Nittany Lions Cannot Play Outside

Penn State is actually cutting back on the number of healthy activities their students can engage in. “A backpacking trip in the Rothrock State Forest and day hikes in the Laurel Highlands and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia were among the Penn State Outing Club’s 2018 spring-term events,” Don Hopey reported in The Pittsbugh Post-Gazette on April 18, 2018. “After this weekend, though, the 98-year-old organization has nothing on its calendar, and unless things change, it won’t.”

“The Outing Club isn’t allowed to go outside anymore. According to an announcement posted by the club on its website last week, the university will not allow the club to organize and run outdoor, student-led trips starting next semester.” It seems the university had done a risk management analysis and decided that kind of outing was too risky. The scuba club was also neutralized after Penn State did an rma on them.

“Penn State recently decreed that three student-led outdoor adventure groups—the hiking club, the cave exploration club, and the scuba club—would have to disband due to safety liability concerns, even though none of the long-running clubs had ever reported a problem,” Robby Soave reported on the Reason.com blog.

Yet and still, the scuba club survived but by agreeing to a compromise that makes it Scuba In Name Only. “Now the scuba club has been granted a reprieve—but with a significant caveat: Nittany Divers Scuba is no longer allowed to organize scuba-diving trips,” Soave reports.

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