Dear Fellow Penn State Geographers,

I have been observing with dismay the current attempt by the Pennsylvania government to disenfranchise voters, probably including members of your student body.

Today I learned that the state government is still distributing false information about the voter ID requirements, asserting that picture IDs are required to vote, despite repeated judicial injunctions to the contrary. I have heard or read nothing in communications or publications from PSU or the geography department expressing the expected, appropriate outrage at this usurpation of your freedoms and rights. One might expect at least the same level of concern we all observed over the removal of the Paterno statue. I fear that complacency and the shock of the Sandusky affair has so decimated the institution's collective will that you have become incapable of any measurable response. I hope I'm wrong, but scientists must base opinions on evidence.

Registering to vote in 1970 was similarly difficult. In like manner, the county officials made it inordinately difficult to become credentialed, in a last ditch effort to keep State College from becoming the majority population center, which fight they happily lost a few years later after my departure. (If you fly from State College or have been treated in the new hospital, thank the student activists -- then aka "liberals" -- who gave you the right to vote in local elections.) In those days most of my fellow students were from outside Pennsylvania and were aghast at the corruption then rampant in the state, with patronage determining almost all services and all state jobs. They could be kept at bay only by disenfranchisement. Sound familiar?

The current state posture is reminiscent of the attitude taken by Pennsylvania and Centre County while I lived there from 1969 to 1972. The graduate stipend I was happy to have on arrival at PSU diminished in value over three years, so to feed my young family without abandoning my studies I went to apply for food stamps during my final few months on campus. The county officials made it as hard as possible to do so, throwing up numerous barriers to application and delaying the award as long as possible. They seemed unable to grasp that food stamps were bringing money into the county that would benefit the local economy as well as the family directly involved.

And now the descendants of those fearful, ignorant officials, in the persons of a greed driven legislature and governor have reasserted themselves in the image of the state's past with this new attempt to exclude those who disagree with them from exercising their right to choose people and policies that benefit the whole community and not merely the powerful.

For thirty years I have displayed my diploma in my home with pride, but now that sentiment is threatened by the very state I was honored to claim as my professional home, pride further bolstered by family connections to the state's coal mines from generations past and by the birth of one of my children in Bellefonte.

I await further review of the press to see whether the University, the department and its students sit on their hands or take action. If the former, you can expect to receive my diploma in the mail.

Rees Clark, Ph.D., 1979