In the limelight

Jeremy Siegel seems right at home.<P> Tucked away inside his small Steinberg-Dietrich Hall office, the veteran Wharton Finance professor leans over a laptop next to his desk and glares at a seemingly incomprehensible array of zig-zagging lines and carefully columned numbers.<P> "I've got to check what the market has been up to," Siegel mutters as he gleans some meaning from the statistical mess on his computer screen.<P> "Looks like we're in for some volatility up ahead," he says.<P> Behind the cluttered desk -- nestled between a pair of matching bull-and-bear bookends -- rest a dozen copies of his best-selling Stocks for the Long Run, the 1994 book which turned the academic economist into a Wall Street wizard.<P> And perched at the edge of his table sits a brightly colored globe, on which, perhaps, the world-famous analyst plots the nearly 150,000 miles he travels each year for consulting and speaking engagements.<P> For a man who has made a career out of deciphering those obscure lines and columns -- and who's done virtually all of it within the tightly guarded confines of an Ivy League business school -- Siegel is a shining star in an academic universe known more for its sobering darkness.<P> His words -- and those of his other high-profile colleagues -- can be found almost daily on the pages of major newspapers and magazines around the world. Their faces dot the television landscape, on such shows as Moneyline, Nightline and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.<P> With every appearance or quotation, these superstars of Penn bring an acclaim to the University that many say could not be generated by any other means.<P> "Certainly having persons whose reputations are recognized publicly is a major distinction for any university," said Bruce Alton, a higher education executive recruiter with the Academic Search Consultation Service. "It's one of many marks that bring credit to a school."<P> "Those of us who are in the public eye, I think, raise the visibility of the institution as a whole," Annenberg School for Communication Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson added. "That's an important role to play."<P> Jamieson should know. Widely regarded as the nation's foremost authority on issues of political communication, the media's demand for her insights on presidential debates, campaign advertisements and political rhetoric is extraordinarily high during the months leading up to Election Day.<P> "I don't consider myself a celebrity," said Jamieson, who in the past few weeks alone has been featured on CNN, National Public Radio and in countless newspaper articles. "I consider myself one of the academic voices that get into the news a lot."<P> For all their exposure and name recognition, neither Siegel nor Jamieson view their public role as separate from their other work. Instead, they both say, their outside collaborations are merely a facet of their basic teaching responsibilities.<P> "I [speak with the media] because I regard it as an extension of my teaching," Siegel said. "People tell me I'm a celebrity. Some people even tell me I'm a guru. But that's impossible -- no one has or can have a real specific knowledge of the future."<P> Siegel may not be able to predict the ups and downs of the stock market with 100 percent accuracy, but University officials say that by attracting top faculty and students to Penn, he and his celebrity colleagues provide intangibles to the University that set them apart from their equally-knowledgeable peers.<P> "They're obviously very valuable to the school both in the attention they bring to Penn and in their abilities in bringing the outside in," School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said. "They can bring issues in public discourse back to the classroom to make learning especially exciting."<P> David Backus, the vice dean of faculty at New York University's Stern School of Business and a follower of Siegel's work, agreed. "It's a different experience having them in the classroom than someone else."<P> Backus added that fame from the media spotlight also brings a potential danger: It makes famous professors more attractive to other schools.<P> "The academic world is a pretty small one," Backus said. "And if you get the idea that somebody big might move or isn't happy, you start talking to them."<P> Siegel and Jamieson admit that they have often been the targets of outside recruiting.<P> "I have been the subject of offers ever since I got my Ph.D., and the number and nature of offers really hasn't changed since 1972," Jamieson said. "But why would I want to leave a university doing so well?"<P> Siegel, who commands significant sums for his outside consulting engagements, echoed those sentiments. "I've been invited to work on Wall Street many times, but I could never have the freedom I have here.<P> "The thought of making $10 million or $20 million is nice, but what gives me satisfaction is doing everything I'm doing now," he said.<P> Besides the ever-present lure of bigger salaries on the outside, the success that notoriety brings can sometimes demand an even more significant price, as Center for Bioethics Director Arthur Caplan learned recently.<P> Caplan -- whose expertise in the field of medical ethics draws, by his estimate, at least 200 media inquiries each week -- was named as a defendant in a civil suit filed against Penn and several others by the family of Jesse Gelsinger, who died last year while participating in a gene therapy research trial conducted at Penn.<P> The suit claims that the advice Caplan gave to researchers running the study led them to target older, healthier subjects like Gelsinger, rather than terminally ill infants whose parents, Caplan advised, cannot give informed consent.<P> According to Caplan, suits like this are a side effect of the growing spotlight on himself and on bioethical issues in general.<P> "I think one of the costs of being out in public... is that you're going to attract all different kinds of reactions," Caplan said. "The media involvement has its ups and downs."<P> Caplan's colleagues say that part of his value as a bioethicist rests in his ability to reach out and communicate to the public in ways that typical scientists cannot.<P> "I think he's perhaps the best-known person in our field, and that brings with it a certain luster to the University," said University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics Director Jeffrey Kahn, who replaced Caplan at Minnesota when Caplan came to Penn in 1994.<P> "Art is extremely productive, and his name is mentioned in all the relevant literature," Kahn added. "He's a huge recipient of grants, and his exposure helps that."<P> Caplan has built much of his reputation through his affinity for engaging public discussion, but exposure can also be found far from Nightline.<P> For Lawrence Sherman, a professor of Sociology and director of the Fels Center of Government, success has come by leading his field in a new direction.<P> Sherman -- who came to Penn just 15 months ago from the University of Maryland -- has already gained the plaudits of University figures for his ambitious rebuilding of the Fels Center. For years it had sat in limbo as enrollment dropped and was shifted among various schools at the University.<P> Sherman is president of both the International Society of Criminology and the American Criminological Society, and was recently ranked by The Journal of Criminal Justice as the most-often cited among 27,536 criminologists around the world.<P> "I think that there is some reason to characterize my work [as groundbreaking]," said Sherman, whose work has brought the scientific method to a traditionally theoretical field.<P> Sherman serves as an advisor to both Philadelphia Mayor John Street and Police Commissioner John Timoney and provides expert testimony in trials around the country on cases that involve crime reporting.<P> "Larry Sherman is a public intellectual and certainly a leader within his profession," Preston said. "He has helped revitalize the programs of the Fels Center, in part because of his vision and in part because of his reputation."<P> Still, many in academia say that the reputations of Penn's superstars continue to feed not solely on their television exposure, but also on their sheer intellectual talent.<P> "Kathleen [Jamieson] plays a large part in extending Annenberg into the public eye," Communications Professor Barbie Zelizer said. "She is brilliant at welding scholarship and the everyday political world, and she has been able to transpose her message in a way that people can understand."<P> And to the professors, the mass exposure can at times seem entirely routine.<P> "If you're still making appearances long after your mother cares, you have to be doing it because you really care about the issues," Caplan said.<P> ---------<P> <h2>Sidebar: ...and waiting in the wings</h2><P> They're regular contributors to CNN, they advise heads of corporations and they even manage to make it to class once in a while.<P> But are Penn's high-profile faculty members fundamentally different from the hundreds of other scholars who make their way around the West Philadelphia campus everyday?<P> According to a number of academic leaders, the answer is no.<P> "There are a large number of faculty members here who I consider to have a huge impact and are making major contributions to their own field," Provost Robert Barchi said. "Some of those are more visible than others."<P> Barchi particularly mentioned Lasker Award winners in the Medical School and Penn researchers who have, in the course of their careers, been on the short list for the Nobel Prize as examples of eminent scholars whose work often goes unnoticed by the general public.<P> At a major university like Penn -- one which offers study and research opportunities in a seemingly limitless number of disciplines -- the focus of media attention often centers around those individuals who concentrate on more timely issues or are just more willing to speak to the media.<P> "In general, we have differences between people who are very well-known in their own disciplines and others -- in the category of public intellectuals -- who are prominently cited in the press," School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said. "Some of our best teachers have terrific reputations on campus but their reputations may not extend so far abroad as some others."<P> Even among celebrity professors themselves, there seems to be a general consensus that the only thing that separates them from the rest of the pack is a natural tendency to speak their mind.<P> "I think that my input is valued by both my colleagues and my students," Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel said. "Still, a lot of my colleagues are doing tremendous research and they just tend to shy away from the press more than I."<P> "A long time ago, I decided that bioethics should be a public issue," Center for Bioethics Director Arthur Caplan said. "On the whole, most academics aren't good about dealing with the media. It's something that you're not ever trained or paid to do, and there's a tendency to say that there's no skill set involved with doing it."<P> Whether the attention earned by Penn's high-profile professors is entirely warranted, there seems to be little doubt about the enormous impact that such individuals have in developing the reputation of the University.<P> "In projecting their own reputation, they are projecting an image of Penn," University President Judith Rodin said. "They all do tremendous work and they're willing and often eager to communicate it publicly."<P> -- J.M.<P>