’s role in the Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.
The report criticized the university’s board of trustees for not performing its oversight duties and said the university’s most powerful leaders repeatedly concealed Sandusky’s abuse to uphold the football team’s revered culture.
Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and is serving a prison sentence of 30 to 60 years.
In June 2018, Lubrano, Pope, Jay Paterno and eight other alumni-elected trustees called a special meeting to announce their review of the Freeh report, which rejected all the report’s conclusions. Lubrano’s term on the board ended two days later, on July 1.
Last February, the trustees’ counter-report was leaked by WJAC-TV in Johnstown before it could be approved for public view by the full board. It argued that Paterno and other high-ranking Penn State officials would not have knowingly allowed a pedophile operate freely on campus or put children in danger.
Last month, the board, Penn State and the Paterno family announced they had resolved their yearslong dispute stemming from the Sandusky scandal and the subsequent Freeh report. As part of the settlement, Penn State has agreed to pay some of the Paterno’s legal costs and the Paterno family has agreed to not pursue “further review or release” of the Freeh report, Freeh’s materials “or otherwise.”
“I’m gratified there is a movement afoot to rightfully honor Joe and his family in the manner they have always deserved, and I’m committed to seeing this through,” said Lubrano in his release.
Lubrano graduated from Penn State in 1982 with a degree in accounting. Jay Paterno, who played for the Nittany Lions football team under his father from 1986-1990, graduated from Penn State in 1990. Pope graduated from Penn State with a B.A. in 1979, M.S. in 1983 and Ph.D in 1986 in psychology. Ballou graduated from Penn State in 1990 with a degree in journalism.
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 9:31 AM with the headline "Former Penn State trustee Lubrano, who supported Joe Paterno, among those seeking board seats."
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