You can tell a lot about a large university by the hat selection in its on-campus bookstore. No this is not an occasion to discuss the ownership of many of the on-campus stores these days at many schools (just another part of the publicization of cost and the privatization of profit in the university sector really). No I refer only to what was on offer at this store. Specifically the type of hat one can buy at the book stores–a baseball style ball cap with such things as the school’s logo or name on it.
I can say for sure that Michigan State has an excellent selection of hats at the book store, ranging from golf visors to Nike on-field coaches hats to the bar caps whose popularity peaked when I was in high school in the nineties to throwback hats of different sorts.
Minnesota has an excellent selection at their book store, with lots of good hats. Even Notre Dame gives their fans plenty of designs to choose from on campus.
Penn State’s sports hat selection was a measly embarassment.
Actually of the few hats they even had, way too many were that dated, douchy, fratty type. And the sporty hats just did not have the right contemporary style. As a Nike-sponsored Big Ten school like MSU, I thought PSU would be coming up big in the hat department–it’s not like a large city and its Lids stores were much of a threat there in Happy Valley.
Why was I even in State College, Pennsylvania? Well it was the summer of 2010, and I was driving back from New York [see video from that trip in pacificpelican.us/podcast 50] when I got off the highway in Pennsylvania and stopped to use the bathroom. Almost back on the interstate, I saw a sign for State College some 37 miles away.
As a Big Ten alumnus, I decided to add another school to the list that I had visited. Based on what I had heard, I was hoping to put Penn State on the cool side of the ledger.
Nothing in much of the eastern U.S. can approximate the isolation of the Centre County farmlands that surround Penn State for vast distances, noticeably on the Beaver Stadium side of campus, the way I entered marked by rolling mini-Appalachia until suddenly the hundred-thousand-plus seat football stadium appears alone on the horizon.
After driving onto campus, I circled around before finding parking.
At the parking garage near the book store I saw a group of summer students conducting some sort of dropping stuff and measuring it procedure, a phenomenon I nicknamed to myself the Penn State gravity experiments. So I decided to take a little video of what was going on, and the students suddenly started acting weird and telling me to stop taking footage, which of course I declined to do. I can’t imagine such a childish request by students in the middle of campus on a major university. There was definitely something weird about this place; further, they could tell I was an outsider.
Then after checking out the dairy store, a good bit of the middle of campus and down back to the disappointing book store, I drove to the other edge of campus and explored the row of shops and apartments that line the edge there. Beyond those I noticed a row of ostentatious fraternity and sorority houses claiming prime property near the edge of campus.
Isolated, hollow-tradition-obsessed, boring–these things exuded from Happy Valley more obviously and eerily than at any large school I’ve ever visited, a sort of foul stench of ossified cliquishness hung in the air more heavily than the Fabreze in a freshman dorm. You get the impression that the smart people in Pennsylvania may well largely avoid the place, leaving it to the conformo-bots.
What my friend in San Francisco who had attended the school had said to me finally made sense now. When she told me where she went, I was like, wow, isn’t that place beautiful, didn’t you just want to stay there?
“No.” she said. She was from Korea. She’d seen plenty. It was a dumb hick town to her. But I wonder if you asked a local, might they agree?
It’s easy to understand how such an insular place in the middle of nothing could have learned to value the institution more than its members, because after all weren’t they admired as a “grand experiment” in uncomplicated America-ness to all those commentators who would drive in for football weekends? The keepers of such a place would see the flow of students to the college as an undifferentiated mass to be formed in the shape of men and women of “integrity” and “values”–you know, those things that lead them by the thousands to violently protest the firing of a disgraced, sanctimonious and narcissistic football coach who had let himself become the terrifying figurehead of a rootless, disturbed personality cult.
All the nasty accusations swirling around the football program, and the even worse ones against Jerry Sandusky and his “foundation” (pedophile ring more likely) are no more illuminating about this dark place perhaps than the recent news in the area about an accuser against Sandusky who came forward–he was apparently harassed and threatened by fellow students for messing with Joe Paterno’s football program and has now left his high school.
