Graham B. Spanier's Remarks
Penn State York
Friday, July 13, 2007
Good morning. I want to begin by thanking Joel Rodney and his staff for hosting us this week. There are some wonderful things happening here at Penn State York, and it's great that the board has an opportunity for a first-hand look at this very vibrant campus. While I know you will hear more about the campus later in today's meeting, I'd like to share a few bits of information about Penn State York.
While all of our campuses serve their students and communities extraordinarily well, this campus is highly involved in the region and considered a partner for a wide variety of community programs and projects. Companies such as Harley-Davidson, Alcoa, Turkey Hill, Starbucks, Tyco, Lifetime Brands, Honeywell, BAE Systems, York International, Snyder's of Hanover and WellSpan Health all have relied on our York campus to provide on-site education for employees.
Over the past year, Penn State York students, faculty, and staff took part in a variety of community service projects, providing nearly 240 hours of service to the York community through undertakings such as Habitat for Humanity, The Children's Home of York, and the local animal shelter.
In addition, the campus community also pulled together to donate 352 pounds of dog and cat food to the animal rescue and 275 pounds of peanut butter and jelly to the Salvation Army. That must have required quite a "stick-to-it" attitude.
Last year, several students in an engineering class here developed and delivered a motorized toy car that is controlled by an adult for a child with cerebral palsy as part of the requirements for their senior-level engineering course. You will be hearing more later today about Penn State York's engineering students and their most recent project.
In addition to a number of ongoing enrichment programs for low-income youth, the campus offers a wide array of summer activities that attract about 1,500 children every year.
Among the more traditional youth camps like soccer and art that are being offered here, are some more adventurous camps like "Robotics Camp," "Song Writing Camp," "Introduction to Video Game Design," "Sign Language" and "Mandarin Chinese."
Changing venues now, at nearby Penn State Hershey Medical Center and our College of Medicine, Hal Paz reports that the college has attracted more than 6,800 applications for 145 openings in the class of 2011. That's a 14 percent increase over the previous year. In fact, one out of every six people who sought to enter medical schools in the United States applied to our college this year. Dr. Paz also reported that the medical center ends the fiscal year with an above budget operating margin.
On the research side at the Medical Center, a $9 million grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation was awarded to Thomas Gardner, professor of ophthalmology and cellular and molecular physiology, for research he and colleagues in the Diabetic Retinopathy Research Group are conducting related to diabetic blindness.
The grant is the largest nongovernmental funding award in the history of the College of Medicine and will help researchers continue to develop new treatments and therapies for diabetic retinopathy.
(Slide shows photo of Cheng-Mao Liu)
Here you see Assistant Professor Cheng-Mao Liu, a member of the research group, looking at retinal cells under the microscope. The Penn State Diabetic Retinopathy Research Group is one of the world's largest groups focusing on the ocular complications of diabetes.
In other areas of research across the University, two assistant professors of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Eberly College of Science have earned Young Investigator Awards from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. This national award recognizes the most promising young faculty members in the chemical and life sciences.
Andrey Krasilnikov studies the spatial organization of highly structured RNA molecules and the complexes such molecules form with RNA-binding proteins. These RNA molecules play a crucial role in gene expression.
Also honored was Anton Nekrutenko, who studies evolutionary genomics, drawing genomic information from different species to find common elements that can enable scientists to predict gene expression and regulation, and how organisms function.
Penn State faculty are known worldwide for their research related to global warming. A recent story in The Washington Post confirms our reputation in this area. In a story and video on research at the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland, our faculty and students were prominently featured among the dozens of scientific teams scattered over the frigid snowscape. The glacier is the fastest flowing glacier in the world and scientists are trying to find out why it's flowing at such a rapid rate.
Let me bring you back to warmer environs, where Alan Walker, Evan Pugh professor of anthropology and biology, as part of an international team has documented a link between animal movement and the shape of the ear canal.
By scanning the skulls of about 200 animal species from mouse to elephant with a powerful, high-resolution CT scanner, the scientists discovered a relationship between the curvature of the ear canal and the movement of the animals. This discovery allows researchers to reconstruct how extinct species moved -- important for filling in the missing pieces in the theory of evolution.
Our men's gymnastics team earned its 12th national championship this year. They, along with our fencing team, which earned its 10th national championship, were honored last month at the White House by President George W. Bush in a special ceremony. I am pleased to report that none of our students wore flip flops to the White House.
On another Intercollegiate Athletics note as I'm sure you have heard, 21,500 season football tickets for our student section -- which was recognized by ESPN's College Gameday as the best in the nation -- sold out in a matter of minutes last month. The unprecedented number of tickets sold marks the second-largest number of student season tickets in college sports. Anticipating great demand, Athletics made an additional 520 student season tickets available this year.
A recent proposal for a lottery format for student season tickets was met with strong student opposition, so we adopted a first-come, first-served procedure demanded by students. Unfortunately, not everyone who had hoped to purchase a ticket was able to do so, and some people apparently purchased tickets with the intent of scalping them -- which of course, is restricted in Pennsylvania.
The Big Ten Network has planned an Aug. 30 launch, just two days before the kick-off of the 2007 Big Ten college football season. The Big Ten Network is a partnership between the Big Ten Conference and Fox Cable Networks. The network will cover the 11 member institutions with unprecedented access to an extensive schedule of conference sports events; original programs featuring academics; and other programs of interest produced by the universities. This is a first-of-its-kind partnership that provides Penn State an opportunity to showcase its accomplishments on a national level.
The network is available to all cable and satellite carriers and television distributors nationwide, and Big Ten Network representatives are currently working with cable system owners to place the network on their cable lineups. National agreements with DirecTV and AT&T have already been realized, along with dozens of local cable systems.
Another first-of-its-kind joint venture was also announced last month by Google and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the academic arm of the Big Ten. The university consortium has teamed up to digitize select collections across all of its libraries -- up to 10 million volumes -- as part of the Google Book Search project. The agreement not only speeds up the digitization process, which would have taken hundreds of years and millions of dollars, but also builds a shared digital repository for public domain materials from 12 major research universities.
This library digitization agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education.
On the enrollment side, we also are dealing with a number of milestones. Total applications for all campuses are again at a record high, with the final tally anticipated to be about 99,000.
Total undergraduate applications are up by 6.6 percent over last year, while graduate applications are up 6 percent. At University Park, our goal is 7,000 new first-year students.
Admissions activities are still under way at most campuses, so outcomes for each campus will become more clear later this summer. At the moment, we are about 400 paid accepts ahead of last year. All of these numbers will continue to fluctuate as the fall 2007 admissions cycle draws to a close. The demand for a Penn State education is stronger than ever.
Another proud milestone for our University was the announcement that The Penn Stater magazine was recently named the best university magazine in the country by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The magazine, published by the Alumni Association, earned the 2007 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year award from among 129 magazine entries. Penn State is the first public university to win this award since 1967 and only the sixth in the 63-year history of the award. Congratulations to The Penn Stater!
And with apologies to Joel Meyers ⦠long before Accu-Weather's Web site and decades before The Weather Channel, Penn State's Department of Meteorology began broadcasting local weather to central Pennsylvania residents in black and white television.
This year, our Department of Meteorology celebrates 50 years of providing television weather. It seems that former Penn State professor and meteorologist Charlie Hosler, driven mad by a horrendous weather forecast in 1957, convinced a local television station that he could do it much better. And he did, giving birth to a new profession of television meteorologists, the use of satellite images on TV, and the longstanding show "Weather World."
Dr. Hosler's legacy lives on at Penn State, where we enjoy a very high placement rate for students in television meteorology.
One final broadcast note worth mentioning, the "What Do You Know" program hosted live by Michael Feldman to an audience of 1.3 million came to University Park for a recent show on National Public Radio.
The wise-cracking Feldman delighted the audience at Eisenhower Auditorium on June 9 with his quirky interview/quiz show. Several local folks got a chance to be ribbed by Feldman, including me. But Joe Paterno won the prize in that category.
He dubbed me a "washboard savant" for my musical abilities playing with the Deacons of Dixieland. The show featured a mix of music, stand-up patter, interviews and audience participation.
Others interviewed included some of our faculty members, a local chef, and the handler of the world-famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil.
You can download a podcast from NPR if you'd like to hear the show.
Now, your questions. ...