Presidential Presence
which included individual gifts from Bob ’59 and Eileen ’57 Sill and Carl Baxter, a Huntingdon business owner, the center made the College an active player in community outreach and regional development. At the same time, Lehman and Jim Donaldson ’67 collaborated to start an entrepreneurial sequence that generated such student businesses as an ice cream truck, a beef jerky business, furniture and appliance rental businesses and a few tech startups. JCEL, which is focusing less on regional development and more on student education in 2012, gave the College outreach into Huntingdon’s business community in ways that had not been pursued before. A bit further from campus, the College and President Kepple
Juniata
recognized that environmental science would be a highly soughtafter career and began a program to overhaul the Raystown Field Station, which had been housed in the small, rustic Grove Farm for several decades. President Kepple, grants expert Mike Keating and others pursued a variety of grants and also worked with Rep. Bud Shuster and his son and successor Bill Shuster, both representatives from
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Pennsylvania’s 9th Congressional District, to gather more than $2.6 million in federal funding to create a separate campus on the shores of Raystown Lake. An environmentally friendly main multipurpose building and gifts for two student lodges have provided the College with an unparalleled experience—the Semester at the Lake, which began in 2006. Students can spend an entire semester just footsteps from the natural world—perhaps one of the most distinctive educational opportunities in the nation. Roughly halfway through President Kepple’s term, the Uncommon Outcomes campaign came to an end, raising over $30 million more than its initial goal (final tally: $103.4 million), providing funding for the science center, JCEL,
postmodern architecture to stage classic, avant-garde and original plays. The infinitely adaptable space can host productions as simple as Our Town or as ambitious as building a swimming pool onstage for a play based on Roman myths. In addition, the refurbished auditorium and updated and expanded dressing rooms attract performers worthy of any stage for the Juniata Presents events. “There are 35 theatre POEs currently studying on campus with another big group coming in for the Class of 2017,” says Kate Clarke, assistant professor of theatre. “The lure of working in this great space has been a real selling point for recruiting talented students.” One of the hidden Juniata transformations and certainly the
scholarships and also the Marlene and Barry Halbritter Center for the Performing Arts. Combining the existing Rosenberger Auditorium with the Suzanne von Liebig Theatre, the new arts complex brought a second classroom building back to the heart of campus. In its fundraising stages, the von Liebig theatre was referred to as a “black box” theatre, but really that’s like calling the Golden Gate Bridge a “coastal roadway” or the Superdome an “athletic facility.” These days the theatre utilizes a dazzling
least glamorous concerned the $6 million effort to improve the College’s infrastructure. Since most of it took place underground and the College renovated a huge number of projects, let’s just say that Juniata rewired, re-piped, remapped and remade the campus heating, cooling, water, electricity and telecommunications, which saved the College about $400,000 per year in utility and other costs. The final jewel in the Juniata crown for a reimagined campus was the 2009 renovation of “The