COLUMN: "Ernest Goes to Penn'

From Adam Mark's "Mark My Words," Fall '96 From Adam Mark's "Mark My Words," Fall '96The intellectual communityFrom Adam Mark's "Mark My Words," Fall '96The intellectual communitycreated during the annualFrom Adam Mark's "Mark My Words," Fall '96The intellectual communitycreated during the annualFreshman Reading ProjectFrom Adam Mark's "Mark My Words," Fall '96The intellectual communitycreated during the annualFreshman Reading Projectdoesn't last for long. From Adam Mark's "Mark My Words," Fall '96The intellectual communitycreated during the annualFreshman Reading Projectdoesn't last for long. When Judith Rodin invoked Ernest Hemingway in her Freshman Convocation address last week, the Class of 2000 gave a collective moan. Earlier in the day, as part of the annual Freshman Reading Project, she -- and many other faculty members and administrators -- led more than two dozen freshmen in a roundtable discussion of his novel A Moveable Feast, set in 1920s Paris. Feast set the stage for a lesson in community. The Reading Project, now in its fourth year, was designed to do just that: introduce incoming students to one another through a shared intellectual and social experience. At Convocation -- the first and last meeting of the entire class until Hey Day -- and at the Deans' Meeting earlier that day, speaker after speaker sang of community and the neighborly fabric the freshmen would weave themselves into over the next four years. It was utterly utopian. Though I don't quite remember, I assume I was given a similar pitch three years ago, using Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In my first week at Penn, the third floor of Speakman and I were fortunate enough to discuss the novel with Matthew Santirocco, then dean of the College. The discussion was my first exercise in community and an exciting introduction to Penn. That model intellectual community, though, soon escaped me. After Frankenstein, I discovered an age-old truism: freshmen prefer bonding over beer to bonding over books. I never did see Dean Santirocco again, and I became close to my RA only inasmuch as he lived next door to me. My freshman roommate and I never talked about Frankenstein -- or much else, for that matter -- and the most intellectual experience I shared with the rest of my freshman class was the Econ Scream. My "community" then, isn't as classical as the University's brochures suggest, what with so many staged pictures of students studying in Furness. It isn't as orchestrated, either. Few of us would take to Hemingway if we didn't have to. Rather, community manifests itself here in smaller, stranger ways. Last week, as my housemates and I were gathered around the Nintendo, we discussed at some length the mechanics of long-term interest rates. The subject was hardly romantic, unlike Hemingway in Paris. But it was spontaneous and infinitely more genuine than my dorm's ogling over Mary Shelley three years earlier. I mean not to belittle the Reading Project. Hemingway, like Stoppard and Lightman and Shelley before him, encouraged freshmen to talk and think with one another when they otherwise might not have. A Moveable Feast effectively broke the ice. Rodin's students, though reserved at first, quickly opened up to her and to one another. One girl in the group could hardly put her hand down. Her talkativeness revealed to her hallmates as much about herself as it did about Hemingway. What the Penn Reading Project offers is unique: a collegial, interactive experience with administrators and faculty members who will never again be as accessible. That's to be expected; Penn is a big school, with big classes, big buildings and bigwigs. The Reading Project doesn't make up for that, but it does temper it. If this year's project is as intense as last year's, which concluded when Arcadia author Tom Stoppard blitzed campus for a week in the spring, then the Class of 2000 is in for a real treat. However, I suspect Hemingway won't be dropping in anytime soon. This semester, the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education is sponsoring "preceptorials," small seminars not for credit. I'll be taking Dynamics of Media in Politics with Henry Teune, the Political Science undergraduate chairperson. Like the Reading Project, these sessions will offer students the chance to interact intimately with faculty members, without the consequence of grades. And unlike the Reading Project, this is something I've elected to do. I never did finish Frankenstein. But I don't care. For one brief hour at the start of my freshman year, Penn was like its brochure. I was sitting in the dean's apartment, pondering the meaning of life or something like that, not for credit but to establish some sense of community with my hallmates. My education at Penn over the past three years has come less from a textbook than from the routine interactions of college life. I've discovered more about the world and about myself from bumming around the DP than from my formal studies. I've been more enlightened by discussing current politics with my housemates than with my classmates in Political Science 130. I don't think the Class of 2000 will long remember what Ernest Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast, but they will remember that they tried to figure it out together.