Bye Bye Vicky

I have no idea why Vicky Triponey vice president for Student Affairs at Penn State unexpectedly announced her immediate resignation on Thursday. But if I had to guess, I'd have to say that it was the result of losing a turf war with JoPa over Judicial Affairs. Spanier had commissioned the report last summer on Judicial Affairs which was delivered last Monday. From an Adam Smetz CDT article on the report.

Donald Suit knows the Office of Judicial Affairs.

For 25 years through the late 1990s, he directed the on-campus student judiciary at Penn State.

And for the record, he said, head football coach Joe Pater-no “was good at backing up Judicial Affairs, at least while I was there.”

But Suit, speaking from his Ferguson Township home this week, said some reforms suggested this month for the campus judiciary would “reflect a little more leniency in how (the university) is treating students, I think.”

“I think it’s more of a concern to me related to the prestige of the university and how it handles athletics,” Suit said of some proposed changes. “ ... We’re beginning to look like some Southern schools that have some shaky practices.”

[...]

Under one recommendation, many punished students could continue their extracurricular activities — such as sports — unless an “administrative leader” in their extracurricular area were to decide otherwise.

“To me, the athletic department has undue influence on Judicial Affairs,” a former Judicial Affairs employee told the Centre Daily Times, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Paterno was the only Penn State sports coach who was interviewed by the advisory committee, according to an index attached to the committee report.

The former Judicial Affairs employee said the judiciary needs to resurrect “more student input.”

“It feels like there is undue influence by the administration in this whole process,” the source said.

The source declined to be named because he or she did not want to cause trouble for former colleagues, the source said.

That sounds to me like JoPa got what he wanted in the report at the expense of Judical Affairs which would be a loss for Triponey.

Keep in mind, that while the public found out about Triponey's resignation late in the day on Thursday, according the CDT story, Penn State flack Bill Mahon said that Triponey had alerted administrators a couple of days earlier. That would be Tuesday or,if Mahon was speaking loosely, Monday at the earliest, which places the decision in the immediate wake of the report. Hence the resignation may have been in reaction to the report.

Let me add that I would rule out the possibility that she resigned or was fired as the result of anything done by the student group SOS, which has been a vocal critic of hers. One reason for this judgement is that there is no event involving them which correlates with her resignation which would have served as a trigger.

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