Merck’s Kenneth Frazier to Head Up Penn State Investigation

Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier will chair Penn State’s special investigation committee charged with investigating the “failures” that occurred at the school surrounding sexual abuse allegations against a former football coach.

Penn State’s board announced Frazier’s appointment today. “The committee will undertake a full and complete investigation of the circumstances that gave rise to the grand jury report [warning: graphic content],” the announcement says. “The committee will be commissioned to determine what failures occurred, who is responsible and what measures are necessary to ensure that this never happens again.”

Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach, was indicted last weekend on charges of child sex abuse over 15 years, as the WSJ reported.

Since then there has been much discussion of who at the university knew what and when about the alleged incidents. On Wednesday night, the board announced that the president of the university, Graham Spanier, would step down and its longtime football coach, Joe Paterno, was out.

Frazier is a trustee of the university and received his bachelor’s degree there. Yesterday, the WSJ’s Jonathan Rockoff and Dow Jones Newswires’ Peter Loftus caught up with Frazier at a Merck event and asked him about the situation at his alma mater.

Frazier said it’s been a “terribly sad time” for the university, its alumni and students. “I will say that I think the board took steps they thought were in best interest of the university over the long term,” he said. “It?s a great and principled institution and I believe it has a bright future ahead.”

Frazier is a Harvard-educated attorney who is no stranger to handling high-profile cases.

As the WSJ reported when he was named CEO last year, Frazier “made his name at Merck as the lawyer who masterminded the pharmaceutical company’s strategy of defending the pain drug Vioxx by fighting every case separately instead of as a joint action. Controversial at the time, that strategy is now seen as having minimized Merck’s losses and drawn an aggressive line against suits in an industry worried about legal liabilities.”

Update: This post has been updated with previous comment from Frazier on the situation at Penn State and with a shorter headline.

Hat tip: NPR

Photo: Bloomberg News