Update February 2, 2026: Fenchak V Penn State BOT

On Thursday, January 29, 2026, I filed a petition in Centre County Court, asking the court to intervene (‘provide relief’) by sanctioning Penn State to pay the legal expenses I incurred when I was forced to take legal action against them to provide important University information to myself, as a trustee in 2024 (read about that here).

I encourage you to read the Petition here, and the Memorandum of Law here. They are very interesting.

This quote from the Memorandum of Law, page 10 sums it up well:

“… The actions taken by the defendants and their counsel during the pendency of this matter were orchestrated to make a Trustee’s action to compel the production of information unduly burdensome, financially undesirable, if not altogether impossible, with the intended goal of deterring the plaintiff, and other Trustees, from compelling information not provided, and to accept the defendants’ decline of a Trustee’s request for information without dissent, question, critical thinking, or deliberation.”

When I was elected an Alumni Trustee in June, 2022 I began requesting information regarding the investments in Penn State’s largest asset, its $5 billion endowment. The management of this huge fund has been disconcerting for many years; the combination of underperformance and excess fees has cost Penn State and its stakeholders billions of dollars. These dollars could have been used to further any number of critical and core university missions, including making tuition more affordable.

The Board leadership repeatedly refused to provide this information, claiming it was unrelated to the duties of a trustee, although some trustees did have access. I was compelled to sue, and pay for costly and time-consuming legal actions, to get the information Penn State leadership knew they were required to provide.

My 2024 lawsuit was amended to include information regarding the parameters of Penn State’s contract with Elevate. Elevate is a global conglomerate management company that Penn State contracted to manage ticketing for Penn State athletics. Penn State claimed this contract would provide $1 billion of revenue to Penn State Athletics, which would offset the $700+ million Beaver Stadium renovation. Once again, I requested specific information regarding this contract and was denied.

The endowment and Elevate contract are obviously of key interest to trustees, all of whom owe a fiduciary duty to the University to oversee and assure its financial well-being. But Penn State engaged in a litany of tactics to prevent the legally required access. One has to wonder: why would they do this, unless they had something they wanted to hide?

Penn State eventually provided the requested information and shortly thereafter initiated a series of pretextual maneuvers to remove me from the Board.

This is Penn State’s playbook, in a nutshell: place a high price tag on some trustee’s access to information while providing it free to others. Preventing access to information also means preventing meaningful and accurate deliberation of critical decisions. This would force a trustee who cared about performing their fiduciary duties to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to receive the information they were legally entitled to.

Penn State’s clear aim is to discourage myself and any other trustee from challenging the university’s refusal to share details, or risk financial ruin. They did exactly the same thing in the wake of the Sandusky Scandal by refusing trustee access to the information surrounding the Freeh Report. In that instance, several trustees took the Board and the university to court and Board leadership was compelled to not only provide that information, but to also indemnify the trustees for the massive legal expenses they incurred (see Ralph Cipriano’s legal blog, Big Trial, for excellent coverage).

And as you will read in the Petition, they didn’t bother to disguise the fact.

We are very fortunate to be represented by Attorney Steve Marino, who is also representing us in our case in federal court against Penn State. I will keep you posted.