COVER STORY
A GIANT STEP FORWARD By Ted Anthony (’90)
JAN 8, 2021
MAR 5, 2021
JULY 12, 2021
O
n a sunny spring morning in April 2021, the vast lawn outside Old Main is empty of activity. An over-the-shoulder glance toward College Avenue reveals only a smattering of people, faces shrouded in masks.
The moment that classes change arrives. Minutes later, it departs with little visible fanfare; as the coronavirus pandemic enters its second year and the process of vaccinations unfolds, most students on this day are still studying remotely. As you walk up the mall and approach Willard Building, even the ubiquitous preacher is nowhere to be seen. But then: Turn left onto Pollock Road, heading west, and approach what has, for decades, been the “old” side of Willard. There is activity. Workers are outside measuring a door. Inside it, you can hear — just barely — the rumble of activity and possibility. Something is happening here. A dream is taking shape — an intricate, complex, carefully calibrated dream that has raced to be ready for Fall 2021 and, by all accounts, will be. It’s a dream made physical, one designed to change everything. It will help a rising generation of media-savvy, 21st-century students learn the arts and skills and practices of a world of dizzying, complex global communication that — though it barely seems possible — is evolving and mutating faster than ever. It will bring offices and people, resources and ideas together in a single place unlike any other that preceded it — a comprehensive media learning and production facility funded by a man who got something life-changing out of his Penn State education and, many decades and successes later, gave something life-changing back. This fall, the era of the Bellisario Media Center — an educational centerpiece like no other — is at hand. And with it, a new chapter in the story of the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications begins.
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2020-21 ANNUAL REPORT
