12/15/04

FROM THE EDITOR
Starting with this LAzine Issue 21, we are changing a few things. For one, each issue will now feature a slightly longer main story dealing with a topic of wide interest to our faculty and students and, we hope, to our readers. For this issue, our main story deals with civic engagement, a relevant topic given the Presidential election and the still evolving role of community and grassroots organizations on both sides of the nation’s political divide. We think the informed opinions of a few of our faculty will provide you some interesting points to ponder.

We could argue that this entire issue devotes itself to engagement. We here profile Henry Tomes, an eminent psychologist and someone currently mentoring a Liberal Arts student. We talk with Jamie Grossman Young, whose work at The Discovery Networks plays a central role in the development of “reality television,” with which so many of us are enthralled on a weekly basis. We also present a story on a week back in October, when the College of the Liberal Arts hosted five different speakers who came to campus and engaged us with their visions and ideas, and who took time to interact with students and expand on the ideas discussed in classrooms. We introduce you to a man whose experiences with the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center prompted him to give back in a rather unusual gesture, and to a recent graduate at the helm of a brand new magazine in Pennsylvania.

We hope you like this change, and that you will look forward to our next issue, wherein we will focus on health care in the United States, and will be talking with alumni and faculty with experience and insight in this area.

Please enjoy the stories contained here, and we welcome your comments on LAzine.


ON PSYCHOLOGY THEN AND NOW: THE PERSPECTIVE OF HENRY TOMES

   Henry Tomes '63 psychology knew he’d be facing an academic challenge when he was accepted into Penn State’s psychology department. But he soon discovered he’d be facing much more: Tomes was the first black student ever admitted to the clinical psychology doctoral program.

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SPOTLIGHT ON MENTORING: VALERIE EARNSHAW AND HENRY TOMES 

   “I had the wrong e-mail address so I inadvertently passed our deadline for touching base,” junior Valerie Earnshaw explained. “Then I got an e-mail from Henry, wondering why I hadn’t contacted him. I thought it was really neat that even with his busy job, he remembered.”

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THE SURPRISE DONOR

   A recent gift for graduate student support at the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center came from an unlikely source: a graduate student at the center.

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JAMIE GROSSMAN YOUNG: FROM FROZEN YOGURT TO MONSTER GARAGE

   How to go from scooping frozen yogurt on College Avenue to helping to expand a fledging network into a hugely successful organization is what Jamie Grossman Young '79 speech communication wants to talk about.

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THE WEEK THE WORLD CAME TO CAMPUS

   By the time former director of enforcement for the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission William McLucas ’72 political science stood before a capacity Penn State Forum crowd, Liberal Arts had already hosted two other distinguished visitors that week, and had two more to come. Despite what might have been fatigue, despite what could have been a difficult talk—what went wrong with financial markets oversight in the nineties, prior to the recession that ushered in the twenty-first century—McLucas spoke to an audience engaged and riveted.

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JEWISH STUDIES GRAD STARTS NEW MAGAZINE

   Josh Lipowsky ’04 communications and Jewish studies notes that Pennsylvania has the fourth largest Jewish population in the country, a fact important to his new job as editor of a new glossy quarterly devoted to Jewish life in the commonwealth.

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DUDE, WHERE’S YOUR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT?

   It may have been called “Rock the Vote,” “Vote or Die,” or “Rap the Vote,” but all of these hip initiatives were really about a very old and hallowed American tradition: civic engagement.

   What is civic engagement? According to Eric Plutzer, associate professor of political science, it is being involved in community efforts to solve problems collectively.

    “The largest and most important aspect of civic engagement is voting,” he notes. “People who are active, informed, and involved participants in political issues are considered civically engaged citizens.”

   The 2004 presidential election saw a substantial increase in the turnout of voters under age 25—from 37 percent in 2000 to 43 percent this year, Plutzer estimates. That translates to at least 20.9 million 18-to-29-year-olds coming out to vote, the strongest showing ever at the polls. However, due to the record numbers of voters of all ages, the proportion of the 18-to-29 vote (18 percent) was the same as four years ago. Young people comprise 22 percent of the overall national population, but their surge in numbers this year was still not enough to reverse the thirty-year trend of decline.

   Why are young voters historically the most reluctant age group to take part in this most basic civic engagement?

   “Voter turnout has been low among the youngest citizens—people under 30—since the formation of the republic. Young voter turnout is also lowest in every European country—it’s a universal phenomena,” says Plutzer. “And there’s one big reason: young people are much more mobile and move frequently, which makes it harder to vote.”

   As well, notes Susan Welch, the dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and a professor of political science, “The United States is the only democratic nation in the entire world that does not help its citizens register to vote.”

   In the United States, obtaining absentee ballots, re-registering, and finding new polling places are examples of the impediments young voters face when they move. Six weeks before the 2004 election, a quarter of first-time registrants didn’t know their polling places, says Plutzer. As people move into their 30s and 40s, they are more settled and they care more about local and state issues, their representatives, and can differentiate more clearly between the parties.

   In Regina Smyth’s first-year seminar, “Why don’t young people vote?,” several students who’d applied for absentee ballots did not receive them.

   Smyth, assistant professor of political science, points out, “Voter turnout among young people in Britain, Canada, and Switzerland, is lower than ours and approaching crisis levels,” she says. “Yes, technical problems play a role. But many young people feel they aren’t qualified to vote, that they don’t have enough information to make an intelligent choice.”

   The key, Smyth feels, is to educate young voters indirectly, so they want to participate.

   “My own view of civic engagement is that you can’t compel it,” she says. “Many of the first-time voters in my class needed encouragement to make them feel qualified to cast a ballot.”

   This view—that a voter needs to be well informed before he or she is motivated to vote—has traditionally been the strategy behind voter registration drives. But Plutzer says, in fact, the opposite is often true.

   “Until the 2004 election, registration drives were not particularly effective,” he says. “Research has proven that people must participate in the voting process before they become motivated or habitual voters. And once someone has voted, there’s a much higher chance he or she will vote again.”

   Smyth had her students evaluate various get-out-the-vote strategies and found that youth-oriented initiatives did not resonate.

   “The idea behind ’Rock the Vote’ and similar efforts was to get young voters civically engaged by thinking they were part of a cool group,” she explains. “But every student, and even the head of PSUVotes—a student registration drive on campus—felt these efforts were overwhelmingly unsuccessful.”

   Plutzer agrees, stating that research has shown repeatedly that “dragging” voters to the polls is the only strategy that really works.

   “Stressing the act of voting—whether through a reminder phone call, face-to-face canvassing, or driving people to the polls,” he says, “is the most effective way of getting them there.”

   Both camps, we now know, did extremely well in face-to-face mobilization. What issue, in particular, drove young voters to the polls? Nothing you could sum up easily.

   The debt, the economy, entitlement programs, the potential job market, tuition raises, the public-school fallout from the ‘No Child Left Behind’ initiative, moral values—especially regarding the Supreme Court vacancies—and the war in Iraq, were some of the motivating issues listed by Smyth’s students.

   And although young voter-drive initiatives were not particularly successful, all of Smyth’s students indicated that they would continue to stay engaged in the voting process, bolstering Plutzer’s claim that once a voter, always—or, at least, more often—a voter.