COLUMN: Time for Go East! Thursdays

From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy's," Fall '99 From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy's," Fall '99Do you ever get the feeling that we're on the far western border of civilization? All over University City, you see signs for "Go West!," the initiative to bring Center City residents into our neighborhood. Um, never. Why is that? Why do we go to such great lengths to get Center City residents onto campus but could care less whether or not West Philadelphians find their way here? Do we feel that Center City residents have more to offer than West Philadelphia denizens? We'd be awfully stupid if we did. West Philadelphia and her residents never cease to offer up a dose of reality to University students operating under the misguided notion that college life is real life. If you ask me, I think the real reason we don't encourage West Philadelphia residents from trekking to Penn is because they represent something we're not prepared to handle. West of 45th Street, West Philadelphia becomes a lot less white and affluent and a lot more black and underprivileged. We can handle having people of color in our community as long as they are rich like us, educated like us or cultured like us. Once they cease to be any of those things, they become The Other -- and we fear them because they are different. But it is the University that responds to those fears by building walls between the two communities. Through recent dining and retail projects, Penn has labored hard to ensure that we don't have to come into any unnecessary contact with The Other. The additions are intended to keep a largely wealthy and largely white campus population just as wealthy and white as it has ever been. No one would deny that those projects have improved the quality of life for Penn students, of course. Steve Madden Shoes, Sundance Theaters, the return of La Terrasse and Stephen Starr's restaurant projects are all welcome additions. The same goes for Eastern Mountain Sports, the enlarged GAP store, Urban Outfitters and Ma Jolie. But all of these additions cater to a relatively privileged clientele. Most West Philly natives are unlikely to have the money for dinner at the Ivy Grill. Can you imagine if the University really made an effort to bring neighborhood residents onto campus, say through inexpensive dining and retail stores? After all, students have been demanding a better mix for years. If there were a mix of upscale dining and inexpensive eateries -- say, a Waffle House for every White Dog -- then area residents might have a valid reason for visiting campus. You might actually have rich people and poor people forced to interact with one another. Blacks and whites might actually eat at the same restaurant. Then again, parents might get nervous seeing their kids interact with poor blacks on a day-to-day basis, which is reason enough in the eyes of the University to keep up the walls that separate the two communities. So for the foreseeable future, the University will remain a small island of Nassau County within the greater environment of Philadelphia. Sure, the University makes fancy speeches about how it wants to foster relationships with the community, interact more with the surrounding neighborhood, etc. But when it comes time to devoting the time and effort to really do such things, on a two-way level, the University has run fast as it can in the opposite direction. On the surface, of course, it looks like a lot is being done to break down barriers between the University and neighborhood residents. The Office of the Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs has an entire wing devoted to improving community relations. Recently, this office helped to plan the successful Clark Park Festival. In addition, a number of community-service initiatives and University-run projects work hard to get students and faculty into the surrounding neighborhood. But all of these initiatives and projects have one common denominator: They work on getting denizens of the University into West Philadelphia. Getting residents of West Philadelphia onto Penn's Ivy League campus is another matter entirely, and one that the University is hesitant to face. That's a shame, because we have as much to learn from the residents of neighborhoods like West Philadelphia as we do in the classrooms of Steinberg-Deitrich. Indeed, going through Penn without interacting with the outside community is -- at best -- an incomplete education. Perhaps a better use of our time and energy would be to bring West Philadelphia to us. It might be scary for some at first, but all sides would benefit in the end.