COLUMN: That's Penntertainment

From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '94 Over the past few years, it seems the once-vaunted social atmosphere at Penn has witnessed a turnabout so dramatic that even the Harvard band could comment snidely about it during Saturday's halftime shenanigans. The University is for once accurately depicting society in its mounting campaign to curb fun in America -- simple good times without strings or ideology attached -- and trying to give it a red-and-blue face. The usual weekend social options at the University are vanishing more rapidly than prom dresses in back seats. The most ... ahem, liberal watering holes are asking for more identification than it took to get through the Berlin Wall a few years back. Not one but both local movie theaters have closed for business. Even the old frat-party staple has been complicated of late with things like guest lists and BYOB. To identify the trend underpinning these elements, one need only look at what is filling the void. In place of a basement at Smoke's, Penn got Fingers, Wings, and Other Things. For the latest box-office hit, one needs never leave the High Rises and their new Resnet hookups -- it may not be what Dr. Leary intended, but students can finally tune in, turn on, and drop out. Some see a future Penn in which all fraternities, at least on the Walk, will be transformed into coffeehouses or Women's Centers. In that same future, Penn will probably have reached a critical mass in its exponentially increasing number of student groups -- each student, atomized into his or her own unique cultural or interest group. Call it monopoly power. Call it petty totalitarianism. Whatever the name, the trend is one of increasing University influence in the life of students outside the classroom. Granted, student life has never been completely free of a Penn tinge, but the current trend distinguishes itself by a puritanical streak demanding that everything social be highbrow at best and politically correct at worst. The most recent manifestation surfaced in a UA proposal to reopen the Eric 3 movie theater as a performing arts space. Until it splashed across the DP headlines, the question of the cinema's future received sparse if any discussion in the paper or on electronic newsgroups. God knows who the theater committee talked to apart from the Performing Arts Council and associated Provosts, but an extremely informal poll among Penn undergrads suggests the idea may not meet with all the gushing approval it receives in the UA. The University apparently could not forgive or help shoulder the costs of an independent movie theater in a University-owned building, despite the social outlet it provided. So instead of John Travolta discussing the merits of quarter-pounders in Paris, Penn gets (shiver) more a-cappella, depending on scheduling by University groups. Whether this or that Arts House or Film Society receives the rights to the space, the University -- the same people that brought "Piss Christ" and cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet to campus -- will influence the choice of entertainment that this and the AMC facility provides. Inertia creeps in when a student realizes that the nearest theater is a five-dollar cab ride away. What remains in West Philly after dark are the staples: cheap beer, cheesy music, and big hair. As nearly every intellectual has discovered, even the most Neanderthal of these things can have wondrous restorative merits, especially since they remain apart from the cares and influence of official University life. Everyone needs, as it were, simply to stop thinking for awhile. Over the past three years, the Penn response to off-campus options has escalated to near-hysterics: more cops, more raids, more ID, more complications, more legalities, and less fun. Alcohol never necessarily made for good times -- witness the rash of research over the last few years correlating drinking to various collegiate problems. Yet it seems as if Penn and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have turned these concerns into the rallying cry of a lynch mob against alcohol. One wonders if the various problems identified and seized upon by University officials arise because of the restrictions placed on the environment. Common sense dictates that in the face of scarce opportunities to drink, students will maximize their use of those opportunities, resulting in situations of little sense at all. Were the health of student life the University's true concern, one might sympathize with the purpose behind the prohibition. What actually matters, as an officer of the LCB explained to the manager of a local restaurant, is insurance money and subsequent return of in loco parentis policies to campus. Without the individual responsibility to make even a choice about alcohol, anyone that wishes to remain legal in his or her method of recreation must increasingly turn to whatever entertainment the University proscribes. This includes "Piss Christ," exponentially increasing "niche" groups, beat poets, "cultural" events, and on and on, ad nauseaum. Even these may somehow prove entertaining. Yet the University's social hand can pull strings for the agenda of those at its helm. If the University, in coordination with the state, can rob a student of individual responsibility over what he or she ingests physically, it will hardly draw the line at responsibility for what a student ingests mentally. In the age of the politically correct and socially puritan, it is unwise to dismiss this out of hand. On a campus in which the Undergraduate Assembly's chair admitted lying to his own constituents, it is unwise to dismiss this out of hand. It is time for the social butterflies, cultural elite, and other movers and shakers among the undergrads to take a hard look at the social scene and determine where University influence should end. Otherwise, the University will continue to intrude, and the restriction and atomization of its students will continue. For many, the only alternative may lie in another Sheryl Crow line: "I'm leaving Las Vegas [West Philly]..." Mark Tonsetic is a senior International Relations and Economics major from Winter Springs, Florida. Java Daze appears alternate Wednesdays.