Posts filed under ‘College of the Liberal Arts’
A Heartfelt Goodbye
This public information photo shows some of the 12,000 attendees at Joe Paterno's memorial service at the Bryce Jordan Center.
Father Matthew Laffey of the Penn State Catholic Center set the tone—and provided a broad outline of Joe Paterno’s life—in his opening prayer. “Thank you for this man. … How fortunate this corner of your kingdom has been.”
The details came slowly over the next two hours Thursday afternoon, as speakers at A Memorial for Joe painted pictures of the man who helped to build—and became largely synonymous with—Penn State.
We met the competitive Joe. “The bigger the game, the quieter he was in practice,” said Todd Blackledge, quarterback of the 1982 national championship team. “But the gleam in his eyes told the story.”
The literary Joe, who never called Susan Welch, dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, anything other than “Dean,” who donated millions of dollars to the library, and who clearly passed that love of literature on to his son. Here’s who Jay Paterno quoted in his closing eulogy: Sophocles, William Blatty, U2, John Adams, John Ruskin, Tennessee Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Arthur Ashe.
The funny Joe, so quick with a one-liner, who told Jimmy Cefalo’s mother on a recruiting visit, “Your pasta is better than Mrs. Cappelletti’s.” (more…)
‘We Can Lick the World with the Liberal Arts’
Joe Paterno giving Penn State's commencement address in 1973.
He had a degree in English Lit from an Ivy League institution. He sometimes quoted Shakespeare to his football team. Plus, he and his wife donated millions of dollars to Penn State’s library, as well as an undergraduate fellows program.
Joe Paterno always valued a liberal arts education, and here’s a look at how Paterno expressed that over the years. Many thanks to Vicki Fong ’81 — a manager of publications and public relations for Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts — for sharing.
First, Paterno addressing a group of Paterno Fellows. “We don’t need anything else. We can lick the world with just the liberal arts,” he said, prompting chuckles from the crowd. As Vicki wrote in an email: “It always makes me smile.”
Here’s another video on what it means to be a “Paterno Professor.” Michael Berube, the Paterno Family professor in literature, says, “Wherever I go, people of course ask, ‘Is that the Paterno family?’ I say, ‘Yes, there’s only one.’ And they’re just massively impressed.”
And lastly, in case anyone’s interested, here’s a PDF that you can download of Paterno’s iconic 1973 commencement speech. My favorite part about having Paterno as the keynote speaker? Looking at who he succeeded.
There were no speakers from 1960-69. In 1970, Charles Conrad Jr,. a NASA astronaut, spoke. In 1971, it was the Earl Warren, the retired Chief Justice of the United States. In 1972, it was James A. Michener, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author. And in 1973: Joe Paterno, Nittany Lion head football coach.
Emily Kaplan, intern
Why Child Sexual Abuse Goes Unreported: A Sociologist Explains
“Everybody likes to think they would be the whistleblower. What I told my class was this: Statistically, you’re full of crap.” —Eric Silver
Of the 28 pages of essays we published in our January/February issue, which we devoted to the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath, none has received more responses than Eric Silver’s. Silver, a professor of sociology and crime, law, and justice, contributed a piece we titled “Bureaucracy, Loyalty, and Truth.”
We introduced the piece like this: “Everyone says they’d report suspected child abuse to the authorities, but most don’t. A Penn State sociologist dissects the powerful forces that prevent us from doing so.”
Silver’s perspective—based largely on his specialty, the sociology of deviance, and a class lecture he gave just days after the charges against Sandusky were filed—really struck a chord with readers. Because of the large response, we’ve decided to make the piece available here. —Lori Shontz, senior editor
I teach a class in the sociology of deviance, and we were covering the topic of adult-child sexual contact when this happened. The students had a homework assignment related to it due the night before all this broke. It was an eerie thing.
I felt like I needed to say something in class—to put the crisis in a sociological context. Two ideas came to me—one is bureaucracy, and the second is loyalty.
Everything in our world is organized by bureaucracies. You go to the grocery store, and your food’s always there, it’s on the shelves—that’s a very complex task, and it’s organized by a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are very good at complex tasks, because they break up those tasks into small pieces that individuals can be responsible for. We’re all familiar with that in our own work lives: If we run into trouble, we tell so-and-so, and that’s it. It’s off our plate, and we continue to do what we’re supposed to do.
In this case, I don’t know the facts any more than anybody else does, but it seems as though there was reporting upward, which most of the time you’re encouraged to do. The big question is: Why didn’t people follow up after they reported upward? In some ways, it’s not a fair question. Our job descriptions aren’t to police our bosses.
I realize that everybody likes to think they would be the whistleblower. They are the ones who would risk their job, their livelihood, their future, their letters of recommendation. This belief fuels our righteous indignation at those involved. What I told my class was this: Statistically, you’re full of crap. For every 1,000 people, you’re lucky if there are two or three whistleblowers. (more…)
How Can We Support Sex Abuse Victims? A SOC 119 Perspective
Early in the second class he devoted to the Sandusky scandal and its aftermath, Sam Richards asked his SOC 119 students to react to this statement: I am feeling exhausted talking about this issue.
This was Nov. 15, only 12 days after the grand jury presentation was released. Less than a week after Joe Paterno had been fired and Graham Spanier had resigned, and nine days since the national media began to arrive on campus. Almost all of the 700 students, voting anonymously with clickers, chose “strongly agree” or “agree.” Imagine what the percentage would be now, with the TV trucks no longer parked on College Avenue and the football team’s regular season over.
Richards then asked students to pair off and kick around solutions to this question: What would it mean to support the victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse? The most common answers: donating money to organizations that support victims, and listening to anyone who wanted to talk about a similar experience.
And then Richards tied the two questions together: “What would it mean to support the victims? No. 1, it would probably not mean being tired of talking about it. After nine days. What is that? We have done a whole semester on race, and we’re not really tired of talking about race, but we’re tired talking about this issue after nine days.”
The way Richards sees it, (more…)
President Erickson Drops In on SOC 119
No one seemed to notice the man in the suit milling around at the front of the room. There’s a lot of activity in Sam Richards’ classroom before class officially starts, and between the “what do you still want to talk about” feed scrolling down the right-hand side of the big screen, the reminder on the other half of the screen that Quizno’s was donating a percentage of its Tuesday night profits to The Haiti Project, and the reggae music blasting from the speakers, it’s hard to keep track of everything.
And then Richards started his Tuesday SOC 119 class—the second given over to the Sandusky scandal and its ramifications—with a moment of silence “for all that has happened, and in particular for the people whose voices are very often silenced.” Immediately afterward, he introduced a guest—“Dr. Rodney Erickson, who’s going to say a few words …”
That grabbed the students’ attention. And even before (more…)
A Classroom Discussion on the Week’s Events
Class started with a moment of silence. Someone dimmed the lights, and the standing-room only crowd—700-plus strong—in 100 Thomas Building for Sam Richards’ SOC 119 class paid tribute to victims of sexual abuse. And not only the alleged victims of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
“We want to honor what they’ve been through and how they are a part of this and how they have been forgotten,” said sociologist Laurie Mulvey ’94g, Richards’ wife, who teaches the class with him. “And we also want to recognize the people in this room who are victims. There are plenty of you in here.”
So began another afternoon in the classroom of one of Penn State’s more outspoken faculty members. The title of the course is Race and Ethnic Relations, but that’s just a jumping off point sometimes. Richards had tweeted the day before that he couldn’t see sticking to the syllabus during such a momentous week on campus.
“We really thought a lot about whether we were going to do this class,” Richards said Thursday afternoon, introducing the discussion. “We decided the value of speaking today was greater than the value of staying silent.”
Added Mulvey, “We want to let you know from the outset that we are definitely not here to give answers. At best, we’re here to give you guidance about how to walk through this difficult moment and think through this difficult moment. “
Richards started by asking the students to complete this sentence: “I feel …”
Here’s a list of the answers:
Our November/December Issue is on the Way
A couple of Saturdays ago, I arrived at the gym early, too early to snag my favorite bike for the 10 a.m. spinning class. So I ended up chatting with a couple of other early arrivals, and I mentioned how much I like 3:30 football games because I have more time to get in a workout before kickoff.
Turns out, they love any home football games. Because they can buy groceries, pick up whatever they need at Target—without having to wait in line. I was incredulous; in my three “tours” of State College, I’ve missed one home game. Under duress. “You never go to football games?” I asked. Turned out, they wouldn’t even think of it.
My spinning classmates aren’t alone. You can meet more people who ignore Penn State football—and learn what they do during the games—in our November/December issue, which should be making its way to your mailbox if it’s not there already.
We’ve got a couple of other good stories in this issue:
—English professor Sandra Spanier ’76g, ’81g talks about the first volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, a project she’s spearheading, and recommends the one Hemingway book you should read if you’re going to read just one. (It’s not my favorite book, A Moveable Feast, but of course it’s an excellent choice. And, no, I’m not going to give it away here.) Still to come: about 15 more volumes of letters.
—And we’ve got a profile of Beverly McIver ’92g, an artist I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about until I read the story. She paints beautiful portraits of herself and her loved ones, paintings that, as my colleague Ryan Jones writes, “offer unflinching takes on race, gender, and mortality.” You can get a sense of her work here, and the backstory in Ryan’s article.
Please let us know what you think!
Lori Shontz, senior editor
A Detective Story—And Some Fascinating Civil War Research
I love the circumstances that led to the lecture I attended last week at the Special Collections Library titled “A Local Detective Story: Deserters and Loyalty in the Civil War.”
A history professor, Sally McMurry, was going through old tax rolls in the basement of the Centre County Historical Museum in Bellefonte, and she needed a break. (Understandably.) She happened to notice a hunk of what appeared to be deteriorating leather on one of the shelves, and when she opened it, she discovered it was records from the Civil War, a list of deserters from Pennsylvania.
So she alerted her colleague, William Blair, head of Penn State’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Center, who was amazed. “I’d never seen anything like this in my life,” he said. “That’s not easy to do these days.”
Thus began some detective work for Blair, whose current research focuses on northern homefronts during the Civil War. This was a detour, but (more…)
Two New Views of Hemingway
Two books released just this week—both with Penn State connections—offer new insights into one of the most analyzed writers ever: Ernest Hemingway.
Cambridge University Press has just published the first volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1907–1922, edited by Penn State English department faculty member Sandra Spanier ’76g, ’81g.
Our upcoming Nov-Dec issue includes a feature-length interview with Spanier on what it’s been like to track down Hemingway’s unpublished correspondence—thousands of letters, telegrams, postcards, short handwritten notes—and what those writings tell us about a very complicated man. That next issue won’t be out until the end of October, but in the meantime you can also hear Spanier talk about the letters in this four-minute video, which also includes a conversation with Hemingway’s son Patrick.
Here’s a news release from Penn State that offers more on how Spanier became interested in Hemingway (this is a career project for her—she tells us that there could be as many as (more…)
High Praise for — and a Few Lessons From — Diane Ackerman
Like a lot of writers, I read both as a reader (for pleasure) and as a writer (to figure out how other writers do it). So when I came across this interview with Diane Ackerman, whose latest book, One Hundred Names for Love, we excerpted in our July/August issue, I was psyched.
Interviewer Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute is an Ackerman fan, too; he thinks One Hundred Names for Love is better than Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which won a National Book Award. (I loved that book, too.) Clark extracted a lot of interesting nuggets about Ackerman’s writing process, including this description of her writing space: “Shelves of white three-ring folders, labeled and organized, some filing cabinets, overflowing bookcases, big windows with a view of the backyard and woods, and a bay window to curl up and write in, one that looks out onto the garden and a big old magnolia tree.”
Somehow, that’s exactly how I imagined it.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
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