I have no doubt that the great majority of Penn State alumni, even those only casually interested, would say the trustees did a poor job of dealing with the aftermath of the Sandusky, Curley and Schultz indictments. That's all too obvious. But that's a good distance from saying that passionate alumni anger will eviscerate Barron's tenure, as Mr. Levinson asserted.
And it will ultimately be up to the (new) trustees to fix what the (old) trustees broke. The University (if you mean Barron and senior execs) is not empowered to fix what the trustees broke. The Administration is subservient to the BoT, just like on every other college campus in the U.S.
Only university presidents who wish to be no longer employed can take public stances against their board. Barron might actually have vision and agenda for Penn State that have nothing to do with Sandusky, and he may actually want to prosecute that vision a while longer. It seems to me that Barron has already discovered, possibly to his great frustration, that he cannot get out in front of the Old Guard BoT as much as he might like. I would speculate that his promise to review the Freeh Report is one such example; that Barron would truly like to put the Freeh Report to the test, but Dunham and the OG trustees have privately explained to Barron that he must not (you pick your reason why).