SCUE launches lunches

The annual "Take a Professor to Lunch Week" lets students interact with favorite faculty. In grade school, giving a teacher an apple was enough of an attempt to curry favor. College students have to go a little further. And students get the opportunity to go that extra mile today as the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education kicks off its 14th-annual "Take a Professor to Lunch Week" -- designed to facilitate more intimate student-faculty interaction by encouraging students to invite their professors to lunch. "Take a Professor to Lunch Week continues to encourage students to reach out and build faculty-student relationships," SCUE Chairperson and College junior Ari Silverman said. Silverman said SCUE plans to take Annenberg School for Communications Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Law School Dean Colin Diver, Associate Vice Provost for University Life Larry Moneta and Admissions Dean Lee Stetson to lunch during the week. The group will also sponsor a "Rethinking Adam Smith Symposium" Wednesday with renowned economists John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Barro, Jeffrey Sachs and Douglass North. And the week will culminate with SCUE inviting the entire University to lunch at the Urban Agenda Conference -- an event featuring panels on research, teaching and action -- planned with the help of the Undergraduate Assembly. In conjunction with the event, all students are invited to register to have lunch with former Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.), chief executive of the Corporation for National Service. "We are just so excited about the week," Silverman said. "We want students to follow our lead and get the nerve to go up to their professors and ask them to lunch." Many faculty members said they were also looking forward to the event. "Some, if not most, of the finest conversations about a course take place 'outside' the course," English Professor Al Filreis said. "SCUE's Take a Professor to Lunch Week reinforces the notion that students and faculty can? continue the hard work of educating while enjoying the ease of lunch." He added that "every student should give it a try." And University President Judith Rodin said she is looking forward to spending time with the two students who have invited her to lunch. "When I was a student at Penn, I very much looked up to my professors and would have loved the opportunity to talk with them individually over lunch," Rodin said. "Take a Professor to Lunch Week provides an impetus for students to take that step," she added. "As a faculty member and as Penn's president, I hear from my colleagues that they are truly delighted to be invited to lunch by their students. I am too."