Barron passes the torch at Penn State University
President will step down on Sunday
Commencement has a different meeting for Penn State University President Eric Barron this year.
After eight-plus years as president — and 28 total years of service — at one of America’s biggest public universities, Mr. Barron is stepping down Sunday as Penn State’s 18th president when he will turn the job over to Neeli Bendapudi, the former president at the University of Louisville who was elected by trustees in December.
Trustees honored Mr. Barron on Friday with the Penn State Medal, for outstanding contributions to the university and higher education; emeritus president status; and the permanent naming of a small business seeding and startup center in State College as the Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub.
For the outgoing president, it’s the end of a barrage of meetings, dealing with different constituencies, fundraising, crisis management and everything else that comes with life in the presidential suite at Old Main. But just like the outgoing Class of ’22, Mr. Barron seems eager for the next set of adventures.
Mr. Barron said one of his most satisfying achievements was progress in making a Penn State education more accessible and affordable to all Pennsylvanians after a period in which there was a real risk that Penn State’s prices were starting to get out of reach for many students from working-class families.
For one thing, Penn State was able to hold the line on in-state student tuition for four of the past eight years. But in addition to that, Mr. Barron’s administration has developed a number of
programs aimed at making sure that all students understand the importance of and have the opportunity to earn their degree in four years, as the best way to avoid unnecessary student debt.
“This university has gone beyond the notion that a scholarship or a tuition freeze is enough to support students,” Mr. Barron told
PennLive. “We’ve created a whole new set of scholarships that focused on getting students off to a fast start, on helping them to graduate on time,” and trying to prevent anyone from having to work more than 20 hours a week while in school.
More recently, there have been new initiatives aimed at addressing housing and food security.
“It’s this notion of looking holistically at student success and the variety of different ways that we can impact ... having what you need in order to live up to your potential is something that I’m incredibly proud of,” Mr. Barron said.
He also cited building a new emphasis on entrepreneurship at Penn State.
Most prominently, that’s been seen in Invent Penn State’s LaunchBox and Innovation Hub Network that now spans 21 locations in Penn State campus communities statewide, putting 96% of Pennsylvanians within a 30-mile drive of a LaunchBox location.
Those spaces provide a wide array of no-cost resources and specialized programs to help launch startup companies.
“We’ve taken a university that had no significant effort in entrepreneurship and — across the state with the Innovation Hubs, Launch boxes, with the competitions that we have, with the number of students that are doing startup companies — I really feel that that has been transformational for the university and to see itself and its land grant mission as not just agricultural extension but economic development extension,” Mr. Barron said.
Mr. Barron’s administration was born in the raw feelings engendered by the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, and all loose ends that it had created, whether in reaching some kind of rapprochement with the family of former head football coach Joe Paterno, who many alumni felt was unfairly scapegoated in the scandal; lawsuits with a faction of trustees over access to records that were used to develop the Freeh Report that became the pretext for NCAA sanctions against Penn State; the long-delayed criminal prosecution of one of his predecessors in the presidency, Graham Spanier; and the completion of settlement payments to Sandusky’s victims.
Then, there was the scrutiny created by the fraternity hazing death of student Timothy Piazza. And of course, the pandemic.
He referenced those times in his closing remarks to the board.
“We’ve had some ups and downs. And I will tell you, if I were a little bit younger I would do it all over again, even if I knew that it wouldn’t be smooth. Because this is a special place. And I really, really have appreciated and enjoyed being your president for eight years,” Mr. Barron said.