More women to join Penn State board
Penn State's board of trustees is poised to bring on more female members, but it may lose ground on racial diversity.
Pennsylvania State University's board of trustees on Friday is likely to gain more female members when it welcomes new trustees to an expanded board.
But it may lose ground on racial diversity.
Board Chair Keith Masser said of the five new trustees that a board committee will recommend for approval , three are women. He declined to name the candidates, whose identity will be revealed at the full board meeting on Friday.
"We had very strong female candidates," said Masser, a Schuylkill County potato farmer who pledged in March that diversity would be a focus as the board prepared to expand.
The lack of female diversity on Penn State's board was raised in March by trustees Barbara Doran and Alice Pope.
"When we're too alike in background and perspective, our collective judgment feels right and rational, when it may actually be limited and flat-out wrong," Doran, a private wealth portfolio manager for Morgan Stanley, said at the time. "…Our students need real and visible role models in leadership positions."
The board currently has six female members or 18 percent or the 32 members. If the three female nominees are approved by the board on Friday – the past president of the alumni association who is a woman also will get a seat - that will increase the number to nine or about one quarter of the expanded 38-member board. Nationally women occupy 30 percent of board seats at private universities and about 28 percent at public ones, according to a 2010 report by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
The board's only two African American members – Merck CEO Ken Frazier and lawyer Adam Taliaferro, an alumni-elected trustee – are scheduled to exit their current seats. Frazier was the board's liaison to Louis Freeh, the former FBI Director whose investigative report faulted former Penn State leaders for covering up child sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky.
Asked if the five new members offered racial diversity, Masser said: "We've got diversity of perspectives."
The five new board members include three at large trustees and two business and industry representatives. The board also is scheduled to welcome five other new members who are selected or recommended by other groups, including an alumni-elected trustee, a student trustee, a faculty trustee and an agricultural society trustee. All are white men except for the faculty trustee, David Han, a cardiac specialist at the Hershey Medical Center who is Asian; he would be the only Asian board member.
There are no Hispanic members on the board except for Acting Education Secretary Pedro Rivera, who is on by virtue of his job.
The new board members will take their seats in July.
At a governance committee meeting on Thursday, Doran suggested that the university create a better process for selecting new trustees, one that will look comprehensively at the board's needs in terms of both skills and perspectives. The committee agreed to discuss the suggestion further.