Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

A Portrait of a University
as a Young Citizen
Jeremy Cohen
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe,
whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my
church; and I will try to express myself in some mode
of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can,
using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to
use, silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moo
cow coming down the road,” James Joyce began his largely autobiographical
novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The good times
at Penn State, and very good times they have been, are legendary.
A student will shout, “We are!” A louder “Penn State!” follows, not
just the retort of a Saturday afternoon stadium chorus, but also the
exuberant response of first-time visitors on campus tours who want
to belong to the community, our community, even if only for the hour
it takes to walk by the library, under the elms on the mall, across
from the new glass and brick Information Science and Technology
Building, always in earshot of the recorded carillon piped from the
Old Main Tower, and ending at the T-shirt rack of the student store.
Penn State, like Joyce’s novel, rarely sits for an easy stereotype.
The Princeton Review ranked Penn State the number two party school
for 2006. That is part of the community’s ethos. But there is more.
Washington Monthly’s poll, ranking universities for their service
to the nation, awarded Penn State the number 3 slot for the same
12 months.
Joyce blurred exploratory imagery of infancy through the
complex intellectual coming of age of an Irish writer. An emerging
Penn State faculty and student cohort are in their own ways also
coming of age, struggling with questions about university mission
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