Faculty, staff giving
tops $17.6 million

Forty percent of Penn State faculty and staff members have pledged more than $17.6 million so far toward the University's Grand Destiny campaign, according to Campaign Chair Edward R. Hintz. The total includes $4.5 million in gifts received during the year ending June 30, 1999.

"These dollars by themselves are certainly important in advancing Penn State's mission," Hintz said. "But the example that faculty and staff set when they give of their own resources is a tremendous inspiration to potential donors among our alumni and friends. Knowing that 40 percent of faculty and staff University-wide have thus far participated in the campaign is also a great source of encouragement to campaign volunteers."

Hintz paid special tribute to the volunteer leaders of the faculty and staff campaign, Gerald Susman, Robert and Judith Klein professor of management, and Elizabeth Susman, Jean Phillips Shibley professor of biobehavioral health.

Hintz said that faculty and staff donors have the opportunity to designate their gifts to areas and programs of their choice. In addition to academic programs, popular areas for employee support have been the University Libraries; public broadcasting, which includes WPSX-TV and WPSU-FM; the Four Diamonds Fund, which aids children being treated for cancer at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and their families; and Penn State athletics.

The Grand Destiny campaign aims to raise $1 billion in private gifts before June 30, 2003.

Grant to fund publication
of history of prominent family

The lives and contributions of the McCormicks of Harrisburg, one of the leading families in central Pennsylvania from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, will be preserved and published though a Penn State Harrisburg project funded by the McCormick Trusts.

A $50,000 grant from the trusts will support work by the college's American studies program and its Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies to produce two volumes devoted to the McCormicks.

In their time and place, the McCormicks wielded significant influence in industry, banking, journalism, local and national government and religious life. The publications will document the family responsible for the founding of Dauphin Deposit Bank, the Harrisburg Patriot, Pine Street Presbyterian Church and a number of other notable institutions and landmarks in the capital city.

Widely known for their philanthropy, the McCormicks established a pattern of public support and left a legacy that continues to benefit the Harrisburg community.

The publishing project is consistent with the mission of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies to publish and promote local history as the key to understanding American history. The center also serves as a resource of information for scholars, students and historians through its collections of photographs, folklore and folklife and information about central Pennsylvania communities.

Under the direction of Michael Barton, associate professor of American studies and history at Penn State Harrisburg, the project will include selected materials from the nearly 160 folders of letters, diaries, account books, genealogical data, privately printed travel accounts, newspaper clippings and other documents now housed at the Historical Society of Dauphin County.

The subject of the first volume, titled The McCormicks of Harrisburg: Public Service and Private Lives, will focus on members of the McCormick family at large and include documents illustrating their lives across the generations.

Publishing Vance McCormick's diaries in a second volume, tentatively titled The Diary of Vance McCormick, Citizen Extraordinaire, at the Paris Peace Conference, would fill a gap in World War I scholarship and integrate McCormick's observations with those of other diplomats and aides to President Woodrow Wilson.