 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
         |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| navigate: home: magazine: fall 2002: article | |
|
Secors lead faculty/staff campaign for Penn State Public Broadcasting By Elizabeth A. Bechtel | ||||||
|
Drs. Bob and Marie Secor arrived in State College in 1969 just a few years after WPSX went on the air. “I’d been called for an interview for a beginning assistant professorship, having just completed my Ph.D., by Henry Sams (then head of the English Department),” Bob Secor recalls. “I was from Chicago, and I flew into Black Moshannon Airport, the only commercial airport near the University. The road to State College was pitch black as it wound down the mountain through a dense pine forest. When I called Marie to tell her I’d arrived, I said the place was a wilderness with nothing but trees.” In those years when Bob Secor, now vice provost for academic affairs and professor of English and American studies, worked toward tenure, and Marie Secor, who serves as professor of English and acting head of the English Department, struggled as a part-time lecturer, WPSX helped them appreciate the past, understand the present and imagine the future. Masterpiece Theatre, Cosmos and many other programs expanded their horizons far beyond Happy Valley. Today, the Secors are helping WPSX move into the digital future. As co-chairs of the faculty/staff component of A Future Worth Building: The Campaign for Penn State Public Broadcasting, they are encouraging their colleagues to support the expanded possibilities digital programming will allow. Marie Secor’s excitement at the possibilities of interactivity comes out as she comments about campus speakers and performances being available as part of a digital archive or as programming available to the community. “Actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company were here in October,” she said. “I imagine being able to capture them in a digital program as they interpret a scene in several different ways. That performance could be preserved and more widely disseminated, in classrooms and to the community, to demonstrate the choices actors make as they perform. Everybody in every field could, I’m sure, think of ways the subjects they study can and should touch a larger audience. This is much more sophisticated than the old ‘turn on the TV and watch the professor lecture.’ That’s definitely not what digital broadcasting would be.” Bob Secor is confident Penn State faculty and staff will support the Campaign for Public Broadcasting. “The joys of being a faculty member at a research institution like Penn State involve not only discovering and integrating knowledge, but also applying and transmitting that knowledge as widely as possible: to students, to colleagues in the profession and to the community, whether the community is defined as the local community, the community of the Commonwealth or the nation. With the advent of digital television, the opportunities for faculty to engage in that transmission will increase in many exciting new directions,” Bob Secor said. Marie Secor agrees. “In this campaign, tomorrow’s benefits from today’s investment are easy to visualize. The digital conversion will have a direct impact on the Penn State community. The difference will be apparent every time you turn on the TV or plan courses or consider how to deliver information to communities served by WPSX and beyond.” | |||||
| ||||||
© 2002 Outreach Communications, Outreach & Cooperative Extension, The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108, fax: (814) 863-2765, e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu |
||||||
