On Saturday night while Penn State football fans had either gone home or were celebrating around Happy Valley and enjoying Blue-White weekend, we were driving back on Interstate 80 from a youth soccer game in New Jersey, and were reminded how isolated our little chunk of paradise is here in the shadow of Mount Nittany.
During the drive we made a quick pit-stop at the rest area at mile marker 218 between the Danville and Limestoneville exits. Note to PennDOT: whoever is responsible for keeping the inside of that rest area clean does a fantastic job. Plus they use regular rolls of toilet paper in the stalls – not that gargantuan monstrosity of single-ply that either doesn’t move, rips every third sheet, or won’t spool off in a nice strip.
Now, it was a bit late, around 11 p.m., but not middle-of-the-night 3 a.m. late. Yet there wasn’t another person in the building, and only a solitary car in the parking lot off a distance from the entrance. Which was slightly unnerving for at least one of us – oddly enough the one who most enjoys the solitude of the woods at night (not me).
As we drove out of the rest area I remarked to my wife the highway seemed to be a road-a-lot-less-traveled that night, so I began to pay a little more attention to exactly how not-traveled it was. From that rest area until we exited I-80 at the Bellefonte exit (mile marker 161) we passed three tractor-trailers, two cars (one of which was sitting by the side of the road), and were passed by two cars — a total of seven vehicles over a stretch of 57 miles.
And this is not one of the many scenic and lightly-traveled two-lane roads that course between hill and dale all over central Pennsylvania. No, this is Interstate 80. At 2,899 miles it is the second-longest Interstate Highway in the United States, starts in downtown San Francisco and ends just across the Hudson River from New York City. It’s a limited-access four-lane divided highway (in this section of Pennsylvania) that most closely follows the path of the historic Lincoln Highway, the first road across the United States. In other words, it’s a popular and well-used road.
And we drove 57 miles of it on a spring Saturday evening and encountered a grand total of seven vehicles. That certainly qualifies as “in-the-middle-of-nowhere” in my mind.
Which brings me to the concept of benchmarking.
The Pennsylvania State University is the reason Happy Valley as we know it exists. If not for a few turns of historic fate in the mid-1800’s, State College wouldn’t be on a map because it wouldn’t have been founded. Bellefonte would be the biggest town around and the Bellefonte School District would likely stretch down the valley all the way to the Huntingdon County line.
With 17,000 full-time faculty and staff and more than 46,000 students, Penn State is directly responsible for 40 percent of Centre County’s population. And many of the rest of us are associated with the ancillary industries of catering to the needs of those 63,000 people. So, as we all know, when something affects Penn State, it generally affects all of us. And the last six years have affected us quite a bit.
Many things have changed – especially names and faces. The result of this will be for history and those who write the legends to decide. And as we know from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” when the legend becomes fact, sir, print the legend.
But with all this new blood looking to justify its existence, one thing Penn State should be cautious with is the concept of benchmarking, of using “industry best practices” to make decisions.
Certainly if we’re talking about the best way to dispose of nuclear fuel rods, or solve an equation, or transmit data, yes, benchmarking is a useful tool because for these types of things the correlation between Penn State and any other large university is likely to be valid. The properties of physics don’t change much between here and California or Florida.
For sociological decisions, however, things can and are different. Setting policies, creating regulations that deal with how people act, what they can do, where they can go — these things do change from place to place.
As far as large universities are concerned – those with a campus of 25,000 or more students – Penn State is one of only a select few that are geographically isolated (several hours) from a major population center of 1 million or more people. Think of the hometowns of large universities around the country – Ann Arbor, Columbus, Madison, Berkeley, Austin, Gainesville, Athens, Piscataway, College Park, Boulder, Minneapolis, College Station. All are in or near population centers. Virginia Tech in Blacksburg is the only other large university as similarly isolated as Penn State.
And that isolation affects the community. Benchmarking, or adopting industry-best practices that are in use at other large universities for rules, regulations and policies, can be short-sighted, unnecessary, wasteful, and produce unintended consequences.
It’s great that people have knowledge and skills they’ve learned in other jobs and at other places. It’s great to want to know how and what others are doing. It’s great to want to improve, and of course the desire to “keep up with the Joneses” is almost an American ideal. But it’s not great if the comparison information you use isn’t relevant.
It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite bumper-stickers. I saw it soon after moving to Orlando as a young northerner in 1986: “We don’t give a sh*t how you did it up north.”
If you find yourself in State College making decisions that affect people, not things, do yourself a favor. Get out every once in awhile, go for a drive, and remember where you are. Happy Valley. Gloriously out here in the middle-of-nowhere.
