Eric Dash: PennTalked up a storm, but fell mostly on deaf ears

In the spring of 2000, University President Judith Rodin rolled out a major initiative to engage the campus in dialogue called PennTalks.

The goal, Rodin said at the time, was to provide an open forum for students to express their concerns as well as give administrators a chance to "get into the grassroots and have everyone really involved in the thinking and planning of the University."

Over 30 student discussion group leaders were recruited. An outside firm was hired to train them in group facilitation. A marketing blitz ensued. And meetings were scheduled in buildings across campus.

There was just one problem, though: few students bothered to show up and discuss. PennTalks, it seemed, fell on deaf ears.

That's why it comes as no surprise that the PennTalks program -- along with its equally noble but similarly flawed parent organization, the Penn National Commission -- will no longer exist after this semester.

In the future, PennTalks officials will provide support and training for groups interested in holding campus-wide forums, while the Commission will be folded into the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict.

The official explanation for the demise is that that the grant funding the original programs simply expired.

But if the Penn National Commission's move a few years ago from inside Rodin's College Hall office to an out-of-the-way building on the eastern edge of campus is any indication, the initiative has been losing steam for some time.

Since its inception in 1996, the Commission had long been plagued by lofty goals but an unclear and amorphous focus.

With Rodin at the helm, it began as the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community -- an organization whose "discourse about discourse" would help understand the problems of contemporary public discussion, and in the process, put the University on a national pedestal.

At its inaugural session, Rodin convened a group of some 50 leading thinkers -- a veritable brain trust including former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, novelist E.L. Doctorow and Karl Rove, now a counselor to President Bush -- for panel discussions about the nature of public dialogue and incivility in politics, sports and popular culture.

But after several more meetings between 1996 and 1999, there were no real earth-shattering findings. And consequently, the Commission was reconceived -- and renamed -- as an organization dedicated to creating forums for public talk.

As an outgrowth of its new mission, officials drew up plans for the Penn Public Talk project. The experimental program would have students lead open discussion groups across Penn's campus, and would eventually serve as a model for colleges -- even cities -- nationwide.

"The idea was that you didn't need a divided community to talk," explained PennTalks Associate Director Lillian Rozin. "You could talk to build a community."

Without a clear agenda or core constituency, however, the PennTalks discussions on campus flopped. Students didn't feel the need -- or have the time -- to converse according to the University's "informal" structure. Disappointed administrators called the program a "learning experience" and chalked its troubles up to bad timing, campus politics and a widespread perception among students that behind the initiative, there lay an administrative agenda.

Once again, the initiative was retooled and reconceived. And for the last several moths, the Penn Public Talk project's resources have been used to support the Campus Conversations and Fireside Chat series in Houston Hall, as well as community-building conversation groups in the college houses.

Although sadly inevitable, the real irony of the demise of PennTalks -- and the Penn National Commission itself -- is that public discourse is needed now more than ever. Especially on this campus.

Indeed, there are major issues and genuine concerns that have captured our collective attention. As citizens, we are still reeling from the horror of terrorist attacks that have forever scarred our nation. And as students, we are grieving over the tragic deaths of two classmates.

Moreover, in the weeks to come, there will be equally important topics to debate -- from a national discourse on civil liberties to campus-wide discussion on the University's new strategic plan.

Would PennTalks discussion groups offer the perfect forum for dialogue? I'm not so sure. But the problem with PennTalks was never its mission. It was the the failure of the administrative leadership of Ben Franklin's University to practice what they preach: reconciling academic theory with real world implementation.

Hopefully, the lofty goals of PennTalks -- to build "community through conversation" -- will be pursued more effectively by other groups at Penn.

After all, Rozin notes, "Having gone through Sept. 11, people need to talk and connect with people more.

"If we can't do it here, how can we do it across other, bigger boundaries of difference?"

Eric Dash is a senior Management and American History major from Pittsburgh, Pa.

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