The academic trustee at Penn State should carry a deep and enduring commitment to the integrity, vitality and future of this institution—not just the flagship campus, but the entire family of campuses that together form the Pennsylvania State University. In recent weeks, the suggestion that we must shutter some of our campuses to ensure the university’s vitality has been met with impassioned responses. I write today to add my voice—not in denial of the challenges we face, but to advocate for a vision of resilience, renewal and responsibility.
Two recent pieces—“Abandoning Our Soul Should Not Be an Option” and “An Open Letter to the Penn State Board of Trustees”—capture the intensity and emotion that many Penn Staters feel in response to the discussion of possible closures. They speak to something that I, too, believe: that the idea of simply eliminating a campus when it ceases to appear “profitable” is fundamentally at odds with our identity and mission as a land-grant university.
It is tempting to treat institutions like businesses, especially in moments of fiscal stress. But Penn State is not a business—it is a public trust. Our campuses are not line items to cut or assets to liquidate; they are integral parts of the whole. They are family. And while every family faces difficult seasons, we do not abandon one another when times are hard. We come together.
That said, I also believe—perhaps counterintuitively—that the recent debate over possible campus closures has been a productive and necessary conversation. Not because closures are the right solution, but because the mere suggestion of them has revealed something important: how little real discussion there has been in past decades about the role and future of our Commonwealth Campuses.
For too long, we operated under a kind of uneasy silence. The campuses seemed safe if only because no one was explicitly threatening them. This sense of security, however, was a false positive. In reality, their stability was based not on strategic reaffirmation, but on strategic avoidance. There were always rumors of closures, but the hard conversations were always deferred. The net effect: the campuses were left to operate under increasing demographic and economic constraints without a clear institutional mandate for the future.
This recent moment of crisis, unsettling as it is, has forced all of us—administrators, faculty, trustees, students, alumni and community members—to say out loud what we think these campuses are for, who they serve, and what they need to thrive. We’ve seen their communities rally, faculty and staff speak with pride and urgency, and students articulate just how essential these campuses are to their lives. In some ways, we are learning more about the character of our campuses now than we have in years. I can only imagine if we had rigorous conversation of this sort every five years for the past 50—without doubt, we’d be in a very different place today.
Let me be clear: these campuses did not ask to be created. We—Penn State—established them, strategically and intentionally, to meet the educational and economic needs of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And for decades, they have done just that. Often underfunded, frequently overlooked and sometimes operating in challenging local economies, these campuses have nonetheless offered high-quality education, economic opportunity and community engagement to regions that might otherwise be left behind.
So now, in this moment of heightened awareness, I say this: let us not confuse vulnerability with failure. Let us not mistake the need for renewal as justification for abandonment.
Nicholas J. Rowland is the Academic Trustee on the Penn State Board of Trustees and a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Penn State Altoona.
