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Editor's note: As the Intercom went to press late Monday, the governor was expected to sign this legislation.
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives, following a similar vote in the state Senate, recently passed House Bill 55, which establishes that property owned by state-related universities such as Penn State is considered public property and is therefore tax exempt. The House vote was 194 to 0 and the Senate vote was 47 to 0. The governor is expected to sign the bill.
While the courts have consistently ruled in Penn State's favor when the question of taxing the University has arisen, that has not stopped some entities from trying to impose taxes on Penn State's property.
"We are very pleased that this legislation once and for all clarifies our status," said President
Graham B. Spanier. "It will soon be a state law that is clear and unambiguous with regard to our tax status. Penn State is an instrumentality of the Commonwealth that serves the public good."
University officials were quick to note that Penn State fully intends to honor the current in-lieu-of-tax agreement that Penn State has entered with local governments in the State College area.
"We have said all along that we will honor the current agreement, and we intend to do that," said Gary Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business. "We want to be good neighbors and partners in this community."
The legislation, which is titled "The Institutions of Purely Public Charity Act," establishes that because state-related universities provide a direct public benefit and serve the public purposes of the Commonwealth, the property owned by state-related universities such as Penn State will be considered public property for purposes of taxation. This does not apply to University property leased to a for-profit enterprise. Penn State currently pays property taxes on commercial facilities on University land, such as the Hotel at the Penn Stater.
In addition to exempting the state-related universities, the bill also codifies the tax exemption for purely public charities, and outlines a set of five criteria to establish whether an organization is a public charity.
After the bill is signed by Gov. Ridge, it will go into effect on Jan.
1, 1998. 
Under the school district's proposed amusement tax, concert tickets like
these
to the upcoming Kenny Rogers show would have an additional 5 percent added
to the price.
By Lisa M. Rosellini
Public Information
University officials plan to go to court against the State College Area School District to protect the tax-exempt status of Penn State.
On Monday, Nov. 24, school board members voted to adopt an amusement tax that will impose a 5-percent fee on all forms of entertainment, diversions, sports and pastimes for which an admission of $10 or more is charged, including Penn State football games. University officials say the move not only violates a 1992 tax agreement between Penn State and the school district, but is also unenforceable with regard to Penn State.
As an instrumentality of the state, the University is immune from local taxation, according to Gary C. Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business/treasurer for the University. Recent legislation (see page one) clarifying Penn State's tax-exempt status bolsters that position. The legislation, expected to be signed by the governor, outlines standards that charities and other nonprofit groups must meet to qualify as tax-exempt. State-related institutions like Penn State are considered public property for purposes of taxation.
The school district's success at collecting an amusement tax from the University would nullify a 1992 tax settlement agreement among Penn State, five local governing bodies and the school district. Under the agreement, Penn State pays out about $1 million per year in cash and in-kind services to Centre County, Ferguson, Patton and Harris townships, and State College Borough, plus the State College Area School District.
The agreement, which includes an inflationary clause, had previously been among six local governments and the school district, until April 1996 when College Township officials pulled out to enact a 5-percent amusement tax on events held at Penn State. At that time, University officials also challenged the validity of the tax and filed suit. That case was withdrawn after Penn State and College Township entered into an agreement which provided for Penn State to make impact payments related to non-university events held in The Bryce Jordan Center.
Earlier last month, school board members rejected an offer from Penn State to increase the total annual payment from the University and University-related properties from $375,000 to $490,000 -- which represents the full local cost of educating children living in University housing. The University intends to honor the current tax settlement agreement with the five remaining local governments, but the school district will no longer be eligible to receive payments due to its attempt to impose and collect a tax on the University.
"We are disappointed that the school board has taken this action, particularly when Penn State made a generous and unprecedented offer to compensate the school district fully for the cost of educating children living in University housing," said Stephen J. MacCarthy, director of University Relations. "There was no effort on the part of the school board to hold any kind of public hearing or discussion on the proposal. We had hoped to work out an amicable agreement with the district, but now we have little recourse other than the courts."
Schultz said court action is obviously not the route University officials had hoped to go, but all previous court cases relating to taxation have ruled in favor of the tax-exempt status of state-related universities.
"We continue to be committed to the importance of maintaining the tax-exempt status of Penn State," Schultz said. "Penn State brings many beneficial things to the community, some that cannot be quantified. The benefits to the local economy from one home football game alone are significant and cannot be discounted."
The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Business & Industry of Centre County agreed and made a point of telling school board members -- to no avail -- in a Nov. 6 letter that it questioned "the prudence" of their actions to enact an amusement tax.
"We believe the enactment of such a tax would irrevocably impair what has been a very positive relationship between Penn State and the school district," the CBICC directors said. "A better course of action would be to continue to negotiate with Penn State during the remaining years of the agreement while receiving your annual payment."
Just a few examples of benefits Penn State provides that are not often taken into account include the community's use of Pattee Library, Recreation Building, the Intramural Building, the Palmer Museum of Art and other museums on campus, the playing fields, skating and tennis facilities, the Natatorium, speech and hearing clinics and the Stone Valley Recreation Area.
Katilina and Derek, children of niversity employee Annette
Struble, play happily at the
Child Development Laboratory in Henderson Building, one of four child care
facilities
currently operated by or affiliated with Penn State's University Park.
Photo: Greg Grieco
By Lisa M. Rosellini
Public Information
Moving ahead with plans to provide access to quality child care, the University has identified a site on the University Park campus along East College Avenue where by 1999 a new child care center will stand.
"In keeping with an action plan we outlined in 1996, we have identified an on-campus space for a child care facility that will continue to meet the care giver needs of our faculty, staff and students, and support them and their families," said President Graham B. Spanier. "This facility should provide parents with an even wider range of child care options and the flexibility to continue their work and studies."
The new center, expected to accommodate 140 children, will replace some of the last vestiges of post-World War II housing erected on campus during the late 1940s. The prefabricated dwellings were built to alleviate a housing crunch caused by the influx of returning veterans who took advantage of the GI Bill of 1944. In 1946, Penn State experienced a record enrollment of 10,500 students -- 55 percent of whom were veterans. The need for student housing, as well as faculty housing, was dire and the 76 units of Eastview Terrace, as the site is currently called, were quickly built.
Initially constructed for faculty and their families, Eastview Terrace was later converted to its current use as residences for married graduate students. A little more than 35 of the original units are still standing. Some of these units may be removed as the project gets under way.
As part of the project, which is currently under design by the architectural firm of Keiran, Timberlake & Harris of Philadelphia, some of the graduate student housing may be replaced on the same stretch of land near the child care facility, while other graduate student housing is expected to be constructed at another location yet to be determined. That project should begin in 1999 and be completed by 2002. About 275 apartments will be built. The total cost of the graduate housing project is $25 million, while the cost for constructing the child care facility is $2.3 million.
"A primary goal of this project is to not only provide increased child care options on campus but to also improve graduate student housing conditions," said Charles Brueggebors, University architect. "These units have been on campus for more than five decades and are ready for replacement."
Brueggebors said the property along East College Avenue is also somewhat of a main gateway to the University Park campus, highly visible to vehicular traffic. An added bonus to the project will be the opportunity to improve the aesthetics of the area.
Linda Pierce, coordinator of Work/Life Programs in the Office of Human Resources, said child care facilities currently operated by the University include: Imagination Station near CATO Park (in partnership with the ARC of Centre County), which serves 21 children; Cedar Child Care on campus, which serves 85 children; and the Child Development Laboratory in the College of Health and Human Development, which serves 54 children. In September, the nearly 15,000-square-foot center known as Daybridge opened in Penn State's Research Park. The facility on University property, which can accommodate up to 200 infant to school-aged children, is operated by Children's World Learning Centers, an outside provider.
Part of the plans for the new child care center on East College Avenue include creating a laboratory for multidisciplinary research and training at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Like the Child Development Laboratory in Henderson Building, the new center will allow observation of children and studies that benefit the well-being of children and expand the knowledge base of early childhood development, education and nutrition could be conducted. Internship experiences are also anticipated and, like the Child Development Lab, this central campus child care facility will also provide training and teaching opportunities. Among the academic areas expected to benefit from the facility are the colleges of Health and Human Development, Education, Arts and Architecture, and the Liberal Arts and Continuing and Distance Education.
"This new facility will dramatically expand the educational and research opportunities for students and faculty in human development and family studies," said Barbara Shannon, dean of the College of Health and Human Development. "We are very pleased the University has chosen to move ahead with the construction of the center."
The Department of Human Development and Family Studies currently operates the Child Development Laboratory, which was the first program in Centre County accredited by the National Academy of Early Childhood Programs.
By Alan Janesch
Public Information
Colleges and universities that discover unethical or unprofessional conduct among their research faculty -- which can range from cutting corners to committing outright fraud -- must publicly disclose the problems and ways of resolving them, an expert on research integrity told a Penn State Forum audience on Nov. 25.
"People read the messages of our actions," said C. Kristina Gunsalus, associate provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "I think we have to send the right messages. We have to say what our standards are. We have to give people the tools for handling ethical questions."
Gunsalus, who is responsible for conflict-of-interest and academic integrity policies at Illinois, said higher education has to be accountable, learn to deal with unethical behavior on its own (without being compelled to by state or federal government), overcome its discomfort with responding forcefully to unethical behavior, and recognize that governmental regulation of unprofessional conduct is a response to research-related scandals.
An attorney, Gunsalus used headlines and editorial cartoons from USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications to illustrate the changing concepts of accountability in higher education and a growing public wariness of research activities at colleges and universities. In response to academic and other pressures, Gunsalus said, research faculty sometimes feel compelled to look the other way when their colleagues behave unethically or unprofessionally.
"We have to be very clear and stand up and say it's not okay," Gunsalus said. "I think it's a problem, and I think we have to talk about it."
Penn State, Gunsalus said, "is a perfect example of a place where people are forthrightly grappling with these issues head-on." But at other universities, she said, the tendency has been to keep things quiet and even to cover up unethical behavior. "When it was discovered that something went wrong," Gunsalus said, "the result was not what we call optimum."
Governmental regulations on ethical and professional behavior "are typically scandal-driven," Gunsalus said. Many of today's laws on the uses of human and animal subjects, scientific misconduct, conflict of interest, use of hazardous substances and other related issues emerged in response to a 1966 New England Journal of Medicine article that listed 22 cases of unethical research. The author was "criticized severely for washing dirty laundry in public," Gunsalus said, but eventually Congress responded by holding hearings and passing laws to regulate research.
William Taylor, director of Penn State's Intercollege Research Programs, called Gunsalus's address "extremely interesting and insightful. To some extent she was preaching to the converted here, but it's just about impossible to overdo exposure to these ideas."
At Penn State, Taylor said, in addition to the full complement of "regulatory compliance apparatus" required by law. Penn State's policies are being continually revised, Taylor said, in order to cover new kinds of cases that may arise and also to respond to the current climate of "heightened awareness and high expectations" of ethical behavior in research.
Paul S. Greenlaw, has retired as professor emeritus of management
in The Smeal College of Business Administration, after 30 years of service
to Penn State.
Greenlaw holds a Ph.D. in political science and public administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He also holds a master's degree in history from Clark University and a bachelor's degree in history from Syracuse University.
While at Penn State, Greenlaw taught classes in personnel management, management science and personnel administration and personnel law. Before coming to the University in 1960, Professor Greenlaw served as instructor in political science at Duke University, management development specialist with the Kroger Co. and as director of management development for the Dayco Corp.
He was a pioneer in the development of educational business simulations for use in industry and in collegiate schools of business and co-authored several books on this subject: Business Simulation (Prentice-Hall International Series in Management, 1962); MARKSIM: A Marketing Decision Simulation (International Textbook Co., 1964); FINANSIM: A Financial Management Simulation, second edition (West, 1979); and PROSIM: A Production Management Simulation, second edition (Harper & Row). Along with Max D. Richards, Smeal professor emeritus of management, Greenlaw co-authored a general management text, Management Decision Making (Irvin, 1966) and its revised edition, Management: Decisions and Behavior (Irwin, 1971).
Among his interests is the application of management science, information decision systems and the law to the field of personnel management. He has co-edited Personnel Management: A Management Science Approach (International Textbook Co., 1970). Greenlaw also wrote two other books on human resources issues, Modern Personnel Management and Readings in Personnel Management (W.B. Saunders, 1979). His most recent work in personnel management, co-authored with John P. Kohl, is Personnel Management: Managing Human Resources (Harper & Row, 1986).
Greenlaw has published articles in numerous professional journals, and has presented papers to scholarly and professional groups across the country. He is a member of the Academy of Management, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Gamma Mu and Pi Sigma Alpha.
Francis G. Quinn, senior research assistant, has retired from
the Applied Research Laboratory's Department of Systems Engineering. His
career at the 
laboratory began in 1965, when he began working on underwater
acoustics communications.
In support of ARL projects, he traveled all over the world -- from the polar ice cap to the U.S. coastlines to the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the open oceans surrounding Norway.
Quinn, a Pittsburgh native, worked in the steel mills after graduating from high school until 1952, when he began a four-year tour of duty with the Air Force. In 1959 he completed his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Denver. He became a senior engineer at Martin Marietta, Denver, and worked research and development instrumentation on the Titan missile. In 1967 he received his master's degree in electrical engineering from Penn State.
During his graduate studies, Quinn received a patent for the development of fiber-optic communications. ARL presented him with an outstanding performance award in 1987, a technical contribution award with the Guidance and Control ATD team in 1992 and a technical contribution award with the Submarine Torpedo Defense Guidance and Control Team in 1993.
Quinn and his wife, Patricia, have three children and five grandchildren. His retirement plans include completing small building projects, collaborating with his son in artistic endeavors, and visiting family and friends.
James P. Breon, manager of meteorology technical facilities in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has retired after 35 years of service. In his position, Breon supervised the maintenance and repair of the computer facilities for the department of meteorology and its various research sites. His area designed and used radar to measure various weather phenomena such as wind, acid rain and lake-effect snow storms. He traveled to many places including the Virgin Islands and Venezuela to carry out measurement programs with ground-based radar. As manager, Breon was responsible for hiring personnel and was proud of his staff's performance.
Breon started with the University in 1962 and since then has seen the technical facilities area grow rapidly.
"I've had an extremely interesting career." Breon said. "I was busy up until the last minute of the very last week. I enjoyed it immensely and liked what I did the whole time."
