“A lot of people would just come up here and say, ‘let’s just brag. Let me tell you all the great things that are going on here.’ But if I take seriously this notion of making a great university even greater, then I have to sit here and say, ‘we’re good at this, we’re good at that, I don’t even know whether we’re good at this or not, and, by the way, this one’s not good enough.’ ”
“In my last job, I had multiple town halls, and I spent a lot of time talking about ideas — going back to my philosophy of testing my ideas in the marketplace — and so my attitude here was to pick a topic that I know is important. The data on student engagement is overwhelming; you just can’t ignore it. So there’s an issue, now how are we going to address it? My job is to go find those particular elements. Hopefully people will see — sometimes rapidly, sometimes a little bit longer — that particular actions have been taken that take us to that next level. Quite frankly, I really like the idea of coming back and telling you, ‘remember when I talked about this and this? This is what we have done to implement it.’ ”
— Penn State President Eric Barron, speaking about student engagement, student access and affordability, and economic development and student career success during his first student town forum on Monday in the Hintz Family Alumni Center. After introducing each topic and the potential proposals to enhance student experience in the topics, Barron asked students for their inputs. He then took questions from the crowd of University Park students and Commonwealth Campus and World Campus students watching online.
Read more here about President Barron’s six major topics to spark discussion across the University, which include student engagement, accessibility and student career success and economic development.