Meet the Penn State deans: Craig Newschaffer talks budget, cheesesteaks — and time machines
As part of a collaborative effort with Penn State, which has released a monthly video on school deans and their perspectives and passions, the Centre Daily Times is continuing a lighthearted Q&A series that highlights a different dean most months in the hopes the local community gets to know them outside of the classroom. This is the final installment of the series.
Up next: Craig J. Newschaffer, Raymond E. and Erin Stuart Schultz Dean of the College of Health and Human Development
Newschaffer, who holds a doctorate from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, officially began his Penn State tenure on Jan. 1, 2019, after a national search to find the College of HHD’s next dean.
He is the founding director of the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, and he also founded and directed the Hopkins Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Epidemiology. He has been published in more than 100 peer-reviewed journals, served on several editorial boards of academic journals (e.g. Autism Research) and is a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology.
At Penn State, he also holds the title of Professor of Biobehavioral Health. And he enjoyed previous stints at Drexel University, Johns Hopkins University, Saint Louis University and Thomas Jefferson University.
CDT: Before Happy Valley, your academic career has taken you to Baltimore, Boston, St. Louis and Philadelphia. So I’m going to need you to rank these foods from best to worst: Crabcakes, lobster rolls, ribs and cheesesteaks.
Newschaffer: That’s pretty easy. So I’ve spent most of my time in Philadelphia, raised my family there, so cheesesteaks are clearly No. 1. And I’m a Dalessandro’s guy; you know, you have to have your favorite shop. Pat’s and Geno’s are the two famous ones, but it’s only for tourists. But then there are hundreds of other ones, but you have to have your favorite and we liked Dalessandro’s in Roxborough (with provolone and onions).
So, cheesesteaks are clearly No. 1. Lobster roll is No. 2 because, I mean, it’s a lobster roll. And then ribs and then — I love Baltimore, but I put crabcakes at the bottom. I think there’s the most variation in quality there. You can’t count on a crabcake. It can be overly bread-y or overcooked and, so, crabcakes at the bottom.
CDT: You mentioned having a band when you were younger. So what was your band’s name in college — and what’s your favorite “band story” or memory from that time?
Newschaffer: The band was called December Sons.
So, it was 1984 and that was the year of the Band Aid video — “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” — and it was this collective recording to fight famine in Africa. It was a big benefit; they brought all the rock stars to get into the holidays. So my buddy and I, we wanted to get our parents Christmas gifts, but we were sort of low on funds. So we wrote the song and recorded it and gave it to them as a Christmas gift.
And the title of the song was “December Sons.” The song was terrible. But when we were looking for a band name, we decided we liked the band name, and that’s what we picked.
With that band, one great memory probably came a year later. This was ‘85, and Hurricane Gloria was coming in. It was coming up the coast to Boston, and we had a gig opening for a band that was much more popular than us. So even though a hurricane was coming, there was still a nice crowd. ... And we had the foresight to work up before that gig the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and played that as our last song. We played that as our final song to, what I remember, as tremendous adoration. This was as the wind was rolling up and the rain was starting to pelt the windows of this club in Cambridge, so that’s my favorite memory from those days.
CDT: We want to hit a lot of different topics, so let’s go back to academics for this next question. You’ve devoted a lot of time and research to autism. Have you found any environmental factors that lead to autism, or is it all genetics? And can you dispel the myth that vaccines cause autism?
Newschaffer: I believe that there is a role for environmental factors in autism causation, but that’s within the context of a pretty strong role for genetics. ... In the history of autism research, there are some things in the environment that’s pretty strong evidence that they’re linked to autism causation. So, historically, they’re things like rubella. There’s a medication called thalidomide that was a travesty. It was a medication that in the ‘50s was prescribed to pregnant women to combat morning sickness.
... But those things are historical things, and they’re very rare exposures. The work that we’ve been doing is trying to find out, are there some more common exposures that are linked to autism? ... So there are some other medications, particularly classes of medications that are used to combat seizures, that have been shown to increase autism risk. Prenatal infection — in general, but mostly mid-pregnancy infection — has been shown to increase autism risk. And certain environmental pollutants; I think there’s the most replicated evidence for fine particulate matter, air pollution, in the prenatal window when the brain is developing. So those things are associated with increased autism risk but, when we study them on their own, small increases in risk. ... As an absolute percent, we’re talking very small. We’re talking under 1% increased risk.
... And there is no evidence linking childhood immunization, or any other immunization for that matter, to autism risk. And that is not something I say lightly. ... Because of the public health importance of this, there is more negative evidence for this hypothesis than virtually any hypothesis for any exposure for any disease that I’ve run into in my 30 years as an epidemiologist. There’s literally been data from millions of children ... and there is no association.
CDT: You mentioned your father listening to old jazz legends like Count Basie, and it’s clear you love music. So, if you had a time machine and could go back and see any one live musical performance, what would it be and why?
Newschaffer: My father was was a swing musician and loved that. So I don’t know that I would go that far back. My musical tastes are pretty low brow. I like Americana alternative country music, and one of the bands that is sort of always cited as sort of being the birth of this idea of alternative country music was a band called Uncle Tupelo.
So, well, there’s old country, which takes you back into the ‘40s and ‘50s. But this is sort of alternative country. This is sort of the 80s. So this band called Uncle Tupelo that I never got to see, and that band spawned the band Wilco. Jeff Tweedy was in Uncle Tupelo with Jay Farrar, who started the band Son Volt. So both Wilco and Son Volt are still active.
But they were together when we were basically kids in this band called Uncle Tupelo. So I would go on a time machine and find an Uncle Tupelo show. I don’t care where it was. But they were only active for about five years in the late 80s — maybe the early 90s, too — but that’s what I would do.
Centre Daily Times: Although we usually keep these lighthearted, we can’t overlook the elephant in the room in the university’s budget issues. Your college’s “base budget” is expected to see an increase, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be free from overall cuts. What has the budget process been like for you, and how will this college change next academic year as a result of the budget?
Craig J. Newschaffer: In general, I think the notion of evolving our budget process makes sense. And coming up with a budget process that reflects, in many ways, the key activities makes a lot of sense.
It’s hard to say that’s an irrational approach. So this transition takes a step in that direction and it tries to link allocation of resources to some of the core activities that we do in the colleges. And, at the same time, it moves away from the historical approach — which essentially said that your budget begins with what you got last year, right? And, again, I don’t think that makes a lot of sense if you want to be a dynamic organization that’s moving forward.
So the idea behind these changes is solid. The devil in the challenge, as always, is in the implementation. I’m in a situation where our allocation for next year is on the plus side, so I recognize that my perspective on this is colored by our college’s situation. I know that some other units are feeling a little bit more stress and have these challenges they have to manage as they move into it, which are a little bit different from what we’re facing. But I think the university deans kind of agree that as we settle into this, we want to do it in a way that lets the colleges continue to have the flexibility to build programs that meet their students’ needs and support aspects of what we do here like the research enterprise. ...
For us, because we’re not facing these cuts, I don’t have to make any major operational changes moving into next year. If I was more stressed, I might have some decisions I would have to make right now. We don’t need to do that. And, in fact, we can proceed with some new investments in areas that we think are priorities. We can invest in some new faculty and some new staff to support education and research programs that we want to, so that’s good for us. And the projections as of last week, with first-year admissions next year, we’re going to see an increase in students that say they’re interested in studying in our college by about 8%.
Other interviews in the “Meet the Penn State Deans” series:
B. Stephen Carpenter II (Arts and Architecture)
Justin Schwartz (formerly Engineering; now provost/executive VP)
Richard Rousch (Agricultural Sciences)
