Is Penn State A Real University? Part III of VII
Editor’s Note: Safeguard Old State is publishing online for the first time former Penn State Trustee Ben Novak’s original series, “Is Penn State A Real University?” The articles, exploring the founding and purpose of the Pennsylvania State University, originally appeared in State College, The Magazine throughout 1988 and 1989.
Is Penn State A Real University? — Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI · Part VII
This is the third in a series of articles exploring the question, “Is Penn State a Real University?” In the first article it was recalled how President Eric A. Walker had raised the question back in the 1960s. “What does a Penn State education really mean?” In the second article, we pursued a disquieting thought about the nature of a real University as advanced by John Henry Cardinal Newman in his classic work, The Idea of a University. In this article we will recount how that thought once took form at Penn State.
Newman had written that a real University comes into existence when a youthful community is brought together and given the proper impetus and opportunity. In effect, he said that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When you have a real University, you will be able to see it in the character and tone of the student body: then, he said, “the youthful community comes to constitute a whole, it will embody a specific idea.”
Penn State once had a magnificent tradition of student initiative which molded students into one of the most creative, innovative and successful student bodies in the nation. The Penn State student body once constituted a whole, and had both the impetus and opportunity to carry out a very specific idea.
The great strength of the Penn State student body had once been the recognition that a student received only half of a real college education in the classroom. This half was the responsibility of the faculty and the administration. The other half of a real college education was received outside the classroom. This second half was the responsibility of the students themselves to create. It led out of them every bit of their initiative and creativity, and enabled them to believe in themselves.
At Penn State this idea took very specific form as the idea of the “Two Colleges.” Wayland F. Dunaway, in his classic History of the Pennsylvania State College, described the “Two Colleges” concept this way:
“It has truly been said that there are two colleges on every campus — one of which is concerned with the course of study leading to graduation, while the other of which is made up of extracurricular activities…”
But extracurricular activities were not just “services” or entertainment or recreation. At Penn State, extracurricular activities were seen as vitally necessary. This was because the basic principle underlying the concept of the “Two Colleges” was that the “Extracurricular Activities College” was to take up the challenge of providing what the Board of Trustees or faculty could not provide in the “curricular college.” The real genius of the Penn State spirit for the first century of its existence was the magnificent side-by-side growth of these “Two Colleges.”
From early on it was known by student leaders that such an idea was going to entail sacrifice. But Penn State student leaders had always had a dream that Penn State was something greater than most of the administration and faculty would ever understand. One student expressed it this way 81 years ago:
“As long as a large proportion of our students, professors and townspeople are thinking and planning for their own selfish ends, our college is not going to grow into its rightful heritage…”
So student leaders undertook the challenge of the “Two Colleges” concept by always having a vision of Penn State which was greater than that of anyone else, and by always planning and organizing to achieve that greater vision. A quip from a student back in 1907 jarred more than one administrator’s complacency:
“We have a pretty fine old place here at Penn State, but there is always room for improvement, even in the Garden of Even Society.”
Let me recount, then, some of the stories of the accomplishments of Penn State students in quest of their always greater vision of Penn State.
For the first three decades or so of the Farmer’s High School, almost the entire “curricular college” at Penn State was comprised of courses teaching the most practical of skills. For some institutions this would have been enough. But not for Penn State students. Penn State students had a greater vision of Penn State, and thus could see what was not present. They immediately began to organize to provide those non-practical elements of a college education which they felt to be missing. Indeed, the students set out to provide their own liberal arts education.
Thus, the first and most important organizations at the beginning of Penn State were the Washington and Cresson Literary Societies. These societies maintained their own reading rooms, and even created their own, quite large, libraries. Dunaway records that the societies’ libraries were so large that they “substantially augmented the College Library.” Dunaway also records the excitement which the challenge of these societies provided to students:
“The principal social event of the week was a meeting of the Literary Society on Friday evening at 7:00 o’clock; and as the hour approached, an air of expectancy seemed to permeate everywhere and to invest the meeting with an interest that the students of the present day…would find it hard to understand.”
By the 1890s, the administration and faculty began to catch up with the students’ vision. Language, literature, history and philosophy chairs were added to the curricular college by 1896. As a result, the need for the student literary societies began to recede.
But the College was growing and with that growth came new needs for the student spirit of the “Extracurricular Activities College” to meet.
For a period of about four decades, from the late 1880s to the late 1920s, the main challenge and function of the “College of Extracurricular Activities” was the construction of housing for Penn State students. Penn State was growing during this period from about 250 students in 1887 to over 4,000 students by 1929. The Trustees, however, had nowhere near enough funds for student dormitories. Where, then, was this increase in students to be housed?
The students took up the challenge to build the housing to support this growth themselves. As with the literary societies, the dedication and involvement generated by the students matched the depth of the challenge they faced.
It was an incredible feat of accomplishment. The students built housing for several thousand students when there were no government programs, no Student Services Office, and none of the helps which are available today. The students had little but their personal determination, their spirit and their loyalty. But with that, and with almost nothing but that, they built 57 dormitories in downtown State College in the form of fraternity houses over a period of less than 40 years.
Those fraternity houses were an essential necessity for the growth of Penn State. They are monuments to a special Penn State spirit, and they still stand as some of the most beautiful buildings in all of State College.
The students had little to build them with. What they had, however, was a college spirit that bankers were willing to bank on. Hardheaded bankers counted on ties of brotherhood and loyalty so strong and deep that these organizations could be expected to last for the next quarter century and still be around when the last payments on the mortgages were due.
At Penn State there was such spirit and loyalty. In a college publication of 1907 it was boasted, “No college in the world possesses a more ideal environment for the development of the Truest College Life and the Loyalist College Spirit, and we have them both.”
Mortgages and loans were granted on the strength of that. It was reported in the 1926 Penn State Alumni News that fraternities were among the safest investments in America. Penn State’s “Extracurricular Activities College” had mastered another challenge — and had found new ways to embody a very specific spirit and make it pay off for Penn State.
From the period 1938 to 1955 comes one of the greatest stories of the “Two Colleges” at Penn State. By the late 1930s it became apparent that the campus needed a place for students to meet and for an even greater college spirit to grow. Students needed a student union building. The first Collegian editorial was published in 1938 calling for such a facility.
World War II intervened, but the call was taken up again after the war. The Board of Trustees, as usual, had no funds for students; only for classrooms and faculty salaries. The word came down once again: If this need were to be filled, the students would have to do it themselves.
The students took on the challenge as part of the “Extracurricular Activities College.” They worked with the Trustees to develop plans for the physical building, while at the same time the students set out to finance the structure themselves. By 1950, they had worked out the details of both.
The financing package was comprised of two parts. First was an insurance plan under which the student union fund was to receive a benefit from every insurance policy sold to students. The second part of the plan was a self-imposed “tax” on each student. In May of 1950, after a long campaign, the All-College Cabinet, representing all student organizations, voted to increase the student activities fee paid by every student by $15 for the first year, and $20 each successive year, to provide the rest of the funding for the building.
The Hetzel Union Building was eventually opened in late 1954, and the first official function held in it was the University’s centenary birthday celebration on February 22, 1955. What was phenomenal was that all the students who had voted to increase their own activities fee graduated long before the HUB was officially opened. But they saw a need and an opportunity to build a better Penn State spirit and they did not hesitate.
There were many other accomplishments of Penn State students in the first century of Penn State. They formed and ran the Book Exchange which became the Penn State Bookstore; students started the Spring Arts Festival which became the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts; students started the sports program, The Daily Collegian, Froth, The Inkling and dozens of other publications, and gave to this Valley its deepest spirit.
For more than a century the Penn State student body had a positive and constructive tradition of creativity and innovativeness. The students found the ways, time after time, to contribute mightily to the growth and development of Penn State. The youthful community at Penn State truly came, in Newman’s words, “to constitute a whole” and to embody the very specific idea of the “Two Colleges.”
However, in the past 25 years or so I have heard little discussion of the contributions that the student body once made to Penn State. The idea of the “Two Colleges” and “The Other Half” seem to have disappeared from public discourse, as completely as the question of what it means to be a real University.
The idea of a real University encompasses much more than simply the spirit of the student body. But in this age when many problems are presented as stereotypes, we often forget how deep and rich the texture of real institutions can be. Students once provided one of the richest and most colorful threads in the tapestry of the University. There are many other threads, and in future articles we will turn our attention to some of the other dimensions of that most wonderful institution ever created by the human mind: The University.
