Is Penn State A Real University? Part VI 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
The newspaper this morning reported that The Daily Collegian has been asked to leave campus. “The Penn State University student newspaper wasn’t exactly kicked out of its offices in the Carnegie Building, but,” nonetheless, reported the Centre Daily Times, the Collegian was informed “that it would have to move out.”
Thus we were told on the Saturday before Labor Day that the voice of Penn State’s student body will no longer make its home on the Penn State campus. It will be moving instead into a remodeled automobile dealership building in downtown State College.
The reason that Penn State’s student newspaper is being asked to move off campus is an example of supreme irony. “The reason for the proposed move,” according to James R. Dungan, director of University Facilities Management, “is the growth of the School of Communications.”
Who would have thought that the creation of a school of “communications” would have resulted in the removal from campus of the only real means of communicating among Penn State’s student body?
The Collegian is being asked to vacate campus because of a need for faculty office space. This need is caused, according to Director Dungan, “mainly by pressure from students who want to major in the communications field.”
Who would have thought that an increasing number of journalism students would have resulted in the removal from campus of their best chance to get hands-on experience in their field? It is like removing the chemistry laboratories from campus because an increasing number of students want to student chemistry.
Actually, common sense would suggest that if there were no student newspaper on campus, a school of communications would have gone about creating one as its first task.
BUt we have a new school of communications founded only three years ago. And it hass a new spirit. Under outstanding leadership it has grown and prospered. Last fall there were 1,250 communications majors. This fall 600 new students paid tuition to study journalism. Business is booming; the student newspaper must go.
There is sufficient irony in that to last a lifetime. But the story does not end there; it then becomes part of a much larger tragedy.
The Daily Collegian is not the first major student organization to feel the sting of the modern trend to drive student organizations off campus and out of the University. Two years ago The Daily Collegian reported on an earlier one:
“The University’s decision to ‘sever relations’ with Greek organizations is one reason the assistant director of student organizations and program development said she will leave her position.”
Gayle Beyers, a nationally-known fraternity expert, quit Penn State’s office of student affairs saying, “The University said it does not want to work with fraternities.” This occurred, Beyers said, when “The University redefined entirely their relations with Greek organizations last Spring Semester (1986).” Pat Conway, the IFC President, summed up what had happened in these words: “The University simply closed the door on everything concerning Greeks,” according to The Daily Collegian.
What we are seeing is the eradication of any student presence on the Penn State campus, except students as paying customers.
In the two and a half years since the spring of 1986, we have seen two of Penn State’s most important organizations cut out of the heart of the Penn State campus. But they are not the firs, nor are they the only major expressions of student life and vitality which have been surgically removed.
The Penn State Book Exchange (“BX”) was once run entirely by a board of five students. During that time as many as 120 students were employed and the school supplies for thousands of students were all ordered by a student. I served as store manager one year, and as purchasing agent the next. The “BX” was one of the best learning experiences I had at Penn Sate. But the “BX” was taken over by the administration and is now no longer a student-run bookstore. It is a big business today, and students have no place in it except as paying customers.
The student radio station, WPSU, is another example of a lost student activity. Not long ago the administration hired a full-time, non-student manager. No doubt WPSU will be better and more professional according to some abstract national standard. But it will no longer be the voice of Penn State students.
I hardly need to mention the loss of class identity at Penn State. Students now identify themselves with numbered semesters, and class spirit is all but unknown. One all but weeps at the impoverishment of freshman students who will never know the camaraderie born of being molded into a class by sophomores who experienced it the year before.
The death of student life and responsibility at Penn State is tragic. It is tragic for two reasons.
First, it is tragic because with it comes the death of the “Two Colleges” idea at Penn State. I have previously written about this in the July issue of State College, the magazine.
According to Wayland Dunaway, every student who came to Penn State had the benefit of two college educations, “one of which is concerned with the course of student leading to graduation, while the other of which is made up of extra-curricular activities.”
As more and more studenet activities are expelled from campus, cut-off from the University or taken over as administration-run businesses, students are losing out on half of their real college education.
The half of a college education which once took place in extracurricular activities once gave life to the other half of a college life which took place in the classroom. Without the “Extra-Curricular Activities College,” it is like trying to clap with just one hand.
It was extracurricular life that molded the spirit and feelings for Penn State which today the University is cashing in on so handsomely for the Campaign for Penn State. Bill Rothwell never tires of pointing out that over one-half of the Penn State Alumni Association membership consists of fraternity and sorority members even though they account for only about one alumnus out of every five.
Therefore, the loss of the “Two Colleges” and extracurricular life at Penn State is a tragedy for the educational process and a tragedy for the future growth of Penn State.
But the demise of student life and responsibility at Penn State is tragic for a second and perhaps much deeper and more important reason. For with that demise comes the eclipse of one of the most important parts of our Founders’ vision of Penn State.
As I wrote in the last installment in this series (September, 1988), Penn State was founded on a principle which was different from that of all the other colleges in America. It furnished a dynamic which propelled Penn State from its founding as the Farmer’s High School to the great University it is today. The Founders never doubted that it would propel Penn State someday to surpass even Harvard, Yale and Princeton in the esteem of the world.
That principle was, as all really great principles are, simple but deep. It can be expressed in a few words. It is that “education, to be profitable, must be put into practice.”
What this simple principle meant was that students were to be not simply the passive recipients of knowledge. They were not simply to have knowledge poured into their heads. They were not simply to seek a degree in order to get a job.
On the contrary, the Founders’ principle meant that students were to be engaged while learning. And this engagement was to take place not only in the laboratories and agricultural fields, but in their building up of a “special community.” For the object in the mind of Justin Smith Morrill, the author of the Morrill Land-Grant Act, “was not to secure resources, merely; but to build a new type of citizenship.”
Penn State students were challenged from Day One not simply to achieve good grades in formal courses, but to establish the new institutions, organizations, forms and ways proper to citizenship in a new community. As Dean Erwin Runkle records, “There is no equivocation here, the institution was…an experiment of democracy in self-education.”
“A new type of citizenship…” and “an experiment of democracy in self-education.” These were the real dynamics behind Penn State’s growth. Everything that Penn State lacked in funds throughout its early years was made up for by this idea. This was the dream of the Founders. Penn State was, wrote Dr. Benjamin Gill, truly an institution “Moulded by an idea.”
This idea of what a real University meant was shared by our Founders with John Henry Newman’s idea for the foundation of a real University in this sense: to both Newman and our Founders, the students were the heart and soul of a real University; there was no “heart and soul” in the dry-as-dust teaching of formal courses.
At a real University, wrote Newman, when the student body comes together “it will constitute a whole, it will embody a specific idea.” This was the same idea given to Penn Staters by our Founders. Students were to create and develop a new type of citizenship; a democracy in self-education. They were challenged to create the whole “other half” of their college education, and to go forth from Penn State with much more than booklearning and scientific formulas in their heads. They were to come to Penn State as they came to “childhood’s gate,” and they were to be molded into men and women with “hands-on” experience in making things happen and creating new ways to work together. This they did, not by sitting in classrooms, but by publishing newspapers, humor magazines, and journals; building fraternity houses and the student union; creating football teams and bookstores and radio stations, and by holding events throughout the year for alumni and townspeople and the whole University to enjoy.
Today the Fraternities are severed, the Collegian expelled, the radio station and the “BX” now taken over, classes gone, and the student life which was so much a part of the Founders’ vision is all but extinguished.
More than three-quarters of a century ago the Valedictorian of the Class of 1911, William Raymond Rhoads, on the 50th Anniversary of Penn State’s first graduating class, addressed an assembly of students and alumni with these words:
“We are evolving from the little college of the past to the big university of the future. Will the traditions and customs of our college be safely carried from one to the other? All depends upon you. Customs will change and decay but traditions will live forever. Learn the early history of our college, study its growth, preserve the college spirit and the old college traditions and hand them down to future college generations, untarnished and strong.”
What shall we say to William Raymond Rhoads 77 years later? Is the experiment over, the “Two Colleges” dead, the Founders’ vision extinguished? Did we fail to bring Penn State safely through to the future? Did we stop learning the early history of our college?
I can think of a few things that we might say to William Raymond Rhoads in 1988. We can say: there are many who are still thrilled by the early history of our college; many who are still inspired by the Founders’ vision. We can say to him that the “Two Colleges” will find new ways to take root at Penn State, and that the great experiment is still capturing imaginations. We can say: Penn State spirit and traditions will never die.
