COLUMN: Too focused on the future?

From Mike Madden's, "Opiate of the Masses," Fall '98 From Mike Madden's, "Opiate of the Masses," Fall '98These days, University administrators find themselves facing a strangely enviable shortcoming: They plan too far ahead. Trust us, the University's crack real estate team implores local merchants, and move your store a few blocks uptown; it'll be a great shopping area when we're finished with it. Yes, University Trustees, please outsource building management to Trammell Crow in a totally unprecedented deal -- we know they'll work miracles for less money. These promises may well pan out. Stepping back a bit and looking at what University President Judith Rodin and her top deputies have in mind, it's hard not to imagine a completely revitalized Penn -- a cosmopolitan neighborhood where professors hang out with students in dynamic new dorms, alongside all sorts of new goodies paid for by the money saved from "restructuring" the central administration. But how will things work before these wide-eyed dreams come true? The University is moving forward on so many long-term projects at once that it's facing a public relations and logistical crisis in the short term. Look at the project to revamp retail in University City, for example. Officials like Rodin, Executive Vice President John Fry and Fry's deputy for real estate, Tom Lussenhop, can't stop talking about how vibrant the neighborhood will be when 40th Street is cleaned up, or when Sansom Common is finished or when new shops move into Houston Hall's basement once the Perelman Quadrangle is completed. They're probably doing it the right way, for the most part. Before embarking on this project, Fry boned up on Jane Jacobs' classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a brilliant primer on intelligent city planning. He lured a staff from big city governments and private firms; together, they came up with a master plan that integrates economic development, architecture and a slew of other disciplines. With this in mind, Penn officials are now going around to local merchants and national chains, trying to draw them into what they promise will be some sort of new Manayunk, both "upscale" and "funky," to borrow Rodin's words. And they can't understand why outfits like the Pennsylvania Book Center or University Jewelers are afraid to leave their homes of more than 30 years to trek three blocks west to a spot that isn't exactly prime real estate right now. The problem is that there are two different paradigms at play. Penn's folks look forward to the culmination of their years of planning and see an urban haven. Meanwhile, merchants look at the rents they'll be paying in the new spots and wonder if they'll be able to stay in business long enough to see the rest of the "revitalization" finished. Similarly, when students wonder why Rodin is so excited about Perelman Quad or Sansom Common, we're looking at it through the lens of the last three years worth of construction and hype, while she's taking a much longer view. These sorts of conflicts won't go away just because the end results will be good, and University officials need to address them with more than a constant barrage of "Trust us!" Yes, these projects take time to finish, so it's unreasonable to expect immediate progress. There's really no way to appease seniors who gripe about seeing campus under scaffolding for four years and hearing about grand openings slated for the semester after they leave. But complaints like that -- and the much more valid critiques of the retail plan or decisions made on outsourcing before the data is all assembled -- still deserve serious thought and absolute honesty in trying to answer them. Administrators constantly seem bewildered when people don't take what they're saying on faith -- "Why are people so short-sighted?" they wonder. Instead, maybe officials should be asking themselves why they haven't seen the short-term holes in their long-term logic -- the ones that seem so clear to everyone else on campus.