Graham Spanier is calling in favors… or trying to, at least.

He sent a letter (PDF) to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about Governor Rendell’s recent exclusion of Penn State and other state-related universities from federal stimulus money.

By arbitrarily re-defining The Pennsylvania State University as non-public, simply because we are not “under the absolute control of the Commonwealth,” the Governor is setting a dangerous precedent that the Department of Education should address. If the Department approves this application as it is written, it gives governors in every other state the ability to pick and choose which public institutions they may support with federal dollars.

The state should not be able to arbitrarily exclude a public institution from receiving congressionally-appropriated federal money- Veblen would probably even agree with that- but frankly, that’s not the issue at hand. Update: here’s the link to the blog post that played a large part in this discussion, we forgot it in the first go.

The core debate is whether Penn State is more of a public or private institution. Read: what exactly does state-related mean?

Graham has seemingly argued for both sides.

In an editorial written in 2007, he explained how Penn State and other state-related should be exempt from certain Right-to-Know legislation because disclosing certain data would weaken Penn State institutinoally. More specifically, he said that Right-to-Know laws being enforced on Penn State would force the school to release information on technology licensing, donors, and salaries to the public. That information, he says, could make alumni more hesitant about donating and would take away some of Penn State’s competitiveness in negotiations.

In that 2007 editorial, he said simply,

Should such legislation pass, we would be treated as if we were part of state government, as if we were a state agency.  We are not.

Juxtapose that with some lines from the article released by Penn State Live yesterday,

In removing the state-related universities from eligibility for stabilization funds, Rendell has declared that they are not public universities, contrary to their missions and history of state support. Penn State is Pennsylvania’s sole land-grant institution and carries out multiple missions in service to the state and its citizens. Its character as a public institution has been supported by 154 years of history, legislative action and legal documents.

And in the letter to Arne Duncan, Spanier said,

Penn State’s role as a public institution of higher education is clear in Pennsylvania statutory and case law.

So let’s break it out in the comments… are we public or private?

It would be an understatement to say Penn State football is a big deal. Consequently, getting the tickets required to make the most of the Saturday experience has become quite the event. While the process of obtaining ticket packages hasn’t always gone smoothly, a sellout is inevitable in this day and age.

More than 21,000 Penn State students purchased season football tickets last week, ensuring that the loyal, enthusiastic and vibrant section again will be filled to capacity in Beaver Stadium. The sale for each class took place on its own designated day, with 90 percent of the tickets for each class sold within the first 15 minutes of each sale.

90 percent in the first 15 minutes is certainly impressive, but for some reason, others are fretting over the decrease in pre-registration:

[Penn State Associate Athletic Director Greg] Myford could not provide exact numbers but said “just under 40,000″ students registered this year, while “more than 40,000″ students registered last year. There are only 22,000 tickets available for students every year.

To the uninformed, this seems to indicate a decrease in interest. However, the drop in pre-registration has been widely attributed to the replacement of email notifications by Student Central, and more importantly, the implementation of the ID-based ticketing system.

In essence, this is good news. Not only did the 22,000 student seats sell out quickly, but by most accounts it wasn’t the battle royale that the sale has been for the past two years. The decision to place student packages on IDs prevented scalpers from flipping the ticket package for a profit merely minutes after the sale, and therefore lowered the demand for the package itself. While some students were upset that they didn’t get an email reminder for pre-registration, and likely even more were longing for the days that a $200 profit could be had for simply remember to log in at 7 am on a Tuesday, those of us who deserve the tickets can’t help but like the new system.

Student tickets for football games will continue to be a coveted commodity until the team ceases to exist or they expand the student section to fit the entire population. Thankfully, it looks like the Athletic department has taken a step in the right direction when it comes to refining its sale procedures.

[Sources: Penn State Live and The Daily Collegian]
[Poster Courtesy PSU Athletics]

The Board of Directors of the Collegian, and both John Harvey and Gerry Hamilton, must be tired this evening.

This afternoon, the Board came to a decision regarding the complaint by John Harvey and most of the Collegian’s alumni and staff against Gerry Hamilton, the paper’s general manager. John Harvey was reinstated to his position as the paper’s news adviser.

This was a civil war that tore apart State College’s most prestigious institution; even if the numbers were few against many, the paper was still a place with an upset hierarchy.

Back in May, Gerry Hamilton fired John Harvey for “insubordination,” the news adviser being canned by the general manager. The majority of the staff and a good number of its alumni got fired up in anger against this action. Just take a look at our first post, about the Save John Harvey Facebook group.

And that’s actually the source that corroborated this information after we got the initial tip from a Collegian editor through a public tweet.

The story was reported first on Onward State in May, then the Collegian began addressing it on May 30 after the aforementioned Facebook group lit up with discussion and protest.

The Collegian’s strongest message came when the Board of Editors itself actually addressed the issue in a “statement” published in June, not an editorial as their usual opinions are. We don’t know what’s happening to Gerry Hamilton yet, but the choices are pretty clear: the board can fire him or risk that its newsroom will probably be pretty awkward.

Update

The Collegian posted an article at nearly the same time we did… they have quotes from the board.

The Board determined the firing “was not supported by enough documented evidence to establish a claim of insubordination.”

Board President Michael Hofherr said the situation will continue to be monitored very closely.

“One of the tasks with the Board is to mend the relationship between the two,” he said.

You can look at the article here.

Gary Schultz retired this week after having served for 14 years as the university’s senior vice president for finance and business. Al Horvath, the current vice president for finance and business, will be taking his position effective today.

In his position, Schultz was responsible for managing the 5,000 person workforce associated with “business operations, finance, and technology.” Oddly enough, he was also the designated executive for the Office of the Physical Plant and University Police.

Schultz will also be leaving a profound legacy from one of his other duties, serving as the chairman of the Penn State Investment Council, the organization tasked with investing the university’s $1.6 billion endowment.

Unfortunately for Schultz, he took the position at the height of the dot-com bubble and is leaving in the middle of the (say it with me now) worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But still, the absolute amount of the endowment has grown even if return on investment has not. In 2001, the endowment was worth $986,300,000. As of 2008, it was worth $1,615,500,000.

That’s not to say he’s leaving the university in a great position financially. But it’s unclear how much of the budgeting came from him and how much comes from Our Dear Leader, Graham Basis Spanier.

In a recent Forbes interview, Penn State legend Joe Paterno discussed power, ambition, and glory within the confines of ancient classics. It seems like JoePa has a pretty good understanding of literature and history, something you don’t see in a lot of NCAA Football coaches (certainly not the brutes over at Ohio State, am I right?).

Forbes: Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

Paterno: I’ve always admired the way Aeneas stood tall in the face of adversity knowing he had a destiny. I have tried to let that help guide me.

He even knows about the Aeneid! What a surprise! Perhaps he would be interested in teaching CAMS 045 for a semester.

Later on in the interview, JoePa reveals his “secret ambition”:

To be a good father and grandfather.

It’s just fantastic that Forbes got JoePa to reveal this deep, dark secret. It must be tough coming to grips with publically announcing that you want to be a good father and grandfather. But shhhhhhh… don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret!

Penn State Athletics finished 19th nationally in the 2008-2009 Director’s Cup standings for Division I programs. The final results were released yesterday by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.

The Director’s Cup is awarded to the school whose athletic program is successful in all NCAA acknowledged sports, with equal weight placed on all sports. That means that Football and Men’s Basketball are equally as important as the sports that get less national coverage (Women’s Water Polo, for example). Each school may have up to 20 sports count towards their score (10 men’s and 10 women’s).

Penn State finished with a score of 813.10 points. Stanford, for the 15th-straight year, finished in first with 1455.00 points. Penn State finished fourth among Big Ten schools, behind Michigan (5th), Ohio State (10th), and Minnesota (14th). With the exception of Indiana (55th), all Big Ten teams finished in the top 50.

Grand Valley State (Mich.) took home the award for Division II schools, while Williams (Mass.) was the winner for Division III.

[Source - pdf]

Governor’s Reduction

Governor Ed Rendell released the latest of his increasingly drastic budget reductions for the 2009 fiscal year. The governor has now reduced the budget proposal by $2 billion dollars.

Overall, 229 line items would be impacted by the latest round of spending reductions. Compared to the current fiscal year, the Governor has now cut three out of every four line items, totally eliminating 163 of them and reducing another 328.

One of the details in the most recent revision, which was released on Thursday, is that the public-related institutions will not be receiving federal stimulus money, resulting in a loss of $20 million in expected appropriations.

Penn State’s Catastrophe

University spokeswoman Lisa Powers told the Centre Daily Times that the reduction would be “catastrophic” for the university. If the current cuts came into effect for next year, the state aid Penn State receives would be back down to 1996-levels.

Graham Spanier is understandably upset. He has to present to the Board of Trustees on July 10th. Before then, he has to make some pretty big decisions.

He has told us that he does not want to raise tuition any more than normal– roughly 5%. He has also told the faculty that the university had not and hopefully would not need to enact any mass layoffs.

Here’s what he had told the Board back in January.

We do not anticipate resorting to any of the university-wide emergency actions being taken by scores of colleges and universities throughout the nation such as mid-year tuition increases, hiring freezes, mandatory furloughs, pay cuts, travel freezes, liquidation of endowment assets, and loans to meet basic operating needs.

But he knew this kind of situation would finally come, and he probably could have guessed that it would occur during the annual budget impasse. It was fully underway by November, when the state actually asked for $20 million of its 2008 appropriation to be returned to the government.

Watch this story over the next couple of weeks. Something is going to happen. Veblen speculated wondered if Rendell wants some relinquishment of budgetary oversight by the school to the state, but it seems to me something that massive would get overlooked in the push to get the budget passed to prevent furloughs.

The blog at Penn State’s alumni magazine had a post about Steve McCurry, the alumnus photographer who shot the famous Afghan Girl picture… it got us interested in the whole story, so here it is.

Kodachrome

First, some technical stuff… see, the photograph was shot using Kodak Kodachrome film. Kodak announced the discontinuation of that film type on Monday. To honor the famous film, Kodak asked some famous photographers who had used it to shot the last remaining rolls.

Since Steve McCurry’s picture of the Afghan Girl is one of the most iconic images of our time, he was one of the selected photographers.

The Afghan Girl

We were intrigued by the picture, so we did what we are apt to do in this era of iPhones – we looked her up on Google.

The Afghan Girl grew up as a Pashtuni living in Afghanistan. During the Afghan-Soviet War (1979-89), the Soviets attacked her village. The girl’s parents were killed in the strike. The girl and her remaining family were sent to a refugee camp in Pakistan.

While Steve McCurry was visiting the refugee camp in 1984, he got a very rare chance to photograph a woman, a 13-year old student at the informal school there.

The picture was on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic. It has since become National Geographic’s most iconic cover, the girls eyes the sight of the Pashtuns.

But for 28 years, the girl– long a woman– remained an unknown to Steve McCurry and everyone else. It took McCurry several failed attempts before he found someone who knew her brother.

He eventually found her. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and though she had no idea how famous the picture was, she embraced its iconic meaning.

When they met again, McCurry told Sharbat her image had become famous as a symbol of the Afghan people. “I don’t think she was particularly interested in her personal fame,” McCurry said. “But she was pleased when we said she had come to be a symbol of the dignity and resilience of her people.” (National Geographic)

For that reason, she allowed a female producer from National Geographic to take a second portrait of her, so the world could see that she had survived.

‘Faces of Asia’

The Penn Stater Magazine actually did a full feature on this story back in the spring of 2002– the opening spread is included on the right.

But they turned us on to something even more exciting. A print of the photo is currently being featured in an exhibition of McCurry’s work that will run until August 16– unfortunately it will be down by fall semester.

Tina Hay, editor of the magazine, posted some more info about the ‘Faces of Asia’ exhibit on her blog.

I just learned from Dana Carlisle Kletchka, the Palmer Museum’s curator of education, that that famous photo has a name—”Haunted Eyes Tell of an Afghan Refugee’s Fears”—and that it will indeed be among the photos at the Palmer exhibition. Just seeing that photo blown up to 19″x31″ will be worth the trip up to the museum, as far as I’m concerned.

Additionally, the documentary made by National Geographic in 2003, ‘The Search for the Afghan Girl,’ will be shown every Sunday between now and August 16 at 1:00 pm.

Check out her Wikipedia page– it’s full of good links and an authoritative version of the story.

Michael Jackson died this afternoon after suffering cardiac arrest at his home in Holmby Hills. TMZ has the rough-draft of his obituary up already… Twitter has the rest.

Our tribute is a little more animated though. We found this video from 1998 of the Penn State Blue Band lip dubbing ‘Thriller.’

A new study came out last week ranking the Smeal College of Business’ Supply Chain Management department as first nationally among universities that offer the program.

The study surveyed 126 companies in an industry survey and asked 19 universities for data regarding their programs. The study then broke down the responses into three catagories:  Industry Value, Depth of Program, and Scope of Program.

Penn State finished first in both Industry Value and Depth of Program, and was tied for second in Scope of Program, with scores of 14 out of 15, 19 out of 20, and 15 out of 20 (respectively) for a total score of 48 out of 55.

Michigan State finished second with a score of 45 out of 55, followed by Arizona State, Ohio State, and MIT.

To see how other Penn State programs rank in their respective fields, check out this PowerPoint created by the Office of University Relations.

[Source]