Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/368554
on campus for a few months? Or has this experience been what you expected it would be? I think there are always a lot of things that are di6erent and that weren't part of your sphere. My sphere when I le7 here was as a dean. My world and my objective is to make that part of the world much stronger. I came here and I visited 21 cam- puses in 15 days. I really don't think very many people have a perspective on what Penn State is actually like. There's an incredible breadth of op- portunity, and I was astounded by what I learned from a lot of the stu- dents. This was pretty remarkable. I would confess that my board of trustees is very di6erent from the one I le7 [at Florida State]. I had 13, and there were a lot of things they just didn't have time to do. They had certain things they were interested in. Many times, when there were is- sues, I would call each of them on the phone. All of them came through some form of political appointment, and that would mean that politics would enter in. Politics enters in here much less as far as I can tell. I can't tell who a governor appointee is and who isn't; these are just good people. And these board members come from all over the place. Things like that are very intriguing to me and interesting, how they function. I was very pleased to see that the institution is very healthy on a lot of di6erent fronts. We have 127,000 applicants [for admission] – that's an incredible number. You had a $2.2 billion campaign, you have $848 million in research. The juggernaut of Penn State's success continues. I don't think you really get a sense of that until you're inside. You can talk about it, but I'm not reading about that. You come here and you start to look at all these di6erent metrics that help describe a university, and you say, wow, this is an impressive place. I knew it would be, but the de- gree to which it's growing and strengthening is a marvel. ■ MEET THE NEW BOSS Barbour was named Penn State's athletics direc- tor at a July 26 news confer- ence. Photo by Ryan Snyder