Lions, Panthers and Owls: Fiscal Reality May Encourage Once-Unholy Alliances

Here’s a fun one for the kids:

Cross a Nittany Lion with a Temple Owl and a Pitt Panther. What do you get?

One gnarly-looking house pet? you suggest. Fair enough.

But that unholy freak of nature just might help answer Pennsylvania’s ongoing budget woes.

I’ll explain.

Without exception, leaders of Pennsylvania’s state-related universities — Lincoln, Penn State, Pitt and Temple — have reiterated that everything must be on the table in light of the roughly 50 percent state-appropriation reduction proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett.

They could cut programs; they could cut people. Tuition could increase substantially — though they’ve said students should not, and will not, shoulder the brunt of the possible new hardship.

But another, less-highlighted possibility has arisen, too: some kind of expanded collaboration, or perhaps even a merger, involving some unspecified number of Pennsylvania’s state-supported college and universities. Those include not only the state-related universities, but also the 14 schools of the State System of Higher Education — including Lock Haven.

The prospect of merger discussions was raised only fleetingly in a Moody’s Investors Service analysis earlier this month.

Then, on Wednesday last week, state Sen. John P. Blake said this during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing:

‘What can we do, going down the road, to look at higher education as a whole?’ the Scranton Democrat asked the presidents of the state-related universities, including Penn State’s Graham Spanier.

Have the state-supported universities and colleges given thought to ‘getting together’? Blake asked. Is there a way for them to work together more closely? he wondered aloud.

Pitt’s chancellor, Mark Nordenberg, fielded the question for his university and his three colleagues at the hearing table.

He said the institutions have a history of being able to work together, and that ‘I see no reason why we could not do that in the years ahead.’

In the recent past, Nordenberg went on, it seemed that some state policies ‘seemed intended to keep us at each other’ rather than to encourage collaboration. There’s been some perception, he said, that the government has pitted the state-system schools against the state-related universities.

Nordenberg didn’t elaborate much beyond that, and Spanier, Temple President Ann Weaver Hart and Lincoln President Ivory Nelson didn’t jump in with any immediate assists on the subject.

Still, doesn’t the whole potential scenario make you wonder?

Perhaps the state’s big universities could find new efficiencies if they were to merge some back-office work, purchasing practices, programming and other functions.

Makes me wonder how their respective alumni might react. Would they would give less money, and be less supportive, if their alma maters’ identities were seen as watered down? Or would they be happy to see practical new efficiencies and therefore be more likely to be supportive?

And given how much each university has invested in developing and marketing its own organizational image, you have to wonder, too: How much would they really be willing to streamline, to unify, to collaborate, to be viewed — potentially — as one, at least in part?

Then again, in our new fiscal realities, imaging may become a relatively insignificant concern. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

After all, as Spanier noted last week, higher education at large is dealing with a philosophical tug-of-war right now.

At one end of the rope are those who believe that higher education is just a private good — beneficial simply for the person who receives it. As a private good, they say, higher education should be financed only by those who receive it, and not by the government.

But at the other end of the rope are those who see higher education as a public good, as Spanier said. He put himself in that camp, arguing that educating the general population — and creating opportunity for the less-well-off — yields benefits for all of society.

In fact, Spanier said, that’s the idea upon which Penn State was founded.

With that core principle now under sustained fire, once-unimaginable measures may well be central to Pennsylvania public universities’ ongoing vitality.

So can Lions, Panthers and Owls learn to love one another?

This may be the year we find out.