"The history of a class is something more than a mere record of dates and facts; it is the history of a living thing, of an organism that has many and varied functions." -- Penn's 1877 yearbook
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, that most complicated of American occasions. On one hand, the holiday feels so right: turkey, cranberry, hearth, family, coziness, football.
Mmm.
And yet, something about Thanksgiving feels wrong -- very wrong. Maybe that's because I know my elementary school teachers fudged the story. Sure, I was told the Pilgrims wore buckled hats and the Indians wore feathers. That was crucial information.
But somehow, those teachers didn't deem the other part of the story crucial. The part about how the Pilgrims' descendants colonized the new world by decimating its indigenous population. The part about the indiscriminate killing of "vile beast" Indians. The part about hate.
Of course, Thanksgiving isn't as simple as all that. It's not some sham holiday whose despicable origins we ignore through feasting. At least not any more. Thanksgiving has transcended its provenance to become a meaningful cultural event.
As my teachers did tell me, Thanksgiving has become a time to reflect on how we got to the present moment. A time to acknowledge that which we have and those who toiled to provide it. A time to pause from the zoom of modernity -- if only to remember that we do not exist in a vacuum, but in a generational chain.
At Penn, I often feel as if I'm in such a vacuum, secluded from past and future generations of students. And how I could not? After all, I eat, sleep and learn with people who are all 18 to 22. And none of them recognizes his roots.
No one recognizes that Locust Walk was once a street. Or thinks of those who walked that street before him. For in our constant rush to class and lunch and plays and parties, we all feel like pioneers, blazing a new path on the edge. But that path is not new. It has been covered with ivy for years.
So this past week, with Thanksgiving approaching, I decided to learn about the paths of those before me, about the pilgrims of this institution. A difficult task, to be sure, but one made easier by Van Pelt Library. There, I found hundreds of books about everyone and everything that has mattered to Penn over its 265 years.
It turns out Penn has a lot in common with Thanksgiving -- like a checkered past. Indeed, while Penn's founders and students didn't crush a native population, they did discriminate based on similarly misguided prejudices.
At times, this was painfully obvious. Take, for instance, the admissions decisions of former School of Education Dean John Minnick, who served from 1921-48.
He refused to admit Catholic girls "whose gaudy dress and excessive use of cosmetics were evidence of a lack of culture." Minnick also condoned this remark made by a faculty member to deny admission to a Jew: "You are not a Jew. You are a kike. Your place is not in the classroom as a teacher but on the street corner selling hot dogs."
Of course, I also read about the early-20th century yearbook editor who, being a "southern girl," moved all the pictures of the "negro" girls to the back of the book. And I can't forget the eerily worded recommendations of the 1944-45 Committee on Educational Policy and Planning. That group advised the school to set up a separate-but-equal campus for female students because of the "doubts and uncertainties among alumni and members of the community" about educating women.
Ultimately, then, I learned that the school's history comprises more than just ENIAC and toast-throwing -- as I once learned that Thanksgiving comprises more than just hats and feathers. Penn has a darker side, of which we should make ourselves aware this Thanksgiving as we study our communal roots. And don't be fooled: they are your roots as much as they're our predecessors.
For whether we like it or not, by virtue of our respective ties to the University, we are all now cells of the Penn "organism," as the 1877 yearbook said. And that organism was once responsible for remarkable intolerance.
Like America, Penn has changed drastically since then. But no degree of change can eradicate a past with which we are all linked.
The path has been covered with ivy for years.
Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.
