EDITORIAL: Outwitting the space allocators

Small but important departments should work together to get better, newer joint space all can use. If these faculty members plead long and hard enough, department chairs then plead to their bosses, the deans, who plead to their boss, the provost. In this convoluted, competitive manner enrollment goals and targets are set, educational priorities are defined -- and precious financial and territorial resources are distributed. The problem with this system is that Penn's 12 separate schools are each responsible for balancing their own budgets. This continuous war between academic fiefdoms means that small departments like Music, promised a permanent building for 20 years, remain stuck in the path of the Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and flooded every time it rains. It means that Regional Studies and American Civilization are demoted from "major" to "program" status in an effort to balance the ledger. After all, when behemoths like Wharton and Engineering can show, through cost-benefit analyses, that building new facilities to accommodate them will in the long run bring more national attention and perhaps cash to Penn, they will always get their way. Inevitably, majors with small enrollments that constitute the core of the liberal arts -- such as Classical Studies -- are the first to be threatened by budget crunches and the first to be placed at the bottom of the priority list for space. These aren't big majors, but they are important for schools like Penn, which aspire to intellectual pre-eminence. If administrators plan to build large academic centers, designed to stand and provide campus-wide service for the next 50 years, they should encourage departments to work together in their space planning and requests, to get maximum mileage from limited resources. A shiny new building that could serve both the Psychology and Music departments, with classrooms in separate wings but shared labs for listening or cognitive processing tasks, is one example. A facility that could house the Education and Social Work schools and facilitate their interdisciplinary research is another. Penn touts to prospective students its 12 schools' physical proximity as a resource unavailable at other top-notch schools. It's time to put money and architecture behind these boasts.