HARRISBURG — Former Penn State President Graham Spanier’s success this week in getting his child-endangerment conviction overturned capped a seven-year fight to save his reputation and stay out of jail, a period during which he has been richly compensated by the university he once ran.

Spanier no longer has an office on campus and is not teaching, but he still collects a salary as a tenured professor on administrative leave. Penn State won’t say what it pays him, and the school is largely exempt from the state open records law.

What is known is that Spanier collected several million dollars from the school in the years immediately after his ouster as president in 2011.

Hours before he was to report to jail to serve two months, a federal judge late Tuesday threw out his misdemeanor conviction for failing to tell police or child-welfare authorities of an eyewitness’ account in 2001 that Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach, was abusing a boy in a team shower.

The judge said Spanier, 70, should not have been charged for 2001 actions under revisions to the law enacted in 2007, and gave prosecutors three months to retry him. On Wednesday, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro said he would appeal.

Spanier’s lawyers said there’s no evidence Spanier was personally told children were being sexually abused.

The scandal led Penn State to fire coach Joe Paterno two months before he died, and has cost the school more than a quarter-billion dollars in settlements, fines and costs.