WPSU-TV (channel 3) is a PBS member television station licensed to Clearfield, Pennsylvania, United States, serving West-Central Pennsylvania. Owned by the Pennsylvania State University as part of Penn State Public Media, it is sister to NPR member WPSU (91.5 FM) and student radio station WKPS ("The Lion 90.7 FM"). The three stations share studios at Innovation Park on Penn State's University Park campus in State College. WPSU-TV's primary transmitter is located north of Clearfield in Lawrence Township, with a secondary transmitter in Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania.
History
Penn State has a long history of using new media to extend access to education. It was the first American institution of higher education to offer agricultural correspondence courses in 1892. When radio became popular in the 1920s, the institution tried broadcasting courses and was the first U.S. university to experiment with closed-circuit television delivery in the 1940s. Penn State hosted a conference on April 20, 1952, at Nittany Lion Inn where the federal government announced its decision to set aside bandwidth to support non-commercial educational television stations. This conference led to the creation of national educational television broadcasting and later to the creation of PBS.
After Congress passed the Educational Facilities Act on May 1, 1962, which provided federal funding for the construction of educational television stations, Penn State was granted a transmitter construction permit in September 1964 and became the first educational television station in Pennsylvania to be licensed to a university, and the 101st such station in the U.S.
Construction of the tower and transmitter site began on Penfield Mountain, north of Clearfield. The tower was built on Rattlesnake Mountain to comply with the FCC "legal triangle" that required to separate co-channels. Because the Wagner Annex studio was not yet completed, video playback machines, film and slide chains, and audio tape equipment were installed at the transmitter site in conjunction with a "mobile recording unit".
The "X" in the original call sign WPSX-TV denotes that the station was an extension of Penn State. "The establishment of the station," said Dr. Eric Walker, then-president of the university, "will enable Penn State to expand its educational services".
WPSX-TV was led by Marlow Froke, director of the Division of Broadcasting at Penn State, as a unit of Continuing Education. On March 1, 1965, under his leadership in cooperation with the newly-formed Allegheny Educational Broadcast Council (AEBC) advisory board, WPSX-TV broadcast to 124 elementary and secondary schools across Pennsylvania to supplement the curriculum and provide in-service training for teachers. The first day's lineup included Saludos Amigos, Primary Concepts in Math, Focus on Fitness, and 12 other programs between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Froke, a former journalism instructor and radio-television newsman, said in a 1965 Altoona Mirror interview, "Television can combine all the channels of communication—sight, sound, and motion—to give the greatest impact on the student". During the first WPSX-TV broadcast school year, the classroom TV service reached approximately 250,000 students in 22 counties.
Evening programs of culture, public affairs, and adult education were added on June 7, 1965, in a Monday-to-Friday, 7–11 p.m. schedule. Saturday and Sunday programming was not added until nearly two years later.
Once the microwave link that carried the broadcast signal to Wagner was completed, WPSX-TV began moving its broadcast and studio operations to its new facility. On December 10, 1965, engineering, production, and programming staff were all based at the Wagner studios for the first time and remained there until a new digital broadcast facility was dedicated on September 8, 2005, as the Outreach Building in Innovation Park.
WPSX-TV drew upon Penn State's faculty and staff to develop original programming for the new evening lineup. Art History 10, which was hosted by assistant professor of art history Carl Barnes and covered painting, architecture, and sculpture, was the first University credit course to be produced for broadcast in late 1965. Public affairs programs covered national, state, and University issues. In 1969, P. J. O'Connell produced The Year Behind, the Year Ahead, reporting on the events that led to the student sit-in protest on Old Main Lawn.