COLUMN: Pride and Prejudices

From Jennie Rosenbaum's "That Would Be Telling," Fall '93 From Jennie Rosenbaum's "That Would Be Telling," Fall '931993 has been a good year for Penn. With consecutive basketball and football Ivy championships, bragging rights are back. For years we tried to come up with some catchy phrase to rival the taunting of Princeton and Yale and the like, but all we could come up with was, "Oh yeah, well, we've got Wharton!" Penn students are now proudly wearing their "Absolut Penn" t-shirts with pride and throwing their property into the Schuylkill. Somehow, our athletic victories have vindicated us in the eyes of the juries of our peers, who watch our progress from Providence and Cambridge and think, "Well, at least they've got Wharton." The casual observer may well wonder where all this pride was before our sports teams won the trophies. What will happen years from now, when this year's Quakers have graduated, and we find ourselves without a championship security blanket to hold on to? Will future Penn students still be proud to be here, or will they wish that they were somewhere, anywhere, other than Penn? So where, you might ask, has Penn Pride been all this time? Virtually nonexistent. The next question, of course, is why wouldn't someone be proud to be at such a prestigious – uh, make that expensive – school? I've come up with a couple of theories to explain why, despite the purchases made at University Sportswear, many Penn students have been ashamed to admit that they go here. Lack of Pride Theory #1: The "State School" image. There's no reason to go into detail; we all know the problem about the confusion with Penn State. One public figure seriously believes that if this school were named, in the Ivy tradition, after some pompous bastard with money, we'd feel a lot better about ourselves. This man plans to make enough money to one day take over the whole Penn administration and get them to rename the school to honor him. Only, "Trump University" just doesn't cut it. We could just do what's been done at other schools and name the place after our supposed founder, Ben Franklin. The change would be amazing. Under the auspices of Franklin University, the grass would become greener, more professors would get tenure, and masses would strut down Locust Walk proudly wearing the letters "FU" on their chests. And of course, the Quakers wouldn't be the Quakers anymore. They'd be, in the true spirit of our founder, the Philandering Diplomats. Our name, obviously, isn't the problem. It doesn't help that most people west of the Mississippi don't know us from that other school with Penn in it, but we're smart – we should be able to get around this one. Which is a nice segue to: Lack of Pride Theory #2: We're too stupid to get in anywhere else. Okay, let's see a show of hands, how many of you can honestly say that Penn was your first choice school? Thought so. You hear it all the time: "I wouldn't have gotten mugged if I'd gone to Cornell." "Brown's requirements are so much more flexible than the College's." "I wanted Yale, I really did." Just keep in mind that Cornell may not have much crime, but they have cows on campus; you don't even have to have a major at Brown, which makes me question their dedication to academics; and as for Yale, two words: New Haven. We may not have met the requirements of those other schools, but we have something that they don't: Ben on a Bench. You'd think that all the students roaming around campus wearing Penn paraphernalia would take pride in their school. Wrong. These same students bitch and moan about the BYOB policy, the loss of Boccie and the cost of basketball tickets. Some of these concerns are more valid than others, but the way we go about dealing with them reflects the way we feel about our school. Take the BYOB policy. When it was announced last semester that the policy would be implemented, the whiny frat boys decided to protest by flying banners that said, "Why pay the bucks if the social life sucks?" The idea was that visiting prospective students would see the signs and be turned off to the school. Great idea, encouraging future Quakers not to come here. Looks like y'all are really glad to be here. How about the way we celebrate our athletic victories? Hundreds of football fans pulled a Theta Xi during their celebration of the win over Princeton, pulling down a goal post and polluting the Schuylkill with it. How much will our tuition increase to cover the cost of our destroying our own property? And then there was the fiasco outside the Palestra on October 29. News reports called the scene a "riot," and news of it reached as far as a small paper in Rhode Island. We could have been a lot safer – and looked a lot better in the eyes of the public – if we hadn't been as drunk and careless in our celebrating. These are just examples, of course. Lots of things are said and done to give the impression that we don't care about our school. If you truly don't care, drop out or transfer. I'm too busy enjoying my time here to worry about your lack of pride. Let's celebrate. We have reason enough to. It's always fun to be the underdog, to come out of nowhere and topple the giants and be the victors. But let's carry the celebration over to other aspects of our lives here at Penn. Let's be proud of our teachers, our campus, and everything we do here. If we don't, then when we finally lose the Ivy championship, the victor will say, "Well, at least they've got Wharton." Jennie Rosenbaum is a senior Theater Arts and Comparative Literature major from Forest Hills, New York. That Would Be Telling appears alternate Mondays.