A column appeared a few weeks ago on StateCollege.com’s sister site Onward State discussing the retro uniforms that several Penn State athletic teams have worn – specifically women’s volleyball, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and, most recently, men’s soccer. The throwback uniforms use the university’s original pink and black colors rather than blue and white. The article went on to show mockups of pink and black uniforms for several other teams.
Of course, all we true-blue Penn State fans know the popular story of how we ended up with blue and white colors: That within three weeks after the new pink uniforms were unveiled back in the 1880s the sun faded the pink to a dull white. Soon thereafter the student body voted to change to navy blue and white.
Personally, I think someone or something was trying to send us a message back in the 1880s. I haven’t seen one pink and black retro Penn State uniform I thought was, well, presentable. History has spoken –pink and black don’t work – and we would do well to listen to it.
As I mentioned however, the Onward State article wasn’t content to leave history alone. They showed edited photos of what pink and black uniforms for field hockey, baseball, football, wrestling, women’s hockey and women’s tennis would look like. Interestingly, the design for the women’s hockey team didn’t have the Penn State name on the front. It read “Farmer’s High,” an homage to the original name of Penn State.
Of course we all know that story too: how the University was founded in 1855 as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania. It admitted its first class in 1859 and changed its name to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania in 1862. Then in 1863 it was designated the commonwealth’s sole land-grant institution, and in 1874 it became the Pennsylvania State College.
Confusingly, the Morrill Land-Grant Act had nothing to do with the college’s agricultural nature – in fact, just the opposite. The land-grant designation required broadening the college’s mission to include teaching, research and public service in many academic disciplines. The Act simply provided grants of federal land to the states, which they in turn would sell and use the money to fund the college. In Penn State’s case they sold 780,000 acres of land for $439,000, then converted the money into a $500,000 bond yielding 6% annually, which functioned as Penn State’s early “endowment. “
But the agricultural nature of Penn State’s origins and early history is what we remember – the Farmers’ High School. A history that’s hard to forget as you travel around Happy Valley. There are few places in town that are less than a few miles from barns, cornfields and cow pastures. If you look out from the Lynch Overlook on the top of Mt. Nittany or Jo Hays Vista on the top of Tussey Mountain, you see miles and miles of farmland. The smell of manure permeates the valley several days a year!
But time passes and industries change.
A quick little Business 101 primer: According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of goods and services produced by the labor and property located in a certain area, and is the bureau’s featured and most comprehensive measure of U.S. economic activity.
GDP is broken down into broad categories such as retail trade, wholesale trade, utilities, transportation, etc. One of those categories is “agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting.”
According to Statista, a global data and business intelligence platform that mines data from the BEA, in 2022 the GDP of Pennsylvania was $726 billion (for those with advanced business knowledge, that figure is in “millions of chained (2012) dollars”). The “finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing” category came out on top at $125 billion (17% of the PA economy). Professional and business services were next at $116 billion (16% of the PA economy).
However, “agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting” was dead last at $4 billion. 0.6% of the PA GDP. Six-tenths of one percent of the entire Pennsylvania GDP is attributed to agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting. I will admit to being surprised by that. (Agriculture does have a total economic impact in Pennsylvania of $132.5 billion annually, according to a report commissioned by the state agriculture department,)
The Farmers’ High School that first begat the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, then the Pennsylvania State College and, finally, the Pennsylvania State University, now exists in a state where agriculture contributes less than 1% to the state’s GDP. Penn State’s College of Agriculture touts on its website that agriculture has been at the core of the Penn State mission and identity, which is true in a historical sense, but this is now at odds with the financial reality of industry in Pennsylvania.
Well, you might ask, so what? Farming takes up a lot of land and appears – especially here in Happy Valley and for miles around – to be a bigger part of the economy than it is. Is it a problem that we still hold on to these outdated ideas of how we think things are versus how they really are? Can’t we revel in Penn State’s being a “world leader in agricultural research and learning, driving discovery and solutions that make life better?”
Of course we can.
Except for one potential issue. The affairs of the Pennsylvania State University are managed by a Board of Trustees that consists of 36 voting members. Six of those voting members are elected by delegates from organized agricultural societies and associations. In addition, the Pennsylvania secretary of agriculture is a voting member of the Board. That’s seven voting members out of 36 votes – 19.4% — that are related to agriculture. That seems to be a little bit of an overwhelming presence given agriculture’s influence in Pennsylvania’s current economy.
Now, I’m sure that the six agricultural trustees as well as the secretary of agriculture are fine individuals who are doing their best for Penn State. And, on a personal level, we do enjoy locally-grown produce, dairy products and especially our local beef. But shouldn’t other industries, whose importance to the PA economy in real dollars is greater than that of agriculture, be represented as well? Penn State is, after all, an “instrumentality of the state,” promoting the general welfare of the citizenry. Shouldn’t all parts of that citizenry get equal representation?
Well, if the goal is to keep the six agricultural trustees on the board, that’s not going to work if all the other industries get representation equal to their share of the PA economy. The board would number over 600 Trustees.
So, what to do?
I say just eliminate the six voting members elected by delegates from agricultural societies and increase the number of voting members elected by the alumni from nine to 15. That will give agriculturally-related alumni more opportunities to run for the Board. The Pennsylvania secretary of agriculture will remain a voting member, so there will always be some agricultural presence on the board, and the governor gets to appoint six voting members and can make one or more of them agriculturally-related if they so choose and feel the need is present.
We all love our Penn State history and lore, and really embrace the story of the Farmers’ High School. And as much as the athletic department has kept up with the times and occasionally remembers the past with retro throwback pink and black uniforms, maybe it’s time the Board of Trustees gets with the times, and as an instrumentality of the state, keeps the spirit of agriculture in place while adjusting to the realities of Pennsylvania’s economy. For the welfare – and glory – of not only Penn Staters everywhere, but all the citizenry of Pennsylvania.
