Drilling U: A Look At One School's Gas Lease

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

November 7, 2011 | 2:22 PM

Drilling on campus? Governor Corbett has floated the idea as a way for cash-strapped universities to raise money.
It’s already going on at one school, though. The Post-Gazette’s look at an under-the-radar lease signed at California University of Pennsylvania is worth the read.

Ten months ago, The Student Association Inc., an organization affiliated with the university, approved a lease for subsurface drilling on land it owns that includes tennis courts, baseball and soccer fields and an apartment complex where 768 students, including Ms. Kemmerle, live.

The deal may be the first Marcellus Shale lease affecting a state-owned university in Pennsylvania, and it shows how drilling is starting to alter the financial landscape at colleges struggling to maintain their missions in a bad economy.

It also illustrates how a drilling lease can remain under the radar. Even the school’s president, Angelo Armenti Jr., said he did not know a deal had been struck. The lease, approved in a closed meeting, was never announced on campus.