Penn State's Board of Trustees voted unanimously on Friday to buy the 1.3 acre site of Kissell Motorsports for $2.6 million dollars. The lot is in Ferguson Township, 9 blocks west of the Atherton and College intersection. The purchase can be viewed in the context of other recent land acquisition-- in 2008 the university acquired a 4.66 acre lot that had been occupied by O.W. Houts, and in 2009 it acquired another property from Craig and Kathleen Kissell.
The university has not yet declared its intentions for the land's long term use, but the building will probably be used by University Athletics staff for the interim. The university has talked around long term expansion plans and has not yet specified what it would build in the far west side of campus.
George Chriss used to film public University Park Undergraduate Association and Daily Collegian meetings when he was at Penn State. He first got involved with open video during his time here. Now he is the founder and heart-and-soul of OpenMeetings.org, a website that hosts films of public meetings from around the country.
The larger concept of open video has become a new phenomenon about making video production and creation more accessible to everyone, essentially bringing video as a medium more into the forefront and having it become a more natural tool we can use to express ourselves. As we can write an essay or speech without thinking twice, we would be able to create a video with this kind of ease. Chriss was kind enough to share his thoughts and experiences with us in our latest 10 Questions piece, which is after the jump.
The Republican National Committee fired its top two financial officers last Friday, the higher of whom, Rob Bickhart, happened to graduate from Penn State in 1978. The reasons cited in asking for Bickhart and his deputy's resignations were, according to RNC Chief of Staff Michael Leavitt, "to improve on strong fundraising numbers" and to "help to provide the resources for defeating Democrats across the country."
More on why Bickhart was fired after the jump.
The anthem we sing at football games and at other profound moments is staying as is for the time being, but Penn State grad and current doctoral candidate Brian Canada did bring up an interesting point about it. In an email to Roger Williams, Executive Director of the Alumni Association, he took issue with the line "For the future that we wait."
That sounds awfully passive for a university that wants to position itself as a leader in research and innovation, doesn't it?...If Penn State students are truly out to "make life better," as one of our more recent taglines has suggested, then why would we sing about *waiting* for the future?
Considering the $2 billion fundraising campaign Penn State has just launched, it's not a good thing, nor does it fit with the "Penn State mentality", to have as one of its blazons a song that can be interpreted as encouraging that kind of inactivity.
After the jump: more history about the Alma Mater.
The "For the Future" campaign had its public launch Friday night in the Bryce Jordan Center with more than 1000 of the university's most loyal supporters. The campaign, which has been in the "private leadership gifts" phase since 2007, has an overall goal of $2 billion by the end of June 2014.
A portion of that money will go towards increasing scholarship funds. The full plan after the jump.
You're writing the dreaded "personal statement" essay on a grad school application, and somebody's said what you are trying to in a much more eloquent way. You're tired from the application process and you're heavily considering secretly borrowing a paragraph or two from this article or that essay.
Well, if you were applying for the M.B.A. program at Penn State, you'd get yourself busted for plagiarism. There's a new service called Turnitin.com that checks students' essays against previously published material, and it shows if the work's not your own.
Learn more about the specifics of the anti-plagiarism program after the jump.