Eric J. Barron brings 35 years of leadership experience in academic administration, education, research, and public service to Penn State. He became the 18th president of Penn State in May 2014, returning to the university after serving as president of Florida State University since 2010.
Barron spent 20 years of his career at Penn State, including serving as dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences from 2002 to 2006 and as founding director of the Earth System Science Center. In 1999, he was named Distinguished Professor of Geosciences at Penn State.
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in geology at Florida State and his master’s degree and PhD in oceanography at the University of Miami. He has previously served as director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and as dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
Town & Gown founder Mimi Barash Coppersmith sat down with Barron at the Allen Street Grill in State College to discuss alumni relations and Penn State’s new $30 million initiative called Invent Penn State, a commonwealth-wide set of investments that will drive economic development, a culture of entrepreneurship, and student career success. The aim is to accelerate the transfer of new ideas into useful products and build a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem around the campuses.
Mimi: So let’s start, talk about some of the work you’ve done with the alumni since you’ve become president.
Eric: It really has been in three categories. One is to do as many alumni events as we can at different places: locally, taking advantage of when people are here, but also in different states, and so maybe 15 different states where it’s a reception and I talk about the university and then I take questions on any topic. I’ve done that in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tampa, and Miami.
Mimi: And what is the mood of the alumni in general?
Eric: I do alumni and donor events that are lunches or dinners for 30 or 40 people as well as a lot of one-on-one meetings, probably a total of more than 8,000 alumni. People are hungry for the good news about Penn State, and this is a group that I would say is used to the fact that they have much to be proud of.
Mimi: We also get the alumni with the Penn Stater magazine.
Eric: We do, and if they get the Penn Stater they have a more positive view. But even if you look at the Penn Stater, much of it is what I would call more personal-interest stories or event oriented.
Mimi: It also has letters that give points and reviews.
Eric: But misses those areas of excellence that you see if you’re a part of the university. So, there are all sorts of areas for which we are doing extremely well. We have external viewpoints from independent agencies that also tell us how the university is functioning, and then we have anecdotal information from external folks, as well. What you discover are the types of things that our alumni are hungry to hear about.
Mimi: I spent 21 years on the board of trustees. I can’t imagine how you are impacted in the preparation for those meetings and in the presentations, the degree to which you are frustrated by people within your own family, so to speak.
Eric: This is one way to look at it. We’re making a huge investment in Invent Penn State — how to make the university more entrepreneurial, how to get our ideas into the marketplace, how to create successes for our students — and it’s a significant effort. And you can spend a lot of time talking about that, presenting it, telling it to the community, but the discussion switches to something that’s in the Freeh materials, and that’s what ends up in the paper and not Invent Penn State. That part is very frustrating because a lot of good ideas don’t get the same attention as they might.
Mimi: Well, collaboration is possible if the people involved want to solve it. I wish you well in that. I hope it can happen.
Eric: I think eventually it will. Look at the progress we’ve been making on solving the issues such as getting the wins back, getting bowl games back, no longer on probation, and being able to get the revenue from those bowls, step by step. Issues are being resolved, as are the court cases. We’ll get to the point I think where we can focus purely on Penn State’s mission.
Mimi: Meanwhile, you have put your arms around the community, the town. Tell me how you’re progressing on this great economic venture.
Eric: Invent Penn State has about 12 different areas of focus in four major themes. One of which is how in the university we can make it more entrepreneurial and have more faculty, staff, and students more interested in bringing their ideas to the marketplace. A second part is to add visibility to the ideas that are in the university. I would say very few people have anywhere near a sense of all the wonderful things going on at Penn State and the ideas that are coming there. The third is to build an ecosystem within the community. That means if a student is starting a company that they think, “State College is a great place to do that. I love it here.” Maybe the past history is they’ll go out in the world and then they’ll come back and retire here. Well what about the middle? Can we make this a very entrepreneurial community where people want to create their companies here? This part is particularly important to the community. So what we’ve done is lease the Verizon building across from the Municipal Building, and we’ll take individuals who have good ideas or who win some of the competitions, like an incubator, and get them mentored in terms of the legal issues of setting up a corporation, capital, and business function. We’ll have an alumni mentoring program where our alumni can drop in a day a month, a week for a year, from all over the world.
Mimi: How is the Verizon incubator different than the existing incubator possibilities?
Eric: Part of our idea is this is quite a bit of mentoring and has a broader opening, unlike what you might have at Innovation Park. You come out of IST Startup Week and you win a prize, and maybe this is a good place for you to start. We actually want the psychology that the university is assisting you in developing your company, but we want you to do it in the community. I actually want you to walk off campus and walk to a place inside State College and work to create your company.
Mimi: What do we in the community have to do to help implement that road to success?
Eric: One of the things that we will do is find mechanisms to open up these ideas to venture capitalists. We need the community to have a place where we can pass companies that are doing well to another part of the community because it can’t stay in the free space forever. They will need partners that will continue to mentor. When you think about it, the university’s facilitating these startups, these ideas, and we need the community to support that and even pass them into the community, because what else are you going to do? They start, they get a great idea, and they go to San Francisco to execute, where they pay an enormous amount of rent but they’ve got a community of other entrepreneurs there that have value and access to some capital there, probably more freely than they do here. We have to fix those problems, even create the sort of density of entrepreneurs here that has people saying, “Oh, I can stay here. I’ve got the talent of the university. I’ve got the workforce coming out of the university. I have a community that’s supportive. I want to start my company in State College.”
Mimi: You’re not only thinking in fresh ways on the economic side of things but you’re thinking about it on the cultural side, as well. Tell us about it.
Eric: I think there are lots of different components here. The university has a wealth of arts — performing, visual arts, a wealth of museums and collections. But if you think about it, it’s hard to access. It isn’t State College as a destination, and it should be. So, imagine you have 35 different museums and collections around the campus. Does a school bus come in and stop at one small collection and then the next small collection? That’s not very efficient. You think about the Palmer Art Museum. You have to make a decision to go, find a place to park, and walk through that collection. It’s a wonderful collection. It’s almost as if it’s too hard to access all the wonderful things that are going on, and there are no accidental visitors. You have to have intent to do it. So, one of the things we’re imagining is you can think about the arboretum as a destination, a museum of science, technology, and natural history as a destination, theater as a destination. Could you design a place in all those categories where I would arrive intentionally, and I’m going to this science, technology, natural history museum, but to get there I’m walking through the arboretum. Or I’m going to the theater and I’m just strolling through the gardens. Or I’m strolling through the gardens and look, here’s this wonderful art museum. I’d like to have people view State College and the university as a destination for their arts and entertainment and for museum culture so people will come from a distance because they know they can spend a day.
Mimi: There has been some discussion about how do we bring some of that into the downtown.
Eric: If you do this and you create a destination, it will enrich the town tremendously because now what will these people do when they visit for the day? Well, let’s go out to a restaurant. Let’s go do X. Let’s go do Y.
Mimi: Here you are having the determination and courage to enter into a relationship with the business community to help make this happen. What are your predictions?
Eric: The enthusiasm for Invent Penn State has been so great, I don’t see how it can fail. We certainly can do a lot better than we’ve been doing. I just don’t see how we won’t end up having more startups. I don’t see how we won’t do a better job of attracting some industry. We can have a whole community of entrepreneurs that are coming up with all sorts of ideas that become a part of the world, and we’ll have fun doing it. Education is the product in State College. So why aren’t we the center of the world in working in the educational-technology sector? We could be. We just never tried it. How do you parlay the natural things that are going on into a set of companies that feel very at home here?
Mimi: Well, AccuWeather is.
Eric: AccuWeather is a perfect example of a company borne out of the expertise of the university. Now instead of having an entrepreneur like Joel Myers sit there and do this on his own, you’re conscientiously thinking how do we create more Joel Myers? And then what do you do to make this an even stronger destination so people want to live here? And to me, that means arts, museums, and arboretums, culture, and sports and all the outdoor activities that you can do that are kind of hidden but are fantastic in our community. In many ways, I think it all fits together.
Mimi: Is there any work on the way to create a venture-capital fund?
Eric: There are several things that we’re thinking about. We’ve been looking at companies that do this and are accelerators that have enough reputation to bring in capital. We’re looking at the notion of a Penn State branded platform that’s open to our communities and to our alumni. They could see the ideas in a set format and business plan, read business plan after business plan that’s coming out of the faculty, staff, and students, and they can decide to invest. This is a deliberate effort to make our intellectual property much more visible to venture capitalists. There is a plan to have what’s called an IP Fair (Intellectual Property Fair) — the first one held in the fall of 2016. We intend to fill the Bryce Jordan Center full of Penn State ideas. If people know that this is happening, they’ll be able to wander around and decide for themselves. We’ll have money on the table for the best ideas to help kick-start companies themselves, and hopefully this will be a draw for people who want to invest.
Mimi: When do you predict we’ll get a red-hot company out of this?
Eric: There are red-hot companies that came out this year. There’s a young company, it was one of the companies at IST Startup Week, Mobium Solutions. It’s focused on 3D printing, adaptive manufacturing. This is a strength of Penn State. The students have looked at what slows down 3D printing — you print something and then you print something else and then you combine them. They have created a device to automate this. They won one of the IST Startup Prizes. Then, there’s a national competition with a donor and MIT, and they won that national competition. I’ll give you another example: when someone has a stroke, they frequently get very depressed because they can’t sense the progress they’re making in getting better and getting control over their muscles. Even though you’re making progress, it doesn’t feel like they can do things — there’s that level of frustration, and they might actually give up. Yet, we wear devices that tell us how many steps we’re taking and miles we’ve walked, so how about a wearable device that accesses progress for stroke victims in terms of their muscle function? Students are designing this. There’s a group of students understanding stroke recovery, and here’s another group of students that are thinking about sensors and wearable devices, and another group of people who know how to program different applications. These are the ideas borne out of a university like Penn State. Truthfully, I just want them to be successful. That’s all I want. But if they’re all successful in Pennsylvania and State College, that’s even better.
Mimi: One final question, entirely different subject. The biggest issue that’s a hurdle to higher education is the cost. What’s your suggestion in solving that problem?
Eric: There are several elements here. Believe it or not, I think that’s also connected to Invent Penn State in a strange way. I believe with the economic downturn we lost a connection with states and the public good of the university. And now, study after study is showing that basically the tuition increases and the increases in out-of-state students just replaced decreases in state funding. In all of the research universities in the US, there’s actually less money for the students, if you add tuition and fees and state appropriation. We’ve lost this sense of the public good, and universities have to do a better job of going back and saying, “Here’s what we do for the commonwealth.” And so Invent Penn State is another part of that conversation about the value of the university to the community. One way to change the cost is to have people believe it’s worthy to fund. Second, see if Penn State does a wonderful job of graduating people, and if you burrow in you see that we have a bigger portion of the population that take longer to graduate. They’re working harder and, in the process, taking longer to graduate. They pay more and borrow more. And so, what we have to do is make sure those students graduate more quickly. Total cost of the degree is the larger issue, not tuition. We’ve launched six different initiatives. We’re piloting them to drive down the cost of a degree while increasing completion rates and on-time completion rates for the important need-based population. I think we actually have the potential to see our student-debt numbers go down, but it will take time.
Mimi: Thank you so much!
Eric: Thank you!
