PSU trustees to look at board review during meeting this week

If this week’s Penn State trustees meeting sounds familiar, it is probably because a lot of the items up for discussion are updates about topics that have been on the table before.

The governance and long-range planning committee has had a number of hot topics in 2015, many of which will be rehashed in the last meeting of the year.

Among those is the board reassessment that gubernatorial-appointed trustee Ali Goldstein proposed in January.

“This is not my condemning one group of people on any side of any issue,” said Goldstein, a university graduate student, when she brought the motion to the floor. “Instead, what I’m saying is this: Penn State was accused of having a culture problem, and three years later, we’re still fighting about it. ... The environment that exists on this board is not something we should devote any further time to dissecting. Let us take command of our own culture.”

From the March meeting at Hershey to the July meeting at Penn State Beaver to multiple meetings in University Park, the topic has come up again and again, as the trustees have debated the form the review should take.

Some advocated a simple survey. There were proposals for a formal review with a leader. Others put forward something somewhere in the middle. In September, President Eric Barron suggested having several current or former university presidents or other significant stakeholders come in for a presentation.

An update on the progress of the process is on the table for Thursday’s committee meeting.

Trustee committees will meet all day on Thursday at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel.

The full board will meet Friday, with an executive session in the morning, a public comment session at 11:15 a.m., and the official meeting at 1 p.m.

This story was originally published November 18, 2015 at 10:36 AM with the headline "PSU trustees to look at board review during meeting this week."