Ganim Wins Pulitzer for Sandusky Coverage
If you’ve been following the Sandusky scandal, I’m sure you’ve noticed the tenacious reporting of Sara Ganim ’08, whose March story first alerted the public that Jerry Sandusky ’66, ’71 MEd H&HD was being investigated by a grand jury, and who was at the forefront of the coverage when the scandal became national news in November. She was honored Monday afternoon with journalism’s highest prize, the Pulitzer.
The citation, for local reporting, reads like this: “Awarded to Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff, Harrisburg, Penn., for courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Penn State sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky.”
“This is definitely a win for the whole newsroom,” Ganim says in this video, which is upside-down. “For everybody standing here. And more important, I think it’s important for everyone in every newsroom just like ours for every newsroom across the country. because better than any award., the most rewarding thing in this whole process is people telling me this story and our coverage has changed their minds about local reporting.”
Ganim, who’s 24 years old and one of the youngest Pulitzer winners, is one of a very small group of Penn Staters who have been so honored:
Norman C. Miller ’56 of the Wall Street Journal won the 1964 prize for local, general, or spot news reporting for a “comprehensive account of a multi-million dollar vegetable oil swindle in New Jersey.”
Rod Nordland ’72 was part of a team from The Philadelphia Inquirer that won the 1983 prize for local, general, or spot news for coverage of the Three Mile Island accident.
Janet Day ’82 was part of a team at The Denver Post that won the 2000 prize for breaking news for coverage of the Columbine shootings.
Novelist Richard Russo, who taught at Penn State Altoona, won the 2002 prize in fiction for Empire Falls, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke taught at Penn State from 1936–1943. Additionally, archivist Paul Dzyak ’92 tells us, Donald Bartlett, half of a dynamic investigative duo with James Steele, briefly attended Penn State. Bartlett and Steele won the 1989 Pulitzer for national reporting for an investigation into the 1986 Tax Reform Act. And Mark E. Neely Jr., McCabe-Greer Professor of American Civil War History, won the 1992 prize for history for The Fate of Liberty.
Thanks to Dzyak and Vicki Fong ’81, manager of public relations for the College of the Liberal Arts, for helping to compile this list. If you know of anyone we missed, please let us know in the comments or at our Facebook page.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
P.S. Additionally, Diane Ackerman ’70 was a finalist for the Pulitzer in non-fiction for One Hundred Names for Love, which we excerpted in our July/August issue.
Inspiring Future Entrepreneurs at IST Start-up Week
Am I the only one with a pen and paper?
I wrote this sentence at the top of my notebook page this morning as I glanced around the lecture hall and noted the sea of iPads, MacBooks, and smartphones surrounding me. Although I shouldn’t have been surprised: I was at a talk for the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s Start-up Week — in a classroom called the “Cybertorium,” no less.
During the week, which started Monday and ends Saturday, IST alumni and young entrepreneurs returned to campus to talk to current students about turning their own ideas into successful start-ups. Lucky for me, the two talks I attended were less about the latest tech gadgets and more about entrepreneurship.
Neilye Garrity ’04 is the co-founder of Candid Career, a video-based website for job seekers, and Matt Miller ’01 is co-founder and CTO of CyberCoders and CareerBliss, two job-hunting websites that streamline the recruiting and hiring process. Both alums offered some advice and answered tons of questions, which audience members could text or Tweet during the talk.
Here are some of their best tips for aspiring entrepreneurs:
—Don’t let others’ reactions discourage you. When Garrity told her family she wanted to quit her cushy job at IBM to work on her website full time, “they thought I was nuts,” she says. “But I believed in what I was doing, so that didn’t stop me.”
—Do your research. “Learn everything you can about companies with similar products, even if those companies failed,” Miller says. “Learn from their mistakes.” (more…)
Three Questions for the Board of Trustees Candidates
How on earth do you differentiate among 86 candidates for the three open alumni seats on the Board of Trustees? I had been asking myself that question for a while—even before I knew the final number of people on the ballot. It seemed like every time I picked up a newspaper, someone else was declaring his or her candidacy. I lost count of how many.
By the time the final number—a record, by far—was determined, I thought I had a good handle on what the candidates thought about the trustees’ handling of the Sandusky scandal. The media coverage—understandably—focused on it. And when the official position statements (which you can find here), were released, most of them dealt primarily with the scandal and its aftermath, too.
That wasn’t enough for me. As a journalist, a Penn State alum, and a Penn State employee, I had more questions. Penn State has other large issues it must confront in the coming years—particularly the annual fight for state appropriation dollars and the steady rise of tuition. I think it’s important for the Board of Trustees candidates to address those issues, too. We brainstormed for a bit at the office, and we crafted three questions we thought could add to the discussion.
Sure, we’d love to hear all of the trustees—not just the ones currently running for the board—address these wider issues. But alumni can vote only for the nine alumni seats on the board, and only three are up every year. We decided to focus where we could shed the most light—the candidates in the most prominent trustees election in Penn State’s history.
So we emailed the three questions to the 86 candidates. We weren’t sure what to expect, but a week later, 72 of them had responded. That’s 83.7 percent. In the research world, they call that a “robust” response. We’re thrilled.
We are presenting the responses to you exactly as the candidates wrote them; click here to read them, either by candidate or by question. If responses exceeded the 250-word limit, we trimmed them, and if something was particularly unclear, we contacted the author to clarify. Otherwise, their responses are unvarnished and unedited.
The candidates raise many important points, and they float some interesting solutions. It’s a lot to digest, we know. But we hope you’ll take some time to learn about the candidates before you vote, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think, too, in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
P.S. This is just one of two initiatives that Alumni Association is doing to help alumni make an informed choice. There’s a Meet the Candidates event from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 21, before the Blue-White game, and we hope you’ll be able to attend that, too. You can find out more about the event here.
Images from an Arboretum in Bloom
Our colleague John Mark Rafacz ’82 over in the Center for the Performing Arts has been spending some time with his camera at the Arboretum lately, and he’s been posting some beautiful images to his Facebook page. I asked him if he’d be willing to send me a few that I might share with you, and he was happy to oblige.
The one above is of a redbud tree beginning to blossom, and below is a close-up of some sort of tulip:
You can click on any of these to see them bigger—which I highly recommend.
Below are two of John’s photos put together. On the left, he tells me, is a flowering quince, and on the right is a lilac just beginning to bloom.
Besides loving John’s artistry with his Nikon, I’m also impressed at how much beauty there is to photograph at the Arboretum—a site that was just dedicated less than two years ago. “Except in the depths of winter, when things are mostly dormant,” John says, “I think you could visit the botanic gardens and see something new each day. It has an incredible variety of flowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees. And with the ever-changing light, weather, and blooming and maturity cycles, the setting can seem completely different from one visit to the next.”
Maybe my favorite of John’s latest photos is the one he made last Saturday, a misty day, when he framed a row of tulips against the large oak tree that stands behind the Arboretum pavilion.
John, by the way, also took some lovely springtime photos elsewhere around University Park two years ago, and we posted them as a small slide show; you can see those images here.
Tina Hay, editor
Who Was “Otto,” Anyway?
On Sunday, I stopped in an open house in our State College neighborhood, curious what I’d find. Most of the houses in our area, about a mile south of campus, were built in the 1950s. This one is being sold by the adult children of the late owners, who, it was immediately clear, had taken great care of their home.
I was admiring how well-kept the house was when I noticed something out of place: What looked to be a door where there wasn’t, in fact, a doorway. I asked the realtor about it, and she explained: It was the original decorative door from Otto’s, the on-campus cafe (not to be confused with the State College brew-pub) inside the Kern Building. Turns out the original owners of the house were Otto and Charlotte Mueller, and that Otto was Penn State’s first assistant vice president for Housing and Food Services from 1953 until his retirement in 1978 (he died in 2007, and Charlotte passed in 2010). The door, which I’m kicking myself for not having taken a picture of, appeared to be hand-painted, including a portrait of a smiling Mr. Mueller and the cafe’s daily hours.
From the basement workroom to what appeared to be the original cabinetry, it was obvious that Otto Mueller took good care of the place. I’m guessing that, under his watch, Housing and Food Services was similarly well maintained.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Public Pride
Students filing out of class early Wednesday afternoon were surprised by what they saw when they passed Old Main: An arc of rainbow balloons spreading across the steps. And a colorful celebration.
Pride Week, an annual event that promotes acceptance and support for the university’s LGBTQA community, is in full swing at Penn State. The week includes a plethora of events, from a intensive three-day workshop focusing on identity to a concert at Chumley’s benefitting the AIDS Project of State College to a drag show on Friday night at the HUB. At Wednesday’s rally, which lasted about an hour, a handful of spectators donned red t-shirts that read, “40 years and still queer, 40 years and still here.” The logo is Pride Week’s theme this year, celebrating the history and strides of LGBTQA organizations at Penn State.
Several speakers—from active leaders in Penn State’s LGBTQA community to the president of the State College High Gay Straight Alliance—stepped up to the makeshift stage in the middle of campus. They told stories of friends who came out, discussed what the LGBTQA community meant to them, and shared personal experiences. Perhaps the loudest applause came when the vice president of the Penn State chapter of Delta Lamdba Phi, a national fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men, pointed to his father in the crowd. ”He was the person I was most terrified to come out to,” he said. “And now he’s my biggest supporter.”
As the crowd of about 75 people erupted in applause, two female students sporting backpacks strolled by. ”Wow,” one student said to her friend. “That’s really cool he could share that in front of all these people in the middle of campus. Really cool.”
Emily Kaplan, intern
Bill O’Brien Opens Spring Practice
Bill O’Brien was about halfway through his first spring practice press conference Monday afternoon when I got my turn at the mic. Changing the subject from the string of player personnel queries that understandably dominated the media questioning, I asked O’Brien if he’d had a chance to find a routine. It’s been a hectic seven weeks since he took over as Penn State’s head football coach, and I was curious how he was settling in.
“Other than the fact that I’m still in room five—well, I can’t give my room number out, but I’m on the fifth floor at the Penn Stater,” O’Brien said. “But I’m very settled in.”
The fact that he’s still living out of a suitcase speaks to how immersed O’Brien has been in his new role. That immersion goes even deeper this week as the Nittany Lions begin spring practice under their new coach, who will be getting his first live look at his players in actual football drills (winter workouts are limited to conditioning drills only). What has he learned so far, and what does he expect out of the next four weeks of practice, culminating next month with the annual Blue-White Game? Here are some highlights from Monday’s presser:
—The quarterback race is wide-open, with Matt McGloin, Rob Bolden, and Paul Jones currently sharing snaps. “There’s no starter,” O’Brien said, “and there won’t be a starter named possibly until the night before the Ohio game.” Meaning the 2012 season opener on Sept. 1.
—O’Brien hasn’t watched film of last year’s Penn State offense. “One of the things I wanted to do when I got here was start with a clean slate,” he said. “I didn’t want to make any judgments, especially offensively, not really knowing what they were doing scheme-wise. I wanted to evaluate them first on winter conditioning, then on spring practice.” I imagine he’ll learn a lot about his QBs over the next month.
—O’Brien said the team’s new strength and conditioning program, with an emphasis on free weights and the contagious intensity of new coach Craig Fitzgerald, has already paid dividends. He mentioned redshirt junior Adam Gress, a 6-foot-6, 306-pound offensive tackle, as a prime example. “He’s had a heck of a winter, and he’s already changed his body—he’s gone from looking one way to looking like a V-shape. That’s what you’re looking for.”
—Without getting specific, he also confirmed changes in the football support staff, alluding to rumors that have flown the past few weeks about some longtime secretaries, video staffers and others who are no longer with the program. “We’ve made a lot of changes there, and we’re really happy with the changes we’ve made,” he said. “One thing you’ll see with me, I like the phrase ‘less is more.’”
—The offense won’t review its own film until after spring practice. Until then, they’re watching tape of the New England Patriots’ offense, which O’Brien helped coach the past four years. “The basis of the Patriots’ offense will be run here,” O’Brien said, emphasizing that fans shouldn’t expect the Lions’ offense to be as elaborate or explosive as the Pats’ high-powered attack—at least, not right away. “Let’s be real clear: We’ll put in the core, then we’ll build on it in training camp.”
—He got specific about how the Lions will utilize their tight ends the same way the Patriots did—hopefully with a similar outcome. With O’Brien on staff, New England regularly went with two and even three tight ends, creating match-up problems for opposing defenses and leading to lots of touchdowns. “One of the things about the tight end position in our system, second to quarterback, it’s really the hardest position to learn,” O’Brien said. “You can do so many different things, but it’s all up to how those guys learn.”
—Asked about who will be running the offense from the sideline this fall, O’Brien was blunt: “Oh yeah, I’ll call the offensive plays.”
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Gen Ed Classes: A Lot of Learning, A Little Bit of Fun
Twice a year, I find myself staring at my computer screen feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed.
When it comes time to schedule classes, I’m always intimidated by eLion’s lists and lists of courses. That’s what happens when you go to a school with 40,000 students and more than 160 majors. I’m usually fine with classes in my areas of study (journalism and English), but general education courses are a different story. There simply are too many. Some seem intriguing; some, not so much.
Gen-ed requirements have changed a lot over the years: Now, all baccalaureate degree programs include a 45-credit gen-ed component, including three credits in health and physical activity, nine credits in natural science, six credits in art, six credits in humanities, and six credits in social and behavioral sciences.
So as students begin to schedule for fall 2012, I took a look at some of Penn State’s more interesting gen-ed courses. I begin with a class I took last year—a class where SpongeBob appears on the syllabus.
*
Course: Geosci 040: The Sea Around Us
Requirement satisfied: GN (Natural Science)
Why I took it: I’m not a science person at all. I had to late drop meteorology my freshman year (who knew predicting weather included calculus?) and needed an easier science class to take.
Interesting assignment: Once, we reported to the HUB-Robeson Center for class. Our lab that day consisted of analyzing the aquarium on the bottom floor. I had no idea there was such an intricate ecosystem living just 100 feet away from Sbarro’s. The most interesting aspect, to me, was that the 500-gallon tank has a self-regulated lighting system, which gets dark at night to mimic the real ocean.
What I got out of it: A new appreciation for beaches and environmentalism. When I visited Cape Cod last summer, I had a hard time looking at the dunes without thinking about how big they once were, and how they got there.
*
Course: CMLIT 120: The Literature of the Occult
Requirement satisfied: GH (Humanities)
Interesting assignment: Read the third installment of the Harry Potter series.
What you can get out of it: “In all honesty, an appreciation for the Harry Potter series,” says Alexa Agugliaro, who says she wasn’t on the J.K. Rowling bandwagon before enrolling in the course. “There are a lot of major drabby classes that people have to take while they’re here, so why not, if you have the room, take a cool class about like vampires and monsters.” It’s not all Harry Potter and Twilight, though. Agugliaro wrote her final term paper on the witches in Macbeth.
Side note: Agugliaro says the teacher wore a wizard hat and a robe every day and had a magic wand.
*
Course: KINES 028: Fencing
Requirement satisfied: GHA (Health and Physical Activity)
Interesting assignment: Just fence. Senior Matt Giacometti said there’s not much variety to the course, but he doesn’t mind. Students participate in basic drills, then fence each other. “It’s fun,” Giacometti says. “Exactly what you want from the class.”
What you can get out of it: “A ton,” Giacometti says. “I’m learning from coaches that have succeeded at the highest level. These guys have coached Olympians.” Giacometti’s professors for the course? Assistant coaches with the Penn State varsity fencing team—a program with 12 national championships and more than 170 All-Americans in the last 28 years. Did you know that Suzie Paxton ’93, a former Nittany Lion fencer and 1996 Olympian, started fencing in this gym class?
*
Course: Applied Linguistics 100
Requirement satisfied: GS (Social and Behavioral Sciences)
Interesting assignment: During one class, the students were asked to think of as many examples of semantic word as they could. As junior Jackie Giraldo recalls, “That was the first time I ever heard the word yinz,” Giraldo says.
What you can get out of it: Says Giraldo: “I learned how language has evolved over time, but also got a deeper look at how words have evolved, how syntax has evolved, and why things are said different ways in different places. I definitely have a new appreciation of communication of different cultures.”
*
Course: INART 115: Popular Music in America
Requirement satisfied: GA (Arts)
Interesting assignment: Students were required to participate in online discussions. One debate revolved around who is the most influential musician today, with one student making a good case that the answer was definitively Lady Gaga.
What you can get out of it: “I now understand the hardships that a lot of musicians had to endure in the past in great music from that, era like the jazz and blues,” junior Jared Cruz says. “And it also influenced the development of music nowadays.”
Emily Kaplan, intern
Videogames in the Classroom? They Might Help Boys Learn
Every chair was taken, causing the staff at Schlow Memorial Library to quickly add a few more rows in the back of the room. But still, some people had to stand in the back of the room, and others peeked in through the doors.
They came to the spring’s first talk in the Research Unplugged series—which is designed to connect Penn State’s researchers with the State College community—to hear Alison Carr-Chellman, department head and professor instructional systems in the College of Education, discuss how the U.S. school system is failing boys. Looking out at the crowd, she said, “I do think the gender issue brings out lots of people.”
It certainly does. Carr-Chellman gave a talk about the issue at TEDxPSU in 2010, and since the video was posted on the main TED website, she’s received at least one email or phone call every day. She believes that a combination of Zero Tolerance policies (designed to stop bullying and violence) that are carried too far, a drop in the number of male elementary school teachers, and a collaborative learning culture that discourages competition and individualism are causing boys to tune out in the classroom—and eventually drop out.
She provided a lot of numbers to back up her position—check out The Boys Initiative or the 100 Girls Project, which has found, for instance, that for every 100 girls who are expelled from school, 325 boys are. And she talked about a provocative solution: incorporating videogames, even violent ones such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, into the classroom.
The way Carr-Chellman framed her talk was particularly clever. She asked, “What are boys like?” Then she showed a photo of her sons curled up together in a hammock, reading books—it was titled, “what we want them to be like.” She then showed a second photo—the same boys, outfitted for Halloween in full soldier regalia. “Halloween,” she said, laughing, “is all about, ‘Can I get a sword or an axe or a mace?’”
Just about everyone in the audience laughed knowingly.
Carr-Chellman understands that some teachers have reservations about using videogames, and she certainly doesn’t want to abolish Zero Tolerance programs. She’s also a feminist, and she doesn’t want to hinder girls’ progress at the expense of boys. But she wants policy makers and teachers to think about ways to keep boys engaged in the classroom. “This is a symptom of a larger problem,” she said. “They need to feel confident.”
The issue is complex, and it deserves a thorough treatment; we’re working on a story about Carr-Chellman and her research for an upcoming issue. In the meantime, you can check out her TEDxPSU talk here, and watch an excerpt from her Research Unplugged talk here.
And if you’re in the State College area on a Thursday between now and April 19, stop by Schlow Memorial Library, on the corner of Beaver Avenue and Allen Street, for additional speakers. The talks start at 12:15 p.m. and last for about an hour. They’re always worth the time.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
A Comedy Connection
Keegan-Michael Key '96g and Jordan Peele (as Barack Obama) in a sketch for their Comedy Central show.
It’s not often that scripted television makes me laugh out loud. As a full-fledged reality TV junkie, I’m far more likely to crack up watching the latest Real Housewives blowout or a melodramatic rose ceremony on The Bachelor.
So you can imagine my shock when I found myself in hysterics during Key and Peele, a new sketch comedy show on Comedy Central. The sketches are smart — politically incorrect, but not mean-spirited. And both title stars are very, very funny.
Some of our readers might remember that the “Key” in the title is a Penn Stater: Keegan-Michael Key ’96g earned his MFA at Penn State, and doubly cool, he’s buddies with Ty Burrell ’97g, from ABC’s Modern Family. Both actors have roots in Utah. In this interview from The Salt Lake Tribune, Key mentions their connection, and Burrell made a cameo in a recent Key and Peele sketch.
Key and Peele premiered in January, and it’s been earning rave reviews, like this one from the Los Angeles Times. It airs Tuesdays at 10:30 on Comedy Central.
Mary Murphy, associate editor
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