COLUMN: Rosemary's Time

From Mike Nadel's "Give 'em Hell," Fall '95 From Mike Nadel's "Give 'em Hell," Fall '95In College Hall, President Rodin and Provost Chodorow are developing a new system of education for the future. They want Penn to be ready for the Twenty-First Century. Stevens' tenure as dean has been stormy. She embarrassed the University by firing Frank Luntz because she didn't like the results of his students' Ivy League poll. She killed the American Civilizations department. She drew fire when she tried to disband the Religious Studies department. She has been criticized for failing to eliminate the widespread waste in a school sadly in need of money. The politics of tenure at the University have demanded that those within SAS stay quiet about their dissatisfaction with Stevens. Until now. Powerful voices are letting themselves be heard. Suddenly, Rosemary Stevens finds herself facing charges of incompetence, dishonesty and racism from one of the University's most respected professors. Houston Baker is a full professor of English and the director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture. After many months of silence, Baker has come forward to let the ugly truth about Stevens see the light of day. In a letter to me this past weekend, Baker described his many concerns about what he calls Stevens' "bumbling, insensitive incompetence." Baker's words paint a portrait of an administrator with anachronistic and very disturbing ideas about race and ethnicity. He describes a conversation with Stevens about Asian American Studies. Sighing deeply, Stevens said: "Ah, yes. They sent me a petition. It was so neatly written. It had so many signatures on it. Really amazing." Another sigh. Then, in her aristocratic British accent, she went on: "I went to meet with them the other evening. And there they were, all so neatly lined up, and just as polite as you could imagine. There were Chinese, and Japanese, and Koreans. All different, you know? But they seemed to think they had something in common! And they were just so polite! It was really touching!" This remarkable condescension seemed to be Stevens' full opinion of Asian-American Studies at the University. While Asian Americans will be incensed by these remarks, everyone who takes courses in the College should be in an uproar over Stevens' apparent attitude towards education. Stevens and her deanship suffer from what Baker calls the "resentment of excellence syndrome." As soon as Stevens assumed the deanship, Baker says, word went out that the new occupants of College Hall resented publicized and touted academic excellence among their own faculty. Stevens and company did not plan to look to highly-regarded academics in the U.S. or abroad as possible new members of the faculty. Stevens' deanship has refused to hire excellent senior professors whom our peer institutions would love the chance to snatch up. Accomplished team players have not received support for tenure, increasing the likelihood that they will go elsewhere. Instead of hiring full professors, Stevens has shifted the burden elsewhere. According to Baker, she has decided to "make pedagogical cannon fodder of the on-board assistant professors." Undergraduate education can only suffer as a result of this. Morale in SAS is inevitably suffering as well. The dean's office has failed to return letters and repeated phone calls from faculty members. This is indicative of what Baker calls an indifferent, silent, cold disregard of even the barest rudiments of collegiality or courtesy. This contempt is not reserved for the faculty; chairs of departments are treated the same way. Houston Baker has taught in the English department at the University for a long time. He writes that the English department "has received less respect, communication, resources, or simply common courtesy from this Deanship than from any other administrative site on the entire Penn campus during the entirety of my more than 20 years at the University of Pennsylvania." We have some stellar deans at the University. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School is an incredible teacher at the top of her field. Colin Diver has brought increased respect to the Law School. Engineering's Gregory Farrington seems to be almost universally praised. Surely the University's most important school can do much better. In fact, SAS must do better. If the College is to lie at the heart of the Rodin-Chodorow Twenty-first Century Education Initiative, its parent school must have strong, effective, tolerant leadership. Houston Baker sums up the problem neatly: "How can we survive in our excellence with this kind of wifty incompetence in the deanship?" We can't. Maybe we could in the nineteenth century, but not in the twenty-first. Rosemary Stevens' time has come.