Jooho Lee: Is there a Penn community?

The University of Michigan's "Big House" has been packed with over 100,000 frenzied fans screaming for their Wolverines at every home football game since 1975. Many alums back on the East Coast faithfully watch the games on TV, proudly displaying their Wolverine paraphernalia wherever they go.

At Michigan, football is intimately linked with a sense of community that thrives among current students and alumni. This feeling is so powerful that it engulfs surrounding neighborhoods. Rallying behind a rather inconsequential phenomenon like college sports, campus community coaxes neighborhood community in Ann Arbor, Mich.

At Penn, we throw toast while people on our streets scrounge the bottoms of trash heaps for food. Our students are occupied with their private lives and our neighborhood continues to feel unwanted and pushed out of University City. We lack community, both from within and from without.

The administration has recognized this dissonance on our campus borders. Both Agendas for Excellence, along with organizations like the Center for Community Partnerships, emphasize the importance of fostering a sense of community within West Philadelphia.

But what hasn't been adequately addressed, unfortunately, is the lack of community within the University.

Take last Tuesday's Econ Scream -- the sorriest I've seen in my three years here. Rather than joining in and venting frustration, the freshmen were there for a show. Rather than participating, they preferred to disengage themselves from the event. Needless to say, there was no scream.

Have we not learned the values of engaging in a common enterprise, even if it's something as trivial as shouting profanities in unison at our Econ professor? It may be true that social capital is on a decline throughout American society, but is it necessary for this trend to be present, perhaps even at an accelerated pace, on our campus?

A university education should be more than mere preparation for joining the workforce. It should instill in students a sense of citizenship. When community-building fails at the university level, it has no chance of succeeding at the societal level.

In this light, Penn is failing to educate its students to be active and meaningful members of a larger community because it is indirectly teaching its students to be self-interested for the mere sake of being self-interested.

The decentralized structure of our university reflects this mentality. Most departments have virtual autonomy when it comes to matters of finance and faculty management, and this leads to conflicts of interest within the departments and schools. Every University decision that leads to any changes in class size, attendance, department size and so on, affects every department's financial capacities. Thus, each part works toward its own self-interest, often losing sight of the good of the entire university.

When there is no sense of community at the university level, there is none within the undergraduate body. For example, when the dean of the College has a power-point presentation of how the median salary for College alums is higher than those of Wharton grads 10 years after commencement, it is not surprising to see the origin of the petty hostility and bitter contempt between these two undergraduate bodies.

Even within the student body, blind self-interest has unfortunate results. For example, there is no trend of cooperation between the different branches of student government. Recent attempts to mediate "conflicting interests" between the Undergraduate Assembly and Student Committee on Undergraduate Education fell apart, all the while losing sight of the fact that both bodies are working for the same group of students.

Although community building is blamed for discouraging competition -- which is necessary to maximize productivity -- pursuing self-interest and the common good are not mutually exclusive. In fact, when Adam Smith made his case for individual agents acting in their self-interest, he was writing in the context of these agents acting with the common good in mind. Remember the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind?

For Smith, John Locke and the rest of the fathers of liberalism, self-interest was a means to an end -- the end being the common good. Of course, acting in this way is essentially self-interested according to Alexis de Tocqueville. With these two concepts feeding back to each other, there is an upward cycle toward a more complete life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

We cannot fail to recognize this need for the emphasis on community along with that of self-interest on our campus. It is essential for our education as well as the health of this university and of the entire city.

We may not have big-time sports, but we'd better build community somehow. And this takes an effort from everyone.

Jooho Lee is a junior History and Political Science major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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