A recent donation could help give citizenship a boost at Penn.
A $2.5 million endowment from the Mellon Foundation will be donated to Penn for a new interdisciplinary program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionality, University officials announced at the end of last semester.
The program - which will begin in the fall of 2007 - will consist of monthly workshops with visiting professors presenting papers on annual themes chosen by the program's Advisory Council.
The program, which is open to all students, will boast faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, the Law School and the Annenberg School for Communication.
Both students and faculty will be invited to attend lectures, and separate specific workshops will be geared toward graduate students.
The Mellon Foundation, which gives grants to universities to pursue higher-education initiatives, gave the grant to Penn on the condition that an effective scholarly program be put in place, Rogers Smith, the program's director, said.
The $2.5 million is expected to last for 15 years, as long as the program is successful and continues.
Smith said he wanted to create the program in order to explore the ways citizens of a community contribute to their governments.
"Penn will [become] a center for generating cutting-edge scholarship," Smith said. "In many ways, we fail to live up to our aspirations of citizenship," Smith said.
To address this problem, the program will focus on analyzing and comparing issues facing different constitutional democracies from around the world.
Scholars will hail from all around the globe, including the U.S., Israel and Greece.
The program's executive committee will be in charge of recruiting professors to present guest lectures as a part of the program.
Three professors are currently scheduled to come over the course of next year, and the committee is still in the midst of inviting more.
And professors won't be the only ones to benefit from the grant.
Money will be provided for undergraduate research projects, graduate-student workshops and a post-doctoral fellow to teach a freshman seminar.
First-year Penn Law student Keven Schreiber noted that law students already taking courses in other schools could benefit from the different perspectives that professors from other fields could offer about law.
School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell likewise pointed to the close relationship that the interdisciplinary program will have with SAS graduate students.
"The School of Arts and Sciences and Penn have a very close relationship with the Mellon Foundation," she said. "Faculty research and discussion should inform undergraduate education."
