Former University of Nebraska chancellor Graham Spanier charged with perjury, obstruction, endangering the welfare of children, failure to properly report suspected abuse and conspiracy in Sandusky case

Graham Spanier spent more than 3 years as chancellor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln before leaving in 1995 to become president of Penn State, where he remained until the board fired him in 2011 for his handling of the Jerry Sandusky pedophile scandal.

     Yesterday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly charged Spanier with perjury, obstruction, endangering the welfare of children, failure to properly report suspected abuse and conspiracy. Said Kelly:

"This was not a mistake by these men. This was not an oversight. It was not misjudgment on their part. This was a conspiracy of silence by top officials to actively conceal the truth."

Spanier's four attorneys asserted his innocence and characterized the new charges as a politically motivated ploy by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett:

"These charges are the work of a vindictive and politically motivated governor working through an unelected attorney general ... whom he appointed to do his bidding."

Graham Spanier, left, with Jerry Sandusky (Reuters)

     Corbett spokesman Kevin Harley called the defense statement "the ranting of a desperate man who just got indicted."
     Spanier was retained as a tenured professor at Penn State after the scandal broke, though on sabbatical. Penn State officials announced Thursday that Spanier would be placed on leave, effective immediately.
     From the New York Times:

In February 2001, Graham B. Spanier, then the president of Penn State, exchanged e-mails with two top university officials regarding Jerry Sandusky.
     The three men had been told of an allegation that Sandusky, a former top assistant to the longtime football coach Joe Paterno, had sexually abused a young boy. It was decided that they would approach Sandusky directly, rather than going to outside authorities. Spanier deemed this a “humane and a reasonable way to proceed,” with one caveat: “The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it.”
     It is now known that Sandusky continued to sexually abuse young boys for years after. On Thursday, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Linda Kelly, said Spanier and the two other university officials — Gary Schultz, a former university vice president, and Tim Curley, the athletic director, who has been on administrative leave — engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” to “actively conceal the truth.”
     “If these men had done what they were supposed to do and legally required to do, several young men may not have been attacked by a serial predator,” Kelly said at a news conference, adding it was not a “mistake” or an “oversight” by the men that allowed Sandusky to continue his abuse.

From Spanier's Wikipedia entry:

As a family sociologist, demographer, and marriage and family therapist, he was the founding editor of the Journal of Family Issues. Spanier was also an author of a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior concerning the practice of mate swapping, or "swinging". Spanier earned an annual salary of $545,016 while President of Penn State.  His compensation was ranked third among his peers at surveyed public universities nationwide, and was the fifth-highest university pay in America, a total annual package in excess of $800,000.

In Pennsylvania, Spanier spent five years in court trying to block the release by The Patriot-News of Harrisburg of the salaries of Penn State’s highest-paid officials, including [Joe] Paterno, from the state retirement system. ... The university lost before the pension board, the Commonwealth Court and, in 2007, the State Supreme Court.
     Conspiracy theorists suspicious of Spanier can chew on this blog post from Jon Rappaport.