Out went the old and in came the new yesterday afternoon when the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education elected their new board for the 2001 term.
College sophomore Jacob Cytryn is the new chairman of SCUE and will head its six-person steering committee.
Cytryn said yesterday that he will continue SCUE's tradition of "improving the academic environment" by focusing on "academic issues in an innovation or reform capacity."
Past accomplishments of SCUE, which has been in place at Penn for 35 years, include the implementation of the Pass/Fail option for classes, the creation of the annual October Fall Break and the lengthening of New Student Orientation for incoming freshmen.
SCUE also compiles the White Paper, an evaluation of the state of undergraduate education at Penn, once every five years. The most recent version was released last year.
The steering committee, which was self-selected from within the general body of SCUE in a three-hour process yesterday, includes new Vice Chairman and College sophomore David Gringer, Treasurer and College junior Katherine Sledge and Secretary and College junior Phillip Geheb.
The two at-large members of the committee are College juniors Naeema Ginwala and Max Cantor.
Outgoing Chairwoman and College senior Lindsey Mathews said she believes that the new board will accomplish all it sets out to do.
"We had an extremely qualified candidate for every position," Mathews said. "They're committed and they have a lot of good insights."
That commitment will be necessary if the new group of student leaders is to accomplish the long list of goals in front of them.
Among those tasks are the continuation of SCUE's commentary on the Pilot curriculum, which will wrap up its first trial run this May, and the preceptorials offered to students each semester. In addition, the committee is planning to take an in-depth look at the Major Advising Program within the College of Arts and Sciences.
"I feel we're at a fulcrum point where higher education is going because the way that knowledge is organized and used in the world is changing," said Mathews of these issues.
On the forefront of the new board's agenda, however, is the concept of "one University," which includes issues concerning research at Penn and the quality of teaching in all four undergraduate schools.
The idea of "one University," according to Mathews, is to ensure that everyone who graduates from Penn feels like a Penn student as opposed to a student solely from a particular college.
Part of this plan is to include more interdisciplinary options for undergraduate education.
Cytryn cited the Pilot curriculum course "Literature of the Holocaust," taught by English Professor Al Filreis and Italian and Film Professor Millicent Marcus, as an example of what SCUE is working towards in this area.
"Dr. Filreis is a model for interdisciplinary teaching," Cytryn said.
The topic of research among undergraduates is also becoming a larger issue for the group, because the Pilot curriculum will allow approximately 600 sophomores to become involved in individual research projects within the next two years.
Despite the large scale and potential impact of the issues SCUE is dealing with, up to this point they have not been widely recognized among the student population for their work. Cytryn said he sees this as one of the major obstacles to making progress on the topics on the agenda.
"Not so many people know what SCUE is, what the letters stand for, let alone what the actual membership believes," Cytryn said. "We're the ghosts behind what's going on."
SCUE is currently looking for applications from freshmen and sophomores in all four undergraduate schools to join the committee for 2002. The body usually accepts between 30 and 40 students each year.
