College Student, 19, Elected Mayor of Oklahoma City of 38,000 (AP) May 14, 2008 — A 19-year-old first-year student at the University of Oklahoma was elected mayor Tuesday of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state.

With all precincts reporting, John Tyler Hammons won with 70 percent of the vote over former Mayor Hershel Ray McBride, said Muskogee County Election Board Secretary Bill Bull.

“The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling and most awesome experience I’ve ever had in my life,” said Hammons, who is from Muskogee but attends the university in Norman.

The two candidates squared off in a runoff election for the nonpartisan post after neither secured 50 percent of the vote in a six-person election April 1.

…

The mayor leads the nine-member city council and serves as a voting member. Hammons said a key to his platform that resonated with voters was openness of government and keeping citizens better informed of city operations.

“I think that’s been a detriment to the trust of the citizens of Muskogee,” he said. “Once we have that trust, we can solve any other problem.”

This story makes it clear that Muskogee and State College are not identical, for certain, but it continues to reinforce the point that college students are capable to lead. After all, if the average age of admission to Princeton at the time of the American Revolution was 13, then certainly 19 year olds can do their part to lead in thier communities, if they can earn the public’s trust.

Are College Degrees a Waste of Money? (NPR) May 12, 2008 — Author and career coach Marty Nemko argues that when kids are not adequately prepared for college, they are simply wasting their time and money on four years of college-level course work. “College is a wise choice for far fewer people than are currently encouraged to consider it,” he writes in his article, America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree.

The majority of students entering college today are unprepared, Nemko explains, “When you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.”

Click here to listen to the interview for yourself. Nemko says with force what few others are saying about higher education in America today. His articles and website are both worth your time, especially if you’re a regular reader of Safeguard Old State and appreciate the extent to which schools like Penn State have shirked their mission as land-grant institutions.

America’s Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor’s Degree (The Chronicle) — Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it’s not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

This brings us back to a central, recurring question at Safeguard Old State: what is the purpose of higher education? Are we merey components in a system, being readied to serve the military-industrial complex, as the multiversity mentality argues, or are we here in the halls of higher education for a greater, more important reason?

If we can answer this question, it will surely become easier to solve the problem of endless cost increases from tuition and fees at our land-grant university.

Alumni Group Leads By Example (CDT) April 28 — The Penn State Alumni Association wanted, in the words of its executive director, Roger Williams, “to step up and exert leadership by example.” It did.

Last week, in response to the ever-escalating cost of attending the most expensive public university in the country, the association pledged $2.1 million to establish 35 scholarships based on financial need.

Alumni wanted to “make sure they were doing something to profoundly ease the burden of cost on students on their families,” Williams explained.

But as generous and commendable as the alumni association’s gift is, it represents the proverbial drop in a very large bucket — and a leaky bucket, at that.

But other groups within the Penn State community are also stepping up with some much-needed water in the form of scholarship money to financially parched students.

In February, the Penn State Faculty Senate announced that it will endow faculty-sponsored scholarships for undergraduates.

These efforts are part of the For the Future campaign designed, according its mission statement, “to increase scholarship support to keep a Penn State education affordable for all families.”

That is, after all, the purpose of a land-grant university.

…

We hope university officials will also take a good look at the bucket and apply a few patches where appropriate.

Isn’t it telling of the state of affairs at Penn State under President Spanier that it’s the faculty and alumni who are left carrying the water when it comes to the stunning cost of education at Pennsylvania’s land-grant university? Why should it fall to the faculty and alumni to find ways to mitigate the enormous cost of our tuition (which has more than doubled in the past ten years alone) when it was the administration’s profligate, unchecked spending that has brought us where we are now?

Furthermore, the editorial fails to explain the reason for the “leaky bucket” and misses the opportunity to address the three core issues at Penn State: tuition, financial transparency and taxpayer appropriations These issues are inherently linked.

Pennsylvania legislators don’t approve the massive appropriation increases request by President Spanier because they cannot be sure where and how the money will be spent, and most importantly whether the taxpayer funds will measurably benefit the student body.

As a result, President Spanier announces an annual tuition increase — typically between 5-8 percent — and gets away with it by laying blame on the legislature for now rubber-stamping an increased taxpayer investment.

All the while, the lack of financial transparency on the part of the administration obscures this annual process, making it impossible for the legislators or the citizens of the Commonwealth to go on anything other than President Spanier’s claim that Penn State administrators are always striving to do “more with less.”

For the citizen taxpayers of the Commonwealth who are asked every year to fork over more of their money to an administration at Penn State that stubbornly refuses to show where that money is going or to prove that there is little to no administrative waste, there’s a simple solution: trust, but verify.

In other words, grant the Pennsylvania State University more taxpayer funding, but do so on the condition that the administration must at least make public the data on how that $360 million or so is spent. In this way, the citizens can receive more than an empty promise from President Spanier, and maybe the student body can, for once, benefit from more taxpayer funding of their education.

In the mean time, the Penn State Alumni Association’s new scholarship fund will likely follow the law of unintended consequences, and end up hurting the very financially strapped students of Penn State it was designed to help, as President Spanier will now be able to issue another massive tuition increase for 42,000 at University Park and at the same time brazenly argue that thanks to a new fund designed to help 35, Penn State administrators are somehow committed to keeping our state education affordable.

Will anyone outside of Old Main believe it?

We are in the midst of groundbreaking change at Penn State — tuition is likely to rise by historic levels of potentially 7-9 percent; a new Vice President for Student Affairs has been chosen and will soon be joing the Penn State Family; new taxes and fees are always close to being foisting upon undeserving students by an overbearing administration.

It is to the Board of Trustees that we in Safeguard Old State turn with a hopeful eye for the future of the Pennsylvania State University. We seek strong leadership, we seek hands-on guidance of our faculty and interaction with our students — our Alma Mater calls out for you to remember her in your life more deeply. More than anything else, we ask that you return your meetings strictly to the confines of the Nittany Valley.

In March, the Trustees met in Washington, DC and heard speeches from famous authors and likely met with important lobbyists and people of various types of importance on Capitol Hill. While that is nice, and certainly helpful in terms of personal connections and maybe even institutional connections, those interactions should take place at another time.

The official business of the board, in other words, should not be conducted with lobbyists in Washington, but with the students and the faculty at Penn State and in State College. Our school’s character and its destiny have largely been determined by our location in the heart of Central Pennsylvania; this is vital to recognize when conducting business, especially on new leadership of the University, that will forever impact the lives of your students.

We at Safeguard Old State denounce certain of the administration’s policies for their incompatibility with a genuinely “student-centered” environment at Penn State. Remember, Trustees, that you are not the equivalent of a lobbyist on Capitol Hill in Washinton, DC. You are a special kind of leader, a steward of the Pennsylvania State University — a unique and historically remarkable fusion of the classical University and the modern research institution in the form of our Commonwealth’s premier land-grant University.

Whenever you met, you should be meeting at a Penn State campus, and most certainly within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Just as you need us as students and faculty for the proper functioning of this University, we too need you, and we petition for your presence with us in this Valley in the future.

Just what is the “residential college movement,” though? Until visiting The Collegiate Way’s website, it’s not something with which I could say I was familiar. After browsing their site more, I came to a clearer understanding.

The Collegiate Way: About — The Collegiate Way website advocates the creation of decentralized residential colleges within large universities as a way of improving higher education for all. Residential colleges are small, permanent, cross-sectional, faculty-led societies of a few hundred members that provide the advantages of a small college in the context of a big institution.

At Penn State, one of the keys to our school from the beginning has been an appreciation by the faculty and president of the vital role which physical residency plays in developing and molding young men and women in the Nittany Valley.

It was the physical closeness that helped shaped this area and this institution’s earliest history of pride in the legends of the valley, love of student initiative and respect for the learning both within the classroom and outside its walls.

Now, establishing separate residential colleges within our university is something else entirely, but there can be no doubt that a residential system as a whole has been and will continue to be vital for the future of Penn State, her students, faculty, alumni and friends.

As technology continues its rapid development and education completely be means of correspondence through the Penn State World Campus grows ever easier, it will become more common for some who never set foot in the Nittany Valley (or even in Pennsylvania) to call themselves Penn Staters.

By that point, will being a “Penn Stater” be at all special?

Facilities To Get Major Upgrades (CDT) — Between building a new softball stadium and soccer and golf clubhouses, Penn State athletics has its game plan set for the upcoming months.

Construction workers lay topsoil for two new soccer fields at University Park near Penn State baseball’s former home, Beaver Field. The $2.9 million project is one of several athletics facility upgrades in the works.

This fall, construction of a $9.5 million softball stadium, currently in the design phase, will take place on the site of the team’s current home, Nittany Lion Field, at University Drive and Park Avenue, said Marv Bevan, project manager for Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant.

Already in the works, a $2.9 million project to build two new varsity soccer fields has trucks dumping topsoil this week near Penn State baseball’s former home, Beaver Field, Bevan said. The old women’s soccer fields there will be converted into intramural fields.

Spearheading the For the Future capital campaign, Rodney Kirsch, senior vice president for development and alumni relations, said the campaign hopes to raise money for both indoor tennis and soccer field projects.

Paul Ruskin, Office of Physical Plant spokesman, said the university is “constantly looking for ways to improve athletic facilities and make sure there are enough for all students.” Penn State hired the firm Brailsford & Dunlavey in 2005 to conduct a recreational facility analysis to “determine whether the university is meeting the demand of students as well as remaining competitive with regional and competitive institutions,” the final report reads.

A survey in the report conducted of 676 students said about 29 percent of students surveyed said recreation sports facilities and programs should be a “very high priority” for Penn State. About 54 percent of those surveyed said that, as recreational sports improvements are considered, keeping tuition and fees affordable is “very important.”

Penn State is considering charging students a $200 a year fee to help pay for facilities upgrades. The money would first be used to connect the HUB-Robeson Center to the White Building Fitness Center and Intramural Building expansion — a move that’s probably still about 10 years in the future, Ruskin said.

“All these projects are funding determined,” with the final decisions to be made by the
administration and university trustees, he said.

What’s remarkable is not that tens of millions are being poured onto new athletic fields and programs, but that the fundraising campaign “For The Future” that’s footing the bill. Penn State’s newest fundraising campaign was heralded for what its goal of increasing scholarship funds. Now we’re finding out that a significant portion of the campaign dollars are going to go toward athletic expansion?

Let me again emphasize that I don’t necessarily have a problem with athletic expansion, but that this particular fundraising campaign was supposed to help bolster our land-grant mission of making education affordable to the low and middle class citizens of the Commonwealth.

Which is more important: a plush $2 million clubhouse for the golf team or reinvesting in the core mission of the University? If Paul Ruskin from the Office of the Physical Plant is correct in saying these and future projects are already “funding determined” and being covered by the For The Future campaign, will the next (inevitable) round of construction be footed by a new, unwanted facilities fee?

Thanks to the University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA), you can read the entire Brailsford & Dunlavey report online and see my analysis of it here on Safeguard Old State.

As readers of Safeguard Old State’s Greek blog will know, we’ve been covering Phi Delta Theta’s struggle to regain their charter and recognition from both their national headquarters and the administration at Penn State University.

On April 24, The LION 90.7fm’s public affairs talk program, Radio Free Penn State, welcomed Phi Delta Theta President Kevin Haslam on for an exclusive in-depth interview on the entire controversy. The interview last for just over one half hour and is well worth your time if you’re interested in learning more about the greek system in general at Penn State and Phi Delta Theta’s history at our university.

I became active in the discussions of the fee shortly after being elected as President of the University Park Undergraduate Association (UPUA). Since that time I have been shown graphs, diagrams, reports and been told accounts of other students wanting these facilities.

But I am absolutely still not sold. After all, this is not the first fee — in fact, these “fees” date back to the 1950s. Take for instance the Student Union Fee, created by President Milton Eisenhower which charged students $7.50 a semester beginning in the early 1950s to pay for the Student Union Building. This fee was later rolled into tuition.

Take into account that a today’s dollar is equivalent to 12-13 cents in 1950, so about Sixty Two Dollars a semester has been rolled into tuition.

Another fee that was created was a Student Activity Fee which helped pay for publication of The Daily Collegian as well as the operation of other student organizations. As of 1960 this fee was at $4.90. Accounting for the value of the dollar today it is equal to forty dollars and eighty three cents. That brings the fees to a grand total of $100.83.

All of this was subsequently rolled into general tuition funds. Then in the mid 1990s a new fee was created to fund student activities and the HUB-Robeson Center. This fee was not supposed to increase above the rate of inflation in any given year, nor was it supposed to fund any building project other than the HUB-Robeson Center.

Fast forward to the new University Health Center, which is being subsidized by our activity fee. So much for those principles. Count in the Information Technology (IT) fee, which is well over $200 per semester and then count the current recreation fee if you want to use the gyms or pools.

At what point do the fee changes and increases end? Who is to say that these new fees won’t be rolled into tuition? Stop taxing us. The excuse that other schools have higher fees is erroneous because their respective tuition costs are a small portion of what we pay at Penn State.

What gets me is that the administration at Penn State may use these fees more and more and raise tuition less and less. Thus we can shed the tag of the most expensive public university in the country all the while still nickle and diming students left and right.

I love being a Penn State student and luckily for me I have the financial stability to attend. Not all of us do, though, and at what point do we recognize that we are a land-grant institution?

We recently heard a CCSG Presidential Candidate talk about how he had to take a year off from Penn State because he couldn’t afford the financial burden. Here is a prospering student leader who was turned away because of the escalating costs.

Part of me thinks I am writing this to myself, because the UPUA has already spoken up loudly on this issue, yet I have a strong hunch that we will be cast aside because, after all, “we’re just students.”

Police: Seven People To Be Charged in ‘Mifflin Streak’ (CDT) May 5 — Open lewdness charges are pending against seven people following the annual “Mifflin Streak,” in which nude Penn State students run down Mifflin road while trying to dodge waiting police officers.

University police say they plan to file charges of open lewdness and disorderly conduct against six men and one woman who were caught running naked as part of the annual spring tradition held the Sunday evening before finals. One of the men was arrested for allegedly exposing himself from a Mifflin Hall window during the festivities.

No names were released pending filing of charges. One of the men will also be facing a resisting arrest charge for being combative with officers, according to Penn State police.

Students and police are well aware of the tradition and large numbers of students each year turn out to watch the streak, along with police officers watching for streakers.

I spoke at some length about this yesterday on The LION 90.7fm’s public affairs talk program, Radio Free Penn State. A Penn State alum called in to give us her thoughts on this year’s streak and recounted how students celebrated when she was an undergrad in the 1980s.

To hear the entire interview, including my thoughts on the Mifflin Streak, click on the track below. We start discussing the streakers at 3:00.

Can Small Be Beautiful? (The Chronicle) — Is “growing like Topsy” necessarily good for universities? Is it in any case inevitable? That is certainly the feeling I get when I travel from campus to campus. Each one seems more like a series of construction sites than a settled community, and there seems to be no end in sight to physical expansion.

…

I know that I sound like a broken record when I observe that the investment choices in expanding the built environment generally favor the sciences, technology, and athletics, and seldom do much to enhance the capacity of the humanities and social sciences. They also favor research over teaching. But I don’t think the point can be made too often.

I also wonder whether the educational functions of the university, especially the needs of undergraduate education, are not taking a back seat to what is considered to be “useful” science and technological research? Are we spending scarce resources on research that we ought to be spending on promoting student learning? Are we sending the wrong sorts of signals to undergraduate students? Are we maintaining the sort of proximity that is most conducive to community interaction?

Whatever happened to the notion that, in higher education, small might be beautiful?

Now, we’re way past the chance of keeping things geographically small at Penn State, but I think there is some worth in asking ourselves how we might go about making our campuses — University Park especially — fall more in line with the motto of our nation, e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.”

In other words, how can we mold our campus into one that accepts our many different academic colleges and the various racial divides and shape our many small communities into one larger, more cohesive whole.

We are tasked with the great opportunity to reimagine students as living and learning together rather than only in our own ethnic groups or special interests. If we truly are all one Penn State, then it’s time for the administration and the campus developers to prove it by making our campus both more beautiful and timeless architecturally and more functional and inclusive to the average student and visitor.

On the other side of College Avenue, we see that we still live in a relatively small town. Immerse yourself in its activities and events and you’ll find that you come to know many of the folks who live, work and run our community in State College.

If we can learn how to take the many, small parts of Penn State from across the Commonwealth that make up the whole, and form a common identity in the 21st century, we’ll have done something truly remarkable.