Highlights of Spanier's Letter

On the 1998 police investigation of then-assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky:

Spanier said he had "no recollections of any conversations" of a campus police investigation into allegations that Sandusky inappropriately touched two boys in a locker room shower that year.

He conceded that he might have received two e-mails referencing the probe cited in the Freeh report.

On a 2001 incident involving Sandusky:

Though then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary

would testify that he told other university administrators he saw Sandusky molesting a boy in a locker-room shower, Spanier wrote that he never received any indication that the incident involved anything more than "horseplay."

Spanier said then-athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz never mentioned McQueary's name and said the witness "was not sure what he saw."

He said both Curley and Schultz replied "yes" when he asked them if they were sure that the witness had only reported "horsing around."

In response to e-mails in which Spanier described the decision not to report Sandusky to authorities as "humane," the former college president said he used the word to "refer specifically and only to my thought that it was humane of Tim to wish to inform Sandusky first."

Spanier explained why, in one 2001 e-mail, he had worried that the university might be "vulnerable" because of the decision not to alert authorities. He told trustees his concern was that Sandusky might ignore an order not to bring children on campus in the future. "I would have worried that we did not enlist more help in enforcing such a directive," he wrote.

On his communication with trustees during the 2011 grand-jury investigation:

Spanier said then-Penn State general counsel Cynthia Baldwin had shared very little information with him about the ongoing probe.

Baldwin failed to notify him of several subpoenas, including one for his own grand-jury testimony, he said.

She told "me on at least three occasions, however, that this was the third or fourth grand jury on this matter ... and that the attorney general did not seem to have any evidence to suggest that something happened involving Penn State."

- Jeremy Roebuck