Five years in, Rodin's Agenda gets a review

The past five years of University President Judith Rodin's administration have been driven by one pile of paper -- the Agenda for Excellence, a strategic plan for the entire University during her tenure. Announced in November of 1995 -- just months after she assumed the University presidency -- the Agenda established a list of nine goals for Penn to tackle over a five- year period. And with those five years coming to a close this year, the Agenda is coming under review. Though the evaluation will occur throughout the end of the year, the University Trustees will hear the first piece of it at their June meeting. As the review process began earlier this year, Rodin said that the analysis would help determine what areas still need improvement. "What this would be is now saying, 'OK, we've done it on an annual basis, we keep recalibrating and resetting; let's step back and see everything that we've accomplished, what we haven't done and ask ourselves why,'" Rodin said. Once the Agenda was compiled by senior administrators, it was circulated to members of the Penn community, including faculty and students. Furthermore, each of Penn's schools developed their own version of the Agenda in subsequent years, each tailored to address their special concerns. And almost as soon as it was implemented, the Agenda began to greatly affect the way the University operated. The March after it was announced, Rodin traveled to South Korea in an effort to aid the globalization called for in the Agenda. In May 1996, the University of Pennsylvania Health System took over the Penn Tower Hotel, a move that Executive Vice President John Fry said, at the time, was a direct result of the Agenda. But to students, perhaps the most noticeable result of the Agenda was the construction of the Perelman Quadrangle, which officially opened in September. Rodin maintains that by and large, Penn is a much better place than it was before the Agenda. "Let's just go back seven and a half years and remind ourselves where we were," Rodin said last week. "When we came, Sansom Common was a parking lot, the temporary book store had been up for 25 years... so you are experiencing a very different Penn from the Penn that we experienced eight years ago," Rodin said. The nine original goals drafted by the Agenda, and then expanded upon by subsequent goal statements and individual agendas drafted by Penn's separate schools, have been the driving force behind some of the most ambitious efforts the University has undertaken since Rodin became president. For instance, in 1995, the Agenda called for the University to "seek greater research opportunities." This motive has led most recently to the establishment of the Center for Undergraduate Research Fellowships, an organization that seeks to facilitate and promote research by Penn's undergraduates. The Agenda also called for massive fundraising efforts, and these efforts, on the whole, have been successful, with the University having raised more than $900 million since the implementation of the Agenda. Furthermore, the University was able to break $300 million in each of the past two years. According to Rodin, this is one of the most dramatic results of the Agenda. "The rate of annual increase at Penn is higher than any other institution in our peer group, except for institutions that are actively in a campaign," Rodin said. For Provost Robert Barchi, who has held various positions at Penn since the late 1960s, the successes of the plan can be seen in the quality of Penn's student body. "We've always had good students, but I think we have excellent students now," Barchi said. "If you think about the Agenda and what it says, it really outlines what it means to be a great university." But while they laud the Agenda and its goals, administrators also say that there are areas still in need of work. According to Rodin, the integration of technology and globalization of Penn are two Agenda goals that have not gone as far ahead as some of the other points. "Ideas that were thought to be fresh and pertinent [in these two areas] five years ago are not still thought so now," Rodin said. And others in the Penn community see other areas that still need work. According to English Department Chairman John Richetti, one of the most important things for Penn to tackle in the next five years is the faculty-to-student ratio within the School of Arts and Sciences, which currently employs 450 professors. Administrators added that they would like to see more faculty per student. "I'd like to see the School of Arts and Sciences faculty go up to between 500 and 525," Richetti said, who added that "that wouldn't give us a ratio as good as some of the other Ivy League schools." SAS Dean Samuel Preston agreed that faculty staffing is a problem that needs to be addressed. "It's a relatively low faculty to student ratio, and that's something that we're working to correct," Preston said. Furthermore, several within the University community say that fundraising for Penn's financial aid system -- which has failed to match recent financial aid overhauls at Princeton and Harvard universities -- has not come nearly as far as was originally planned. Less than 5 percent of Penn's financial aid budget is covered by endowment, putting Penn at the bottom of the Ivy League in this category. But it is issues such as these that this year's review seeks to address. According to Rodin, determining such weaknesses is the most important part of the analysis. "My view is always, you learn more from what you didn't do and probing why than examining what you did do," Rodin said.

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