Will Penn State trustees remove Barry Fenchak from board? Special meeting scheduled
The Penn State board of trustees scheduled a special meeting for Monday to vote on removing one of its most outspoken board members.
The board will meet virtually at 3 p.m. Monday, June 16 to consider a proposal recommending removing trustee Barry Fenchak from the board. A vote in favor of doing so would make Fenchak permanently ineligible to serve on the board again.
Fenchak is an alumni-elected trustee whose three-year term expires June 30. He submitted materials and garnered enough signatures to appear on the trustee election ballot to run for a second term, but the board ruled he was unqualified and ineligible to appear on the ballot. He ran an unsuccessful write-in campaign.
The board previously tried to permanently remove Fenchak from the board in the fall because of an incident that occurred after the board’s July 2024 meeting. Fenchak loosely repeated a quote from the PG-rated movie “A League of Their Own” in which Tom Hanks’ character told a baseball umpire he looked like a “penis with a little hat on” to a female staff member.
A board subcommittee found it to be a code of conduct violation and unanimously recommended his removal.
When the board tried to remove him, the issue went to court as part of a lawsuit Fenchak filed against the board. The judge blocked the board from removing him as trustee a day before the vote was scheduled, finding Fenchak had provided “uncontradicted evidence of a broad pattern of retaliatory behavior” by the board.
But the judge, Brian Marshall, lifted that preliminary injunction in May — paving way for his removal — after finding the basis for it had since become moot. He granted the injunction in the fall after Fenchak showed the board was trying to remove him in retaliation for his repeated requests for information, namely the university’s approximately $4.57 billion endowment and a reportedly $1 billion athletic department contract with a ticketing and fan engagement agency.
But in the seven months since, Fenchak was given 510 pages of information related to the endowment and a complete, unredacted copy of the contract with Elevate. He can no longer claim he is subject to removal from the board because of those specific requests, Marshall wrote in his ruling.
Reporter Bret Pallotto contributed to this report.
