As a long term club seat holder, I was recently contacted by a staff member of PSU club seats department who does outreach to club seat holders. He traveled from Penn State to my home town to see me and other club seat holders-his boss is Penn State football great Bob White who has been in charge of club seats for many years. He obviously wants me and others to increase charitable donations to PSU athletics (scholarship funds) and for richer (than me) donors to give larger amounts for PSU athletic building projects funding. This man was incredibly nice, knew his stuff, and was not pushy in any way. For those who do not know, season ticket holders have to give a minimum annual fee which goes to a fund that among other things supports scholarships for hundreds of athletes in the nonrevenue sports and they have many other fund raising or philantropic activities. One of the things he stressed to me is that the relatively new Morgan Academic center, connected to the Lasch Building, is home to academic support services for athletes. He stressed that graduation rates for PSU athletes, which have always been very good, have even improved more since the enhanced academic supports through the Morgan Center-nice to hear. I was surprised to hear that PSU has over 300 staff who work in fundraising or philantropic support and that PSU is now in middle of over a 2 billion fundraising program (obviously for PSU as a whole, not athletic program). Clearly, he knows that PSU is recruiting for a new President and that Sandy Barbour will likely retire in the not so distant future-thus there will be major changes in PSU administration both in the academic and athletic end in the near future. We did discuss how PSU has recently done well with incredibly high charitable giving to nursing program and that the Engineering building project will exceed $750 million dollars. We discussed upcoming Lasch Building project whose funding was approved by PSU Board and that this project is a key one now. lastly, there is a huge study for renovation needs (or replacement ?) of Beaver stadium. He indicated that if a new stadium were to be constructed it would cost over a billon (B word) dollars. However, he did not think that there will be decisions on Beaver stadium project until new administration takes place which makes sense as it could be a major project. I did enjoy meeting with this man and he has been impressed by PSU coaches and support staff! Time will tell as to what changes new administration -University president and athletic director- will bring but hopefully they will be positive ones. One last note: he worked at football games last year in which mainly only family members were able to attend because of Covid. He said it was so quiet in the stadium he could hear every word (some nice, some less than nice) yelled on the sidelines to PSU players! This year it hopefully will be very loud in the stadium so the words coaches scream at players is not heard!
Philanthropy at PSU and fundraising for athletic buildings and athletic scholarships
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