Penn State Want's to be Known as the Home of Sober Anti-intellectuals.

Last year Penn State received loads of free publicity when it was ranked the number two party school in the nation by Princeton Review. Old Main wasn't exactly happy about this publicity.

"I don't know that being regarded as a top party school is flattering," said Tysen Kendig, university spokesman. "Certainly, we want our students to have a great experience at the university, both academically and socially. But I think we need to be careful at all colleges and universities because we are dealing with a climate of alcohol abuse. And that's definitely not something that any college or university would be proud of."

So the University doesn't want to be associated with a climate of alcohol abuse. Fair enough.

This year Penn State is poised to be on the receiving end of yet more free publicity. The A&E television network is slated to run a -I use the word loosely-reality series based on the exploits of the Penn State Paranormal Research Society, an official Penn State student club. The name of the program is Paranormal State.(h/t to ha-mace) This time around, Old Main couldn't be happier about all of the free publicity. In fact, Old Main is pimping the show on the University's Propaganda Portal.

Before the pilot taping, Penn State administrators worked with the team during the show's planning and insured no students would be taped "while engaging in any illegal activities," said Bill Mahon, a university spokesman.

"It looks like a high-quality show," he said. "It'll be great exposure for the university. There's no way we could afford to buy that much air time on a major network."

I'm guessing, but by "high-quality", I don't think he means high intellectual quality. He probably means it'll be nice to look at. One might think though that at a university, which has pretenses of being a major research university, that this association with pseudo-science would not be considered a "great exposure for the university". That's not the case at Penn State. As long as there is no "illegal activity" shown and ,he might have added, as long as the kid stay sober, they think this is great.

Here is how Old Main would have handled this if there was any intellectual integrity in the building. The spokesman would have said,"Paranormal research is pseudo-science and is antithetical to the very essence of a university. Hence this is not something with which the Penn State is proud to be associated and does not want to be seen as promoting it. It is particularly a problem in this time of anti-science bias in our country.We have not cooperated at all in the production of this program." Yeah, like that'll ever happen.



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