FOCUS: Returning the Favor

Having earned a University degree, many former students find themselves coming back to join the faculty and staff. In their University days, one was a Mayor's Scholar, another was a member of Mask & Wig and still others Daily Pennsylvanian reporters. While their paths probably did not cross as undergraduates at the University, today they all share a common bond. They are among the 2,000 faculty and staff members, out of the University's nearly living 210,000 alumni, who have received their undergraduate degrees at the University. They all have different stories about their undergraduate days and all were led by different motivations to come back to their alma mater. Yet, they all agree that their University has been a major part of their lives. · History Professor Bruce Kuklick was the first person in his family to advance past the 10th grade and go to college. A Philadelphia native, he decided to attend the University because he "thought Penn was the best school there was." "I was swept away that I could study philosophy and take a course in German literature or read Dickens," said Kuklick, the author of a bestseller on the history of baseball, To Everything a Season. Academic success awaited Kuklick at the University. One of the first recipients of the Thouron Fellowship, he attended Oxford University while the University picked up the tab. "All of that first glop of education was provided for by the University," he said. "They did very well by me. I shouldn't complain." After receiving his doctorate in American Civilization at the University, Kuklick went on to teach at Yale University. "I confess, I loath and despise New Haven," he said. "It's the most wretched little city. And to the extent that Yale is a part of it, it's so socially snobbish and conservative as to be moved off the face of the earth." Finally, Kuklick's path led him to the University, where he has been for 20 years. Today he has mixed feelings about the place he calls home. "I have a complicated set of feelings," Kuklick admitted. "On the one hand, it touches deep parts of me to think about the education that this institution has provided for me. I paid nothing and Penn gave me what I still consider to be a terrific education. "On the other hand, there are so many aspects of the way the place is run that just drive me nuts." · Assistant Annenberg School Dean Phyllis Kaniss is another University grad. And for Kaniss, her experience at the University has provided the inspiration for her work today. "It is a wonderful sense of continuity," she said. "I try to relate to and give my students what people gave me as an undergraduate." Kaniss' experience at the University was highlighted by her work as a DP reporter, she said. "I was very involved in the events on campus," said Kaniss, a 1972 graduate. "It was a very explosive time on college campuses, including Penn. "Black students just began to get organized and become more militant and women's groups were activated when I was a student and I reported on them," she added. "I felt like a very central player on campus being one of the major reporters on The Daily Pennsylvanian." Like Kuklick, Kaniss remembers her undergraduate days fondly. Starting out as an English major, her interest shifted during her junior year to regional science, the study of applied economics across geographic regions. In fact, she was the department's first undergraduate major. After receiving her doctorate at Cornell University in regional science, Kaniss returned to the University as a junior lecturer. Slowly, though, she made the shift to communications, where she works today. Comparing the University of yesteryear to the school today, she said much has changed. "Students didn't worry much about careers or what they would do after graduation" when I was an undergraduate, she said. "When I was a student, it was a time of soul searching and a time to think about what you could contribute to the world." But to Kaniss some things haven't changed. She said students are still interested in safety and there is still a fair amount of tension between blacks and whites. She said, for her, the hardest part of her experience was coming back to the University as an employee, instead of as a student. "The first year I was here, I felt very anonymous," she said. "As a student, I was a personality on campus. I knew everybody and everybody knew me. Being an active student is very different from starting as the low man on the totem poll." · Doris and Elton Cochran-Fikes met as undergraduates at the Friars Senior Society Induction Dinner in 1973. Today the two are not only husband and wife, but also University alumni relations director and associate athletic director, respectively. Former Judicial Inquiry Officer and director of the W.E.B. DuBois College House, Elton Cochran-Fikes was a track and field champion as a University undergraduate. "The University is so intertwined in my life," he said. "I met my wife here. I had two stints here as a student and three job stints here. It's been a relationship that began in 1970 that's continued and that's been very positive." His wife, Doris, on the other hand, performed with Penn Players and was a student government representative. She said the University changed quite a bit when she was a student here. While a freshman, the University changed its policy which required women to wear dresses to Sunday night dinner. And as a sophomore, she saw the end of University-imposed curfews for women. "I remember women lining up along Walnut Street to kiss their dates goodnight and running in at 2 a.m. as the curfew came down," she said. She added that it was only during her sophomore year that the University nixed its four-semester physical education requirement, its rule that students had to pass a swimming test to graduate and its policy requiring nearly five credits a semester to graduate. "It sounds like the dark ages," she mused. Immediately after she graduated, Doris Cochran-Fikes took a job in the alumni office as assistant publications director. "It was a strange transition for me because in many ways I was still a student," she said. "I realized, though, that the University was a lot different from the perspective of an employee. I had my best days as an undergraduate after I actually graduated from Penn." While she was an undergraduate, she said, University life for students was somber. "The Vietnam War was upon us," she said. "Women's issues and civil rights issues for blacks were very prominent and everything was very heavy. It was hard as a Penn undergraduate to have fun." For a short time, Elton was in the marines and Doris lived in New York, but they married and returned to Philadelphia. Today, Doris Cochran-Fikes said she can't separate her past experiences from the present. "I feel so much a part of the mission and the tradition and the energy that drives this place and those feelings are enhanced by me being an alumna of the University." Her husband agreed. "I can't imagine being happy and having a more fulfilled social and work life than what I have here at Penn," he said. · Tim Ryan, a 1986 College graduate, tried construction work and waiting tables before coming to the University's Admissions Office. Now the director of planning in the Admissions Office, he didn't know what to expect out of an urban campus, coming from a rural area in southern New Jersey. And it wasn't until he took off two years and returned to school that he saw his future unfold in front of him. Ryan graduated with a triple minor in biology, English and psychology, but had no major. This option has since been eliminated. After serving as director of Advanced Placement and Transfer Credit and head of the Texas office, Ryan was promoted to his current position. "I think I am more impressed and supportive of the place now than I was back then," he said. "I am aware of what it takes to run the place. You have 100 different constituencies that you have to impress and please and sometimes these constituencies are at odds. "I still feel like I'm giving back," Ryan said. "I really feel that I was presented with an opportunity as a student that changed my life." He said when he is travelling on business to promote the University, his passion comes across. "I don't think that it would be the same if I would not have been a student here," he said. "That's a big part of it." · As alumni director, Doris Cochran-Fikes said different desires motivate alumni to pursue different options. "Some people view their experience as a student as something that was a very good time in their life and something that they want to recapture when they come back," she said. "Others see it as a way station on their way to other things and they don't look back." History Professor Michael Zuckerman would agree with Cochran-Fikes' first scenario. A 1961 College graduate, Zuckerman said attending the University gave him the motivation to be a professor and to teach on campus. "I expected to be a lawyer," he said. "My father was a lawyer. I looked at a lot of lawyers and it didn't look like they had lives they loved. But when I looked at my teachers and they looked like they had lives they loved, I decided I was going to be a teacher." An editor of the DP and American Civilization major, Zuckerman said the University has not receded from the effects brought about from the counterculture of the 1960s. "When I was here as a student, it was an overwhelmingly white male university," he said. "Now, it is co-ed and spectacularly diverse. You could walk for weeks on the campus of my undergraduate days and never see a black and never see an Asian and scarcely see foreign students. The place is transformed now." He said many people would give anything to have the opportunity to teach at their alma mater. "It's hard to do," he said. "There probably are a lot of people that would gladly go back to school where they were undergraduates at. I was just very lucky."

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