Posted on 02/14/2014 3:51:13 PM PST by FlJoePa
The next president of Penn State will be a familiar face on campus here — Florida State President Eric Barron, a source confirmed Friday.
Barron, a 20-year faculty member and a former dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has been chosen to be Penn State’s 18th president.
Penn State’s board of trustees will vote to hire Barron during a special board of trustees meeting at noon Monday at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel. The board’s compensation committee also must approve his contract.
Barron will succeed Rodney Erickson, who delayed retiring and opted to lead the university at the start of the Jerry Sandusky scandal in November 2011. Erickson, whose salary is $600,000, has said he will retire by June 30, the last day of his contract.
Barron will have spent about four years at the helm of Florida State, a public university in Tallahassee where he was in charge of a $1 billion fundraising campaign. Florida State was named the most efficiently run university during his tenure, and the Seminoles won this year’s NCAA football championship.
Barron was on the faculty at Penn State from 1986 to 2006. He was a distinguished professor of geosciences, and he served as dean for the last four years of his tenure.
Barron did not return phone calls from The Tallahassee Democrat, the newspaper reported Friday. Barron’s chief of staff told the paper that Barron was “off the grid” visiting family in New York.
At Penn State, Barron will lead one of the largest universities in the country, with 96,519 students. He also will take over a university with one of the largest research enterprises in the country, with $848 million spent on research in fiscal 2012-2013.
But Barron will step into a university whose alumni base remains divided from the fallout of the Sandusky scandal. Many alumni resent the way Joe Paterno was phone-fired and that Erickson accepted the NCAA’s sanctions.
Penn State will join two peer institutions that have named their next leaders over the past two weeks.
Ohio State University hired the president of the University of California in Irvine, Michael Drake, to be its next president, and the University of Pittsburgh chose Patrick Gallagher, who is the acting U.S. deputy secretary of commerce, to be its chancellor and CEO. Drake and Gallagher will start in the summer.
As Penn State’s president, Barron will deal with is keeping the cost of tuition affordable at a time when state funding has been flat. Penn State has the highest tuition among public universities in the country, though that has not stopped applications from rolling in at record levels this year.
The search to replace Erickson has been ongoing for more than a year. Penn State set up a search committee, hired a headhunting firm and held forums on campus to get feedback from the university community about qualities the next president should possess.
Penn State was on the verge of naming its president Nov. 1, which was the date of a special meeting for a board of trustees personnel decision. The board’s only personnel decision is hiring a new president, according to its bylaws.
But Old Main abruptly canceled the meeting, and the board chairman said “all options are open” in the much-watched presidential search process.
A week later, a New York newspaper reported that Penn State’s presidential pick had been found to have been padding his pay. That candidate was David Smith, the president of the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.
Since then, university leaders have been tight-lipped about the search process. The board chairman, Keith Masser, gave a vague update on the search progress at the trustees meeting in January, saying that a new president would be named “in the months ahead.”
The reality was quicker than Masser’s prediction, as it ended up being a month away.
And on Presidents Day no less.
Will the new guy not hide in his office when his staff are shagging kids?
Is he married to a woman and does he have a family?
You still don’t realize that js was a retired coach when he was accused, do you? You’re pretty thick, huh?
Oh, I may be this and I may be that..
But I’ve never been any part of a kid-shagging operation.
Like Paterno or Sandusky or any of those other Ped-State fellows.
What you know about the case could fit on the head of a pin. But keep commenting on it. By all means.
A retired coach who the university never informed the police about
A retired coach who the university gave full access to the campus and HS kid..
It’s a disgrace what PSU allowed.
Pedo State should be burned to the ground right after they dig up Paterno’s rotting corpse and toss it on the pyre.
Well, let’s see.
The fag-friendly media went so far as to cough up a yuck onto those dudes.
That might just indicate obscene Penn State faggotry of the worst degree.
“Oh, I may be this and I may be that..
But I’ve never been any part of a kid-shagging operation.
Like Paterno or Sandusky or any of those other Ped-State fellows.”
HG, you have to recognize cognitive dissonance when you see it. This JoePa guy is beyond help. Every time I hear the words “Penn State,” I think of the last scene in the movie “The Scent of a Woman. where Al Pacino tells the head master what he would like to do with his “school” if he could still see. At least Penn State could have taken down their football stadium to atone for what the institution condoned for so many years. Hey, JoPa guy, football uber ales, right!
This thread is about one of the largest, and best universities in the nation hiring a new President.
If you have something to say about that, then by all means speak up.
If not, maybe you shouldn’t hijack every thread that has a mention of Penn State in it in an effort to make you somehow feel better about yourselves.
“This thread is about one of the largest, and best universities in the nation hiring a new President.
If you have something to say about that, then by all means speak up.”
A) I was communicating with Humblergunner, not you.
B) As to your assertion that Penn State is “one of the largest and best universities in the nation,” I would take issue with the veracity of that statement. Any institution that places the “value” of their football program above dealing effectively with the sexual abuse of children fails the test of “best.” Graham Spannier was a disgrace as the school’s president, and yet he stayed until this whole sorry story unfolded. Shame on the school’s “leadership” for knowingly trying to cover this abuse up. You know that they did, but like a lot of people who are rah rah over school sports, you seem to be all too willing to overlook what happened. As for Joe Paterno, I hope he’s burning in Hell if there is such a place. As the end of the day, he was a shell of a human being who, like our current president, mistakenly believed he was some kind of demigod.
Finally, good old Michael Mann is a Penn State guy. What he’s done to try and “steer” the “global warming crap” is a disgrace along with his lawsuit against Stein for calling his bluff. A quality institution of higher learning doesn’t employ “scientists” who work backward from a predetermined “answer.”
Have a nice day!
So what, the State of PA was also culpable in the coverup. That’s like the cops justifying an officer-involved shooting. Sorry, no sale. Maybe you’d go there and watch a FB game, but not me. I agree with some of the other posters that Penn State should have been torn down! But then I went to UC Berkeley and feel the same way about it too, particularly now that Janet Nappy is now president.
You just got done saying Joe Paterno is burning in hell and now you simply shift the blame to the state once I confront you with FACTS? With no retraction or apology? Who are you? The media?
Screw off. I’m done with you.
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