Penn State

  • I ordered a copy of The Collegian Chronicles years ago and was recently flipping through it. It’s a sort of history of Penn State from 1887 to 2006 through the pages of The Daily Collegian, the campus newspaper. Its dedication honors Ross Lehman, Class of 1941:

    Ross B. Lehman, executive director emeritus alumni association in Office of Student Affairs, from Feb. 1, 1948, until his retirement April 1, 1983; died Dec. 12, 2003 at the age of 85.

    Ross was one of the pillars of the State College/Penn State communities. He and his wife wrote a widely read Centre Daily Times column called “Open House” for decades, and like Joe and Sue Paterno he and his wife embodied some of the best aspects of the Penn State ethos. Skull and Bones at Penn State endowed an award in his honor:

    It is given annually to a freshman who exemplifies the ideals of Skull and Bones: unselfish service and leadership to the Penn State University community, and the elimination of false pride, excessive self-esteem and grand ideas of personal glory.

    A leadership award honoring virtues opposed to false pride, grand ideas of personal glory, etc. is somewhat distinctive now, isn’t it? Who talks like that any longer?

    The Collegian Chronicles is dedicated to Ross Lehman, and this bit stands out:

    While in captivity in a German prison hospital, Ross recalled awakening one morning to see “the most beautiful, indescribable patch of blue” sky. It was his moment of revelation. “I said to myself at that moment, ‘Each minute of life is an eternity, and it’s how that minute is lived, how acutely one perceives it and absorbs it within his being, that determines how much a man becomes a sun: he generates or he explodes.”

    Ross once advised: “Live nobly while you live. Tomorrow you may not die.”

    Tomorrow you may not die. A hard phrase, like a needle in the eye of the “live like each day is your last” sentimentalism that justifies doing basically whatever.

    I guess I’ll throw my chips in with the Ross Lehmans of the world, and try to be friends with those who do.

  • I think the Nittany Valley is a remarkable place, home to not only to Penn State, but also to special communities like State College, victorian Bellefonte, and scenic Lemont, the hamlet at Mount Nittany’s base. Michael Houtz, by the way, captured the heart of the Nittany Valley beautifully a few years ago in this early morning, fog-blanketed valley scene:

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    I’ve developed a love affair with the Nittany Valley, but I’m not from there—I’m from Bucks County, near Philadelphia. The two places share some similar characteristics: historic in their own ways, filled with farms and woodlands and rivers. But Bucks County has changed dramatically since I was a child. Its population has exploded in a suburbanized, sub-division way at the expense of many beauty places. Today in Bucks County there are 1,034 people per square mile. In Centre County there are 138 people per square mile.

    When I wrote Conserving Mount Nittany, one lesson was that conservation only works if people are prepared mentally and financially and communally to protect what they love. It’s why we protected Mount Nittany, but lost Hort Woods.

    Too many of the farms, fields, and quiet places of the Bucks County of my youth have gone missing. I’m glad that, even as Centre County’s population grows, it remains a comparatively homelike place to capture some of the spirit of a different time among the old farms north of Philadelphia.

    This is one of the reasons I think nostalgia lives in places like State College.

  • Ron Srigley writes a powerful indictment of the administrative class of the modern university. “Whose University Is It Anyway?” is a long, worthwhile, well-researched piece. And it resonates with much of my experience and frustrations of a decade ago at Penn State, and with the secondhand experience of my friends and family within college and university life. Places that were founded for the wide-ranging pursuit of knowledge as a good in itself, and the ability to recognize truth, virtue, etc. are now places run by an administrative class that’s less concerned with those inevitably unordered aims and more concerned with a culture of efficiency that brooks no critique that would threaten its own growth and development:

    Administrators control the modern university. The faculty have “fallen,” to use Benjamin Ginsberg’s term. It’s an “all-administrative” institution now. [1] Spending on administrators and administration exceeds spending on faculty, administrators out-number faculty by a long shot, and administrative salaries and benefit packages, particularly those of presidents and other senior managers, have skyrocketed over the last 10 years. Even more telling perhaps, students themselves increasingly resemble administrators more than professors in their ambitions and needs. Safety, comfort, security, quality services, first-class accommodations, guaranteed high grades, institutional brand, better job placements, the market value of the credential — these are the things one hears students demanding these days, not truth, justice, and intelligence. [2] The traditional language of “professors” and “students” still exists, though “service provider” and “consumer” are making serious bids to replace them. The principles of collegial governance and joint decision-making are still on the books, but they are no longer what the institution is about or how it works.

    The revolution is over and the administrators have won. But the persistence of traditional structures and language has led some to think that the fight over the institution is now just beginning. This is a mistake. As with most revolutions, open conflict occurs only after real power has already changed hands. In France, for instance, the bourgeoisie were able to seize control of the regime because in a sense they already had it. The same is true of the modern university. …

    Personally, I’m less strident than the activists but more active than the pessimists. My own proposal is thus old-fashioned but also mildly seditious: I suggest we think about this change in the university in order to reach some understanding of what it means. Then we can act as we see fit, though without any illusions about consequences.

    In order to do this I propose a test. A favorite trope among the administrative castes is accountability. People must be held accountable, they tell us, particularly professors. Well, let’s take them at their word and hold them accountable. How have they done with the public trust since having assumed control of the university? …

    In the traditional university, professors were “unaccountable.” The university was a sacred space where they were at liberty to pursue with students and colleagues their fields of inquiry without coercion or interference. This doesn’t mean they were free without qualification, of course. Professors were deeply accountable, but in a sense that went far beyond the reach, ambition, and perhaps even the interests of the administrative caste — they were accountable to discover and then to tell the truth, and to encourage their students to do the same. Assessing their abilities and accomplishments in this regard was a matter of judgment and so could not be quantified; it could be exercised only by those capable of it. A mechanism was therefore introduced to ensure this judgment was reached before the university committed to a faculty member permanently. After roughly 15 years of undergraduate and postgraduate study, and then a long period of careful professional observation and assessment, in most universities lasting five to six years, only those professors who proved themselves worthy were granted tenure and allowed to continue their teaching and research in pursuit of this beautiful goal

    Administrators, on the other hand, were always held accountable precisely because their responsibilities were administrative in nature and therefore amenable to measurement and regular public audit. They were responsible to ensure the activities of students and professors were not interfered with and to manage the institution’s financial affairs. They were, in this sense, stewards of the sacred space, not its rulers.

    In the contemporary university these roles have been reversed. Faculty members are the ones who are now accountable, but no longer to their peers and students and no longer regarding mastery of their subjects. Instead, they are accountable to administrators, who employ an increasingly wide array of instruments and staff to assess their productivity and measure their performance, all of which are now deemed eminently quantifiable. In place of judgment regarding the quality of their work we now have a variety of “outcomes” used as measures of worth. Student evaluations and enrollments (i.e., popularity), learning as determined by “rubrics,” quantity of publications, amount of research dollars, extent of social “impact” are the things that count now. In other words, only things you can quantify and none of which require judgment.

    The administrators who protested so vociferously the lack of accountability of professors have now assumed the position themselves. Administrators are virtually untouchable today. Their value to the institution is assumed to be so great that it cannot be measured and cannot be subject to critical assessment. This explains in part their metastatic growth within the institution. …

    Ask about virtually any problem in the university today and the solution proposed will inevitably be administrative. Why? Because we think administrators, not professors, guarantee the quality of the product and the achievement of institutional goals. But how is that possible in an academic environment in which knowledge and understanding are the true goals? Without putting too fine a point on it, it’s because they aren’t the true goals any longer. With the exception of certain key science and technology programs in which content proficiency is paramount, administrative efficiency and administrative mindedness are the true goals of the institution. …

    When it comes to the real mandate of the modern university, boards of governors, government, and industry are all in agreement. That mandate is well known to all of us who live and work within the non-ivied walls: more industry partnerships, more technology, more STEM subjects, more money for research and development in these areas, more administrative review bodies and measures, more students, more student services, and more student satisfaction. And because the administrative university is a zero-sum game, there is a reverse side to the mandate: fewer tenured faculty, less faculty control over curricula, fewer humanities and pure science programs, less support for humanities and pure science research, and the erosion of collegial governance.

    There is no serious debate about this mandate among the key players in the university administrative hierarchy, so the assertion that administrators are accountable to it in the way they insist faculty must be is a red herring. The administrators are the mandate. …

    If you think I overstate the consequences of this erosion of the university curriculum, consider the 2016 US presidential debates as barometers of the culture. Many people were horrified by the debates, regardless of partisan interests. But if you want to appreciate the full extent of the horror and understand just how far we’ve fallen, watch the first ever televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960. The extent of our new barbarism becomes immediately apparent in the contrast and it’s quite a shock, and this without even claiming that Kennedy and Nixon were themselves in any way high-water marks of political culture. If you think this decline has nothing to do with the decline of genuine liberal arts education, through which students are taught to think deeply and meaningfully about the real human problems of government, justice and reason, and the rise of the all-administrative university in which they are not, think again. As one Canadian university president I know said to a colleague who had expressed an interest in Montesquieu’s political thought, “Why study him? He’s dead.” So much for history. So much for political wisdom. And so much for magnanimity and breadth of understanding. We now have intellectual philistines settling the matter of what our children need to know. Where in this miasma of deculturation will they ever find an image of a genuine statesperson or citizen or of a truly just human being? Nowhere, if the modern administrative university has its way. …

    Four areas of the all-administrative university stand out for comment: students, the university curriculum, university governance, and administrative salaries.

    If you speak with university officials, you’ll tend to find that the ones who speak with the most confidence and least apprehension are administrators. And that’s how you can tell where the real power resides in that university, because those with power tend to be confident and self-assured. Right up until they’ve lost it.

  • Here’s something I wrote a few years ago for Onward State:

    In “The Legends of the Nittany Valley,” folklorist Henry Shoemaker records some of the American Indian and settler stories that provide a cultural and historical foundation for Penn State mythology, including Mount Nittany as our sacred symbol and pristine retreat, the love story of Princess Nittany and Lion’s Paw, and even the reclusive Nittany Lion.

    Yet stories alone have no independent life to speak of; their significance grows from the affection, tenderness, and patience of the reader, from the moments spent in solitude or near friends with the words of a long-dead peer over a coffee at Saints or W.C. Clarke’s. Herodotus or Dante would be nothing without the gift of time and attention paid in gratitude by the living reader. It’s through that gift that we reverence something culturally significant, and make something from the past a part of our present time.

    This is what tradition is, if distilled: the continuing act of encountering the past, helping it come alive again in some way, and then in due course becoming a part of the past ourselves as we look to the future. This beautiful notion is encapsulated in an even more beautiful, practical example: The singing of Robert Burns’s 1788 “Auld Lang Syne” every New Year’s Eve. It’s a literal and lyrical Scottish injunction to remember our friendships and honor days gone by on the eve of a new time.

    This helps explain why Mount Nittany, by all accounts an ordinary Pennsylvania mountain, is nonetheless sacred for Penn Staters and the people of the valley. As with the stories of the past, we’ve infused the Mountain with a distinctive meaning. Penn State Professor Simon Bronner writes that we “inspirit the land” of Mount Nittany and places like it. We do this in a thousand distinct ways, through hikes alone to learning and sharing the same stories to nights spent with friends around a small fire.

    The Mount Nittany Conservancy is what makes our experience of the Mountain possible—specifically what makes our experience of it as a natural space, protected from development, a perpetual part of the Nittany Valley experience. Even if you’ve never heard of Henry Shoemaker, and aren’t inclined to pick up his stories, the Mount Nittany Conservancy has made it possible to encounter a bit of the legend, mythology, and history of the Mountain through two new podcasts. The first, “Mount Nittany in Myth and Legend,” is a digestible seven minutes and is concerned with origins:

    The second podcast, “The Story of Mount Nittany,” is a meditative 40-minute encounter with the reason the origin stories matter. In it, we hear from the people who conserve the Mountain for all to enjoy, from personalities as varied as Nittany Lion’s letterman Bob Andronici and student-volunteers combating erosion, to trailblazer Tom Smyth recounting decades of history (at 13:30), to Vince Verbeke’s “wayfinding stations” (18:21), to Penn State Arboretum director Kim Steiner’s insight on Mountain forestry (21:25), to Mount Nittany Conservancy founder Ben Novak’s experience of the “ordinary” Mountain (24:04), vision for land acquisition (28:08), and creation of square-inch deeds (31:55), to Bob Frick’s experience with less-preserved mountains (25:30), to Ben Bronstein’s historical markers (26:15), to Sue Paterno’s reflection on the Mountain (32:37) and Coach Joe Paterno’s affection for Mount Nittany as one on the Mount Nittany Conservancy’s inaugural board. Bob Frick, a Mount Nittany Conservancy board member, served as the executive producer of these podcasts, which were co-produced with WPSU’s Katie O’Toole and Patty Satalia.

    Nearly a century before many of us were born, Henry Shoemaker declared: “There is no spot of ground a hundred feet square in the Pennsylvania mountains that has not its legend. Some are old, as ancient as the old, old forests. Others are of recent making or in formation now. Each is different, each is full of its own local color.”

    Mount Nittany is one of those Pennsylvania mountains, and the Nittany Valley remains a place where legends continue to take shape. Thanks to Henry Shoemaker’s stories, and the Mount Nittany Conservancy’s new podcasts, you can get a better sense for why the Mountain matters and why hiking it is such a special experience.

    Hiking Mount Nittany” is one of those things that finds its way onto the Penn State bucket lists of most students, and it’s something many make a ritual pleasure. A single hike often serves as an occasion for encounter with “local color” of the Mountain and the valley, a color which has a radiance that outlasts every autumn.

  • Who was Henry Shoemaker?

    In speaking to Penn State students earlier this month on “Inspiriting Mount Nittany,” I mentioned Henry W. Shoemaker, Pennsylvania’s first folklorist. I thought I’d share a bit more about him, because his life was remarkable not only in Pennsylvania history, but for its lessons about the value of human beings sharing stories with one another and how whole cultures can be stronger and more remarkable as a result.

    Shoemaker wasn’t just Pennsylvania’s first folklorist. He was also a prolific journalist, and Progressive-Era friend of people like Teddy Roosevelt. He’s most remembered for his many volumes of American Indian folk stories and legends collected throughout Pennsylvania. Shoemaker preserved settler-versions of what were claimed to be some of the last surviving oral stories of the American Indians of Pennsylvania—the Lenni Lenape, the Iroquois, Shawnee, Susquehannock, Tuscarora, Oneida, and others.

    A few of his more well known collections include Juniata Memories: Legends Collected in Central Pennsylvania, Black Forest Souvenirs, Allegheny Episodes, Susquehanna Legends, and Penn’s Grandest Cavern. Simon J. Bronner, a Penn State professor, wrote a biography of Shoemaker in 1996 called Popularizing Pennsylvania: Henry W. Shoemaker and the Progressive Uses of Folklore and History.

    It’s at least in part thanks to Henry Shoemaker that the world knows the “Nittany Lions” of Penn State, and that we know of the Indian legend of Princess Nita-Nee. A few years ago I helped Nittany Valley Press compile a special collection of the folk stories and legends specifically pertaining to the area of Central Pennsylvania where Penn State is located. The book is called The Legends of the Nittany Valley, and is a small way we hope to perpetuate not only the stories themselves, but also memory of Shoemaker and other American folklorists incredible efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to perpetuate a spirit and feeling for the American Indians who we so thoroughly wiped away from their historic homes.

    When I was initially learning about Shoemaker, I particularly liked this language used to describe him and his work:

    In many ways, Henry W. Shoemaker (1880-1958) embodies the spirit of the Progressive movement in America. A prominent reformist newspaper publisher in Pennsylvania, he used his wealth and position inherited from industrialism to promote the preservation of America’s wilderness and native cultures. He fell in with such national leaders as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, who hoped to rekindle a rugged American nationalism. He became America’s first State Folklorist and a pioneer of national conservation. Shoemaker’s consuming passion was for preserving the cultural and natural heritage of his home state. He authored hundreds of pamphlets and books on Pennsylvania’s nature, history, and folklore. Today his memory lives on in the legends he helped promote…

    Ken Poorman also provides a convenient snapshot of Shoemaker’s most notable achievements:

    • Newspaper publisher, author, folklorist, raconteur, diplomat
    • Mobilized interest and public funding to preserve historic and natural heritage
    • Leading conservationist, promoter of state parks
    • Romanticizer and popularizer of folktales, legends, and history
    • First official Folklorist in America
    • Director of Pennsylvania Historical Commission
    • Responsible for planting thousands of historical markers
    • Connection with Juniata through serving on M.G. Brumbaugh’s staff in Harrisburg
    • For many years after 1930 conducted pilgrimages to MGB’s grave near Lake Raystown

    Despite pioneering folklore as an interest of Pennsylvania government as a means of “inspiriting the land” and cultivating civic pride and common experiences in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic America, folklorists who’ve come along since tend to look down their noses at Shoemaker and his contemporaries, like Katharine Berry Judson in the Pacific Northwest or William W. Canfield in New York.

    Shoemaker opens himself to the criticism of contemporary folklorists because he injected too much of his own voice and his own era’s sensibilities into lots of his folklore. This has led to the charge that Shoemaker simply wrote all of the folklore himself. I’m far from convicted that Shoemaker created all of his folklore. Even if true, it would mean that he was incredibly creative and prolific, deserving of honor in and of itself. But more to the point, he frequently cites people he spoke with on trips throughout Pennsylvania and discloses the towns and places he heard stories, and thanks specific people by name. If all of this was purely fictional, in other words, practically everyone would have known it at the time. And the historical record doesn’t seem to bare that out.

    In any event, the nature of oral stories and tradition is that the details of the folklore tend to change with almost every telling even while the stories attempt to retain the essence of their narrative. That’s what oral tradition is: the histories and stories of people passed down by the person-to-person telling. I wish Shoemaker interjected less of his generation’s own attitudes, biases, etc. into many of the stories. But it’s still easy and worthwhile to read them and enjoy them for what they are: fantastic stories that might just reach back into the earliest human stories and experiences of Pennsylvania shared by American Indian peoples, who we can still try to honor as our cultural ancestors.

    The photo above shows Henry Shoemaker at Restless Oaks in 1913 with “Ramsden Rex,” his “English-bred Russian wolfhound.” I think the Juniata College Archives has the original version of this photo.

  • Founders Day

    Today is Founders Day at Penn State, when students, alumni, and townspeople celebrate figures like Evan and Rebecca Pugh, Frederick Watts, James Irvin, George Atherton, and so many others who figured prominently in the creation of what became Pennsylvania’s land grant university. I’m not in State College, but I shot this clip of Old Main in steady rain when I was in town on February 14th for my “Inspiriting Mount Nittany” talk. It’s a scene any Penn Stater would be familiar with:

    Tonight Chris Buchignani will be speaking about the essence of cultural conservation, and some of the remarkable stories of Happy Valley over the generations as part of Lion Ambassador’s event:

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  • I spoke to the University Park Undergraduate Association, the student government at Penn State, on Wednesday, February 14 (Ash Wednesday) on Mount Nittany’s significance and historical conservation efforts:

    As part of the talk, I presented the students with a Square Inch Life Estate Deed to Mount Nittany. Life Estate Deeds are available through the Mount Nittany Conservancy, and are a true, legal square inch deed recorded in the Centre County Office of the Recorder of Deeds.

    To learn more of the Mountain’s history and significance, be sure to read Conserving Mount Nittany: A Dynamic Environmentalism or listen to the audiobook version for free.

    It was a fun talk, even though it was incredibly difficult to pack much of the substance and depth of either the folkloric or practical conservation efforts of Mount Nittany into what was roughly a 12 minute presentation. There was so much that I didn’t have time to address, particularly the relationship between Mount Nittany and Hort Woods, and some of the more interesting aspects of the “Magic of Mount Nittany” fundraising campaign of the 1980s and the narrative of the Princess Nittany legends themselves. But that’s what the book is for.

    Since I served in UPUA, it has developed for the better. I’d guess there were at least 70 people in attendance. (We were sometimes lucky to meet quorum requirements to even conduct meetings in the first year.) I stayed for the entire meeting, and heard about their campus and community initiatives which each seemed to be positive and important for building a better Penn State.

  • UPUA Alumni Weekend

    As a sophomore at Penn State, I served in the University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA)’s First Assembly. The UPUA, Penn State’s student government, was reorganized in that year—though student government at Penn State originated sometime around 1910, though I forget the precise date.

    This year’s 12th Assembly organized the first UPUA Alumni Weekend, and it provided an enjoyable chance to reunite with so many friends and faces from more than a decade ago, and to connect with today’s Penn Staters and discover what they’re working on and what sort of people they are.

    I was very proud of UPUA, for instance, for just having achieved a revision to Penn State’s medical amnesty policy, ensuring that neither impaired students who need medical attention, nor their friends or bystanders who call for assistance, will be subject to prosecution. That’s a humane approach to an issue that impacts many, and it’s something I hope Pennsylvania adopts as law across the commonwealth.

    Also visited The LION 90.7fm studios before heading to the Nittany Lion Inn for the UPUA Alumni Weekend’s closing dinner and remarks by Gavin Keirans, Vice President for Student Affairs Damon Sims, and others:

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    It was a good weekend. I’m not sure I’ll be attending these alumni weekends in the future, except sporadically, but I’m grateful that they’re happening.

  • I wrote earlier this year soliciting audio, memories, items, etc. from Penn State’s student broadcasting alumni for a growing permanent archive, and more recently on the news of Penn State’s “Student Broadcasting” historical marker placed in from of Pattee/Paterno Library just before the start of the fall semester. I also visited the old WDFM headquarters in Sparks Building and made a short video of the Student Broadcasting marker for those who can’t visit it in person.

    Why do I think Penn State student broadcasting still matters in a world where content can be created and consumed instantaneously? Why does The LION 90.7fm—the heir to WPSC, WDFM, and WPSU—still matter for Penn State students?

    For the reason I shared with Penn State News earlier this year: “While it’s a fact that student broadcasting has always been made possible by technology, its true power has always been in empowering the human voice.”

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    What The LION 90.7fm does, and what its predecessors we honor did in years past, is provide a specific place where young people and community members can come together and truly learn from each other. It provides a place where the human voice can be fine tuned, where a Penn Stater can learn how to speak in a way that’s compelling and to earn the attention of a potentially indifferent audience. It provides an extracurricular sort of classroom for learning about how to be a positive public citizen along with a few dozen other Penn Staters. And it provides a place for students to share great music, the news and life of the community, and the spirit of each class with anyone who might want to hear. It’s a place that reminds us that what we say, and the things we create, matter to a whole community and can change lives, careers, and influence others in all sorts of unexpected and unplanned, positive ways.

    We’ve wanted to support Penn State student broadcasters for a long time. It always amazed me that, despite a history dating to the Senior Gift of the Class of 1912 that enabled the first student radio experiments, there has never been a formal scholarship to support students involved with student broadcasting.

    That changed when Mike Walsh, an alumnus of The LION 90.7fm, came to me not long ago and committed $25,000 toward a necessary $50,000 to create the first permanent annual scholarship for Penn State student broadcasters. Thanks to Mike’s gift, I signed the paperwork committing the Penn State Media Alumni Interest Group to raise that remaining $25,000 no later than June 30, 2019. I’ve been confident that alumni will step up with contributions of all sizes to help us reach this goal, and I’m writing now to ask if you’ll be one who steps up and makes a gift before the end of this year.

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    We’ve already raised ~$7,500 of the remaining $25,000, and we’re aiming to raise a final ~$2,000 by December 31st. Next year, we’re aiming to raise ~$8,500. That would leave ~$7,500 to raise in 2019 and ensure we reach our $50,000 goal to make this scholarship permanent.

    Even better, Penn State will double match the annual scholarship available to members of The LION 90.7fm, which means that by helping us reach this $50,000 goal, an annual ~$7,200 in scholarship assistance will be available for Penn State student broadcasters going forward, every year.

    I only write to appeal for gifts like this once per year, and now is that time for this year. Will you make a gift today (or later this month) to help us raise our remaining $2,000 goal before December 31st?

    Make a one time, tax deductible gift here, or consider signing up as a recurring scholarship donor directly through Penn State.

    As alums of WPSC, WDFM, WPSU, WKPS, or any of the old residence hall stations, I think we have some duty to the students of today who’ve followed in our footsteps to make life better for them than it was for us. To make Penn State just a little bit better by building up student broadcasters and making it better than we found it.

    That’s ultimately what I’m asking you to consider, if you’re in a position to make a gift.

  • Mount Nittany and Joab Thomas

    I’ve been spending some time recently on scanning and digitizing a few boxes worth of early Mount Nittany Conservancy archives that Ben Novak provided to me. As the Mount Nittany Conservancy’s founder and first president, Ben was instrumental not only in the organization’s major land preservation and fundraising efforts throughout the 1980s and early 1990s that we covered in Conserving Mount Nittany, but also in creating and promoting the distinctive “Square Inch” Life Estate Deeds, which provide a true, legal square inch of Mount Nittany for the life of the donor—recorded with the Centre County Recorder of Deeds—in exchange for a beautiful, framed deed certificate.

    Over the course of these scanning and archival efforts, a number of prominent Penn Staters and State College names appear, including Dr. Joab Thomas and his wife. Dr. Thomas was Penn State’s president from 1990-1995, and he and his wife ordered their Square Inch in the early 1990s:

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