Pennsylvania Needs More Sunshine. DSL a Case Study.

On Sunday the Carlisle Sentinel published an editorial in favor of liberalizing Pennsylvania's sunshine laws.

Pennsylvania's laws governing open meetings and open records leave a lot to be desired. For one thing, if you ask for information and an official body refuses to cooperate, the burden is on the citizen to prove he or she has a right to the information.

That's completely the opposite of the law in most other states. Resolving such a dispute usually requires a trip to court in the company of attorneys experienced in this area of law. That's an expensive and unlikely proposition for an individual citizen - and that situation encourages some officials to brush off all such requests.

I am in full agreement with this and I also think that this example offered by the Sentinel perfectly illustrates the need.

As Sentinel readers are aware, the fate of a local Dickinson School of Law campus hung in the balance as the Penn State University Board of Trustees, meeting as quietly as it could, attempted to move the entire school to University Park in violation of a purchase agreement requiring the university to keep the law school in Carlisle “in perpetuity.”

It was a combination of judicious leaks from inside the institution and a series of court actions that headed off what might have been an institutional sneak-away of a kind not seen since the Baltimore Colts tiptoed off to Indianapolis two decades ago.

What I found most interesting about this passage is that the editorial board pulled its punch. Rather than singling out Spanier as the thief that tried to steal DSL, it shifts the blame to a faceless Board of Trustees. If you followed the Sentinel's coverage of the fight to keep DSL in Carlisle you know that it didn't hesitate at the time to single out Spanier. See this op-ed for example.

What has changed is that Penn State has agreed to keep an "equal" campus of DSL in Carlisle in exchange for one in University Park. While plans move ahead on the construction of the University Park campus using borrowed money, fund raising for the Carlisle renovations have stalled. Hence Carlisle is at this point still somewhat uncertain that Spanier will keep his word. Spanier has a notoriously thin skin and has, in the past, signaled one thing about DSL and turned around and done something else. I think the Sentinel pulled its punch because they feared retribution from Spanier if he was named as the thief.

By the way, I highly recommend the Sentinel's coverage of the DSL death match to anyone who wants insight into the ways of Spanier, Erikson, and Courtney. You can search their archives here. The story broke in 2003 and was resolved in 2005.

Penn State, Portland, and their Declaration of Independence

Today we learn from the CDT that,

Five months after the Penn State president issued a public reprimand of Rene Portland, university insurance is still financing a legal defense for the embattled basketball coach.

Of course, Penn State flack Tyson Kendig tells us that this is standard operating procedure. The University carries insurance for just such contingencies and routinely pays for the legal defense of it employees when they are sued as a result of preforming their official duties. The article notes that in fact the University has paid the legal expenses of other employees in recent months. I don't dispute any of that. It is however somewhat beside the point. I would like to know if Penn State has ever refused to pick up the tab for the defense of one of its employees and, if so, under what circumstances.

The fact that Penn State is picking up the tab raises the issue of whether or not the Portland and Penn State legal defenses are independent of each other. Portland hired the lawyer Jack Stover, from Buchanan, Ingersoll and Rooney, a large firm with offices in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and California. On the surface it would appear that her lawyer is independent of Penn State.

What the article does not tell you is that Jack Stover was, and may still be, the legal counsel for Dickinson School of Law Board of Governors. He represented the board during the DSL Penn State death match a few years ago. In that capacity he represented the interests of those on the board aligned with Spanier. This would mean that he worked with Wendell Courtney, Penn State's general counsel, in Penn State's successful effort to relocate the school to University Park. Further, according to his profile on his firm's web site he is an adjunct professor at DSL.

It is beginning to look like Penn State and Rene are putting up a unified defense, but are not publicly acknowledging this. The sanctions against Portland and her public denouncement of them at her infamous news conference are starting look like a piece of political theater designed to give the appearance of distance between her and Penn State.

A possible conflict of interest, duplicity, and a lack of transparency, all in a day's work at Penn State.