HARRISBURG— The story being told by former Penn State president Graham Spanier as he defends himself against accusations that he covered up a sex abuse allegation runs contrary into his own reputation as a detail-oriented manager.

But experts in university governance also suggest that if Spanier truly didn’t know what was going on, he showed a willful ignorance and a disturbing lack of curiosity about a scandal that stood to ruin Penn State’s reputation.

In a series of interviews this week, Spanier and his lawyers have repeatedly portrayed him as on the sidelines, completely unaware that complaints about former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky were serious enough to warrant more attention.

The governance experts acknowledge the job of president requires dealing with a continual stream of problems, but they are raising doubts that Spanier took a less than active role in investigating the scandal that engulfed two of his top lieutenants and longtime football coach Joe Paterno.

“You can say I didn’t know. ... You can say they didn’t tell me — up to a point,” said Stephen Trachtenberg, who spent three decades as president at the University of Hartford and George Washington University.

“But from what we have heard about what transpired, his vice president, his director of athletics, his coaches allegedly were concealing this bad news from him for such an extensive period of time that I find the story implausible,” he said.

Sandusky was convicted of various criminal counts in June for both of those encounters, as well as child sexual abuse of eight other boys. He awaits sentencing.

Spanier has not been charged with any crimes, but athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz are expected to go to trial in January on charges they lied to a grand jury about the scandal and did not properly report the 2001 accusation to authorities.

Spanier told ABC the 2001 case was only characterized as “horseplay.”

Even that should have raised red flags, said Mary Gray, an American University math and statistics professor with an expertise in university governance.

“I would think if I was the university president, I would ask, ‘What do you mean by horsing around?”’ said Gray.

An investigation led by former federal judge and FBI director Louis Freeh turned up an e-mail from Spanier to Curley that seemed to agree with a decision not to alert authorities to the 2001 complaint.