LETTER TO THE EDTIRO: Straight Facts About Ivy Council

To the Editor: At this conference, entitled "Defining Ourselves: Student Activism in the Ivy League", we worked hard to see that the aims and concerns of Penn's students were injected into Ivy Council's coordinated effort of voicing student issues. The Undergraduate Assembly's motive in sending delegates to participate in (and oftentimes lead) Ivy Council is clear: to give the UA, through the collaborative efforts of the Ivy League student governments, more leverage in University affairs, and thus allowing the aims and concerns of Penn's students to be better heard and represented in the University's initiatives. The Ivy Council has three principal functions. First, it provides a forum for information, allowing communication among the Ivies. Second, Ivy Council deals with student advocacy issues, functioning as a platform for speaking out nationally on issues concerning students and campuses. And third, it serves as a support center for our student governments. The editorial branded Ivy Council as "nothing more than a powerless body void of any goals" (despite our three-fold purpose above). The editorial further charges that "the concerns of a large, preprofessional, urban school such as Penn are going to be different from those of a small, academic, rural institution such as Dartmouth." Dartmouth's student government recently succeeded in convincing its administration to build a student union, which was completed and open for business this year, and which housed our conference. Yet the editorial insists that the Ivies could never "find meaningful common ground." Can you say "Revlon Center"? Yet despite this valuable coordination and note-comparing of strategies in advocating students' needs, we were still accused of "just padding [our] collective resume." We wish we had been able to get our hands on some of that alleged "padding" during our Friday-afternoon-to-Sunday-night Ivy conference, as the floors we slept on between our seventeen hours of driving were far from the sort of comfort that we would have endured just to look better on paper. Our plan of action for Penn and the other Ivies (to supply just a brief sampling) reveals the UA's and Ivy Council's determination in implementing the will of the student body into University and Ivy League policy. In part, this includes: 1) assuring need-blind admissions in the Ivy League; 2) arranging for a nationally-significant figure to speak simultaneously to all students of the Ancient Eight, via satellite hookup; 3) keeping in constant contact with our Ivy counterparts, by phone, post, and e-mail, thus fulfilling the editorial's hope that the Council would "be able to do the research, build the rapport, [and] put in the legwork required to write serious resolutions"; 4) establishing a coordinated an Ivy-wide "Take Back the Night" program; and 5) petitioning all eight Ivies to give students a greater awareness of and involvement in the faculty tenure process. The issues that Penn students and student leaders grapple with daily are issues that are just as ever-present at the other top-tier universities on the east coast, and so the Ivy Council has begun to serve a valuable function: transforming Ivy-wide issues into national concerns. Because of this reason, and because of the resolutions and courses of action that have come out of Ivy Council, we feel that Penn's participation in an Ivy Council conference has a value far exceeding the $200 that the UA was so criticized for allocating. The UA delegation to Ivy Council: Tal Golomb College '98 Larry Kamin College '98 Laurie Moldawer College '97 Lance Rogers College '96