'Century' comes to close for U. initiative

Officials say they have achieved the goals of the 21st Century Project. The millennium may be more than a year away, but the University's 21st Century Project is about to officially become no more than a memory, officials said this week. The project -- announced in 1994 and incorporated into University President Judith Rodin's Agenda for Excellence the following year -- oversaw several University-wide academic and student life initiatives over its four-year life. Originating under former Provost Stanley Chodorow and his Provost's Council on Undergraduate Experience, the project came to primarily encompass four initiatives: the University's college house system; the Wheel project, which delivers in-residence academic support services; the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk; and Civic House, Penn's new community-service hub, which opened last month at 3914 Locust Walk. The plan also called for increased interaction between the University's 12 schools, leading to a slew of dual-degree, interdisciplinary and submatriculation programs. "We're at the conclusion of that project and we're working with the Council of Undergraduate Deans to work on new initiatives," Rodin said. "We will now consider what comes next." Last November, as Chodorow prepared to leave his position after being named a finalist for the presidency of the University of Texas at Austin, several administrators said they expected his projects, including the 21st Century Project, to survive his departure. This week, officials insisted that while the project itself has ended, its primary components will continue to progress. "We have essentially retired the name," Interim Provost Michael Wachter said. "We have retired it because so many of its key projects have been launched and been successful." "That was a good name for an incubator," Wachter added, "[but] a lot of it has been hatched, so to speak." The project was never designed to be a permanent campus fixture, according to Assistant to the President Steven Steinberg, who was appointed as interim director of the project last December. "When the project was launched, it really did have a three to four year time frame with it to foster this kind of interaction," he said. College Dean Richard Beeman said that with the project having run its course, the majority of Penn's academic planning will now be done by the individual schools. "We've moved forward centrally in those areas where one could move forward centrally, like the college houses," he said. "Most of the undergraduate deans feel that practical responsibility for the essentials of educational innovation rest with the schools." Administrators also emphasized that several new academic initiatives are in the works, even if they won't be under the aegis of the 21st Century Project. In particular, officials emphasized the importance of the Undergraduate Research Center, a resource for students wishing to create or participate in research projects at Penn or other institutions. "It's in its bare infancy and we'll be acting out the first steps of how it works," Wachter said of the research center. "To some extent we've been identifying undergraduate research as something Penn can do differently," Steinberg added. "That will move forward with or without the rubric of the 21st Century Project." Along with increased inter-school programming and better use of Penn's urban environment as a learning tool, Beeman identified undergraduate research as one of the three priorities for his school in the post-project era. "We are a distinguished research university and we are in competition with perhaps 25 other distinguished research universities," Beeman said. "This has got to be an important priority."