T his fall, the University of Pennsylvania was awarded the title of Number One Party School in America by Playboy. As far as I know, not a single Penn student took this seriously. People posted incredulous Facebook statuses and ironic tweets and genuinely wondered if Playboy had meant to give the honor to Penn State — and then we all went out to knock back a few glasses of Franzia at a BYO.
That’s how I remember it, anyway. But as Alice Robb tells it in a recent New Republic article, this obvious bit of controversy-seeking by Playboy was a crucial moment in the history of Penn. There was a chance — just a chance, mind you — that it would “finally give Penn the identity it never quite possessed.”
It’s not entirely clear what having an “identity” means, or whether it’s true that Penn doesn’t have one, or why it would be a good thing to reduce a school of 20,000 people down to a few lazy adjectives. But never mind. Robb investigated the possibility that we might be developing an identity with the kind of dogged shoe leather reporting we’ve come to expect from one of America’s foremost policy magazines, by which I mean she went to a couple of frat parties during Homecoming.
What happened next won’t surprise you. Robb determined that Penn students have a chip on our collective shoulder because we didn’t get into Yale. We desperately seek markers of status. We’re all climbing over each other to get finance and consulting jobs. We go to parties so we can check off boxes on our to-do lists, and our Greek life is really just next-level networking. Something something Ben Franklin.
For any Pen n student, this is old news. We talk about these problems all the time. Robb could have saved herself the trip by just reading The Daily Pennsylvanian or 34th Street once in a while. Of course, then she would have also seen that students here spend their time on all sorts of projects and groups that have very little to do with employment prospects and that lots of people don’t think of their fraternities and sororities solely as “a gateway to the gilded Goldman life,” and that for every hard-partying social climber is some schlub in a library — and that sometimes those are even the same person. In other words, she would have found out that Penn is filled with human beings.
No one would deny that Penn has problems within its campus culture. Students here are stressed out about getting good grades and finding good jobs. Parts of the social scene impose a financial burden that not everyone can meet, and there are genuine concerns to be raised about exclusivity and gender issues in Greek life. There is plenty of pressure to go to Wall Street after graduation. There are apparently people who really do care about where their house falls in some online sorority ranking.
Of course, you’d find all these things at any college. Steady employment and the validation of your peers are pretty basic human desires. But “Students Seek Jobs and Social Status, Sometimes Feel Anxious About It” doesn’t make for much of a headline. To get buzz, you need to turn these typical collegiate issues into some broader statement about the way we live now, and you need to ignore all the people who don’t live that way. So the fact that Penn has some elitists and go-getters and people carrying padfolios, and the fact that a rainy homecoming night didn’t produce a lot of “Project X”-type parties have to be combined into a half-baked diagnosis of “a specific kind of insecurity — borne of a combination of ambition and inferiority complex.”
Well, fine. People are entitled to their opinions, and the internet can always use more clickbait. Meanwhile, Penn students will just carry on living our lives. Sometimes we’ll do that in problematic ways, and sometimes we’ll try to fix the problems we see. Mostly, though, we’ll hang out with our friends and drink crappy beer and complain about classes and jobs and not worry about whether our school has the right “identity.” Anything else would seem insecure.
Adam Hersh is a College senior from Tenafly, N.J., studying anthropology. His email address is adhersh@sas.upenn.edu.
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