Nicolas Rodriquez: Finding leaders in the applicant pool

Every year seems to bring a fresh outlook on Penn, with new students infusing the community with new energy. However, each year, the eyes of many friends and colleagues grow darker, their attitudes more somber and their optimism more diminished.

The truth is that, like a flower amongst weeds, their supply of energy is getting sucked out by the minute. They see fewer and fewer people among them willing to dedicate their time beyond class and fun toward becoming active on campus and doing work in the surrounding community.

Apathy is becoming the order of law on campus and in this nation, growing with each successive year. Administrators seem irritated by these assertions and speak of the increasingly selective body of students who are growing smarter and more diverse by the year. But how has this discontent grown year after year when we are supposed to have better students each year? Where have these leaders gone?

Penn is by definition selective, standing proudly amongst the world's elite institutions of higher learning. Yet the people that come to Penn are by no means a representative sample of the diverse demographics that exist in this global community.

Penn's facile approach toward diversity and academics means bringing students that can fit social, academic and ethnic demographics that it wants, who can also foot their own bill at Penn. That means that qualified candidates who are not as financially stable need not apply. (That goes for poor Anglo students along with everyone else.)

Penn students are not ordinary. I am not an ordinary Chicano. An ordinary Chicano does not have access to tutors, private school and test preparation courses, but can still achieve the highest means in higher education or in vocational school with encouragement. Where I come from, a Chicano is told, "You can only go so far." The child of a rich farmer (rich is very different where I come from) is told, "Go as far as you want."

I benefited from the knowledge about navigating higher education that my parents held, info not readily available to my Chicano peers or for many other students. School leaders did not invest in the futures of these students because they didn't see them (myself included) as beings of change, people who could make a difference through leadership, scholarship and activism.

That is the key problem lying in the approach to education in this country, and to the approach at Penn. Penn is looking for great scholars and future leaders of this country, tapping into the same networks it has used for 200 years to look for the next big thing. We all have similar qualifications when we apply here; everyone has good grades and has done extracurricular activities.

Penn, however, seems to be ignoring young civic scholars, people who don't just donate their time at a homeless shelter to fill a resum‚, but who dedicate themselves to a cause, who show civic action and, most of all, can be innovative leaders in their communities and great scholars in their own right. It may purport to look that way, but reality on campus speaks to this point.

I met this summer with several student and faculty leaders, and they voiced deep concerns about how the University was going to address student apathy. Each year, we continue to bring more academically qualified candidates here to Penn, and each year, these leaders see fewer and fewer freshmen of any background that can refresh the pool of leadership on campus. More incoming students are staying in their dorm rooms. Apathy is withering this campus and community into oblivion.

So when I ask Penn administrators to analyze how they recruit future students to this university, I ask that we begin to examine beyond boxes checked and padded resum‚s and find people who show true dedication to their communities and scholarship. To truly address our position in the Academy, we must look beyond scholarship and seek dedication in helping to build the community here.

Lao Tzu said, "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves." When we start seeing a change in the attitude here at Penn, then we are doing it for ourselves.

Nico Rodriquez is a senior Political Science major from Sanger, Calif., and spokesman for the Latino Coalition.

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