Fracking Penn State

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Published Jan. 5, 2012, 8:58 p.m. ET

The AP has a good story out today on Penn State's post-Sandusky spin operation. It's sad but nothing too surprising; that is how your modern college operates (I wrote a similar story a decade ago about St. Joe's spin operation after a student there died from binge drinking). In the pyramid of outrageous things in Happy Vally, nothing comes close to Sandusky's rank immorality, but high on the list is the incestuousness (no pun intended) of Penn State and state officials and even the people they've brought in to clean things up.

Consider the case of fracking billiionaire Terry Pegula:

The memo goes on to describe how many of Penn State's donors had spoken out in support of the school. From the AP story:

The overwhelming majority of our leading donors have made public statements affirming their faith in the university and its future. The document named a couple who gave $88 million to launch an NCAA ice hockey program, and another who endowed the position of head football coach.

The AP doesn't want to name the couple who donated the $88 million, the largest gift in PSU history. But I'll name them. The husband is Terry Pegula, the owner of the Buffalo Sabres. This October, he hired the former finance chair of Sandusky's PSU-connected Second Mile charity to be the Sabres chief development officer. (The Sabres later scrubbed their website of Second Mile references, but not before we caught them.)

Pegula's wife just happens to be the biggest individual contributor to Tom Corbett's gubernatorial campaign. In 2009, Kim Pegula gave $180,000 to Corbett's campaign. Her husband donated $100,000. So the biggest donors in PSU history also gave $280,000 to the current governor, who was at the time the attorney general investigating the Sandusky case while running for governor. The same governor who now sits on the school's board of trustees. A tangled little web is Pennsylvania.

Indeed. One day, Penn State is going to regret not going outside of The Family to pick a new president and also to find truly independent people (and yes, I'm talking about you Louis Freeh) to investigate the scandal....maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of its life.