STAFF EDITORIAL: Penn Talks, but to whom?

To find out what students are thinking, Judith Rodin should approach the masses directly, not through focus groups. To that end, the PennTalks program, unveiled yesterday, will create small student-led focus groups for the discussion of our hopes and visions for the University community. The leaders of these panels, in turn, will report their findings to Rodin. Rather than hold open-ended forums and hoping that students offer their voices, she would be better served by going directly to the students where they feel most comfortable. We support the president's goal of involving students in the University's strategic planning process. However, owing to the lack of a clear focus or agenda, we believe the program to be severely flawed. First, it bears noting that the University's record with open consultative forums has been spotty at best. Over the last year, a number of forums targeting the issue du jour -- from the alcohol policy to the future of the modem pool -- have been poorly attended. And University Council -- the president and provost's main advisory body -- has drawn few supplicants to their annual open forums. Indeed, it takes a matter of life or death -- as was the case with a packed forum on campus safety in the crime-ridden fall of 1996 -- to bring the masses to Rodin's doorstep. Unlike these earlier efforts, PennTalks has neither a clear agenda nor a core constituency. We do not expect students, focused as they are on the here and now, to turn out en masse for a discussion on the University's future. Rodin's request that students come to PennTalks sessions to discuss some grand institutional vision is misguided. Rather, the onus falls on her and members of her administration to reach out to the student body and solicit its views directly. Granted, Rodin does meet with a number of student leaders on a regular basis. But she can also take a lesson from her immediate predecessor, former President Sheldon Hackney, who made a point of visiting students where they lived and ate. That type of informal interaction is best for taking the pulse of the student body. If Rodin wants to engage students on an issue as important -- yet esoteric -- as where Penn is going as an institution, she must approach them personally, not through intermediaries. And she must meet the students more than half-way -- on their terms, not hers -- to really find out what is on their minds.