For doctoral dissertations, the Graduate School requires students to authorize ProQuest, a for-profit company, to distribute their dissertations. So, if you are writing a doctoral thesis, you do need to get the rights from your publisher to authorize commercial distribution. If you explain that your institution requires this, that should help. If you run into trouble, contact the Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright for assistance.

For masters' theses, the Graduate School does not require students to license their theses to ProQuest. So, if you are writing a masters' thesis, you don't need to worry about this issue.

In either case, what you submit will be distributed via Penn State's electronic thesis and dissertation repository, which is noncommercial.