COLUMN: Bring faculty closer to campus

From Shireen Santosham's, "If I Was Your Woman," Fall '97 From Shireen Santosham's, "If I Was Your Woman," Fall '97 Can you imagine having corn fields in the middle of campus? At my high school we had four. When I finally started my college search, the last thing I wanted was a school out in the country, isolated from the rest of the modern world. Unfortunately, Penn seems to have little of either. Most of my professors hardly recognize my face, much less my name. As an undergraduate, the closest I usually get to my professor is the third row of a three hundred-person lecture hall. My longest conversation is a three line email asking about the upcoming midterm. Office hours seem scheduled at exactly the most inconvenient time, and catching the professor after class is a rarity. And they're never around after hours; at five o'clock, they're out the door and on their way back to the Main Line. Of course, this situation is not their fault. They have families and obligations outside the University. Unfortunately for students, it's one of the problems of attending a large urban school. This problem, however, has also had a subtle, more profound effect on the entire West Philadelphia community. With few professors living near the University, community sentiment has suffered in West Philadelphia. How can the University expect to foster good relations with its neighboring community if there is no sense of community between faculty and students? Perhaps unfounded, some local community members have expressed the opinion that Penn is, "An urban university, with a suburban mentality." This attitude is fueled by the fact that less than five percent of all faculty live in West Philadelphia. As a result, many faculty members do not have strong ties to the area. This lack of commitment to our local community is also exemplified by the students because they are a transient population -- most of us do not spend more than four years in this area. The combination of these two forces leaves a division between the University and the West Philadelphia residential community. But although in recent years, community relations have improved, there is still a distinct separation between the two. If more faculty lived on and around campus, community relations would improve. Faculty members are likely to draw more attention of West Philadelphia issues to the University community. Hopefully, as a result, problems such as crime and neighborhood defamation would decrease. Also, more neighborhood programs would gain prestige, attention and participation. In general, West Philadelphia could be a more pleasant place to live. Such a move would, by nature, improve the relationship of the University as a whole with the community. Communication lines between the community members and Penn would improve simply because more members of the community would also be active voices at Penn. For students, more faculty on or near campus has obvious benefits. These advantages stem not only from increased accessibility, but from newly formed connections between faculty and students. These connections will grow simply from shared concerns about living in the same area. If there are so many potential benefits, why aren't more faculty living in West Philly? The two most obvious reasons are concerns over the high cost of living and of crime in this area. Crime in West Philadelphia is a fact of life. However, educated people will tend to be more concerned and active in fighting the crime in their neighborhoods. Currently, there are several neighborhood crime watches that have been established by West Philadelphia community members. With the addition of Penn faculty as residents, there is likely to be an increase in participants in these types of programs. The issue of cost of living is another problem. Living in the city is an expensive proposition. Perhaps if the University provided more incentives to faculty members to stay in West Philly, more would live here. Penn currently offers a guaranteed mortgage program through local banks to encourage more faculty to live in the area. However, professors who don't have tenure have said they don't want to buy a house in Philadelphia if they don't know how long they will be at the University. therefore not taking advantage of the program. Why not put more effort into bringing more faculty closer to campus? Maybe build on-campus faculty housing and provide free parking for them. Bringing faculty onto campus would both increase community sentiment, as well as providing residents who live all year round on campus. If you build student housing, empty buildings that could be collecting rent over the summer, remain unused. These unused buildings result in a general loss of potential profits. If you build faculty housing, you collect rent for a full year. Some argue, that the new residential "college houses" will address many of these problems. Particularly, because each of the new houses will have at least two standing faculty members in residence. However, the number of faculty actually moving onto campus will be insufficient to alleviate community tensions. This new plan amounts to approximately one faculty member per four-hundred students. For most students at Penn, this ratio is not much of an improvement. In addition, bringing such a small number of faculty members onto campus will not significantly improve "town-gown" relations. Bringing faculty onto campus is a step in the right direction. But if the University is serious about promoting community both on campus and in the larger West Philadelphia area, they need to be more aggressive in getting a significant number of faculty closer to campus. Such a move would improve not only student-teacher relationships, but also community relations in general, and West Philadelphia as a whole.