Jim Saksa | Down with the Ivy League

About once a week, I hear the same complaint about our dear University: no one has ever heard of it.

We form facebook groups proclaiming our inclusion in the Ivy League, we buy shirts that not-so-subtly differentiate us from Penn State, and we bitch and moan every time Princeton gets a media mention and we don't.

Clearly, the real issue is that Penn students are extremely bright and successful, yet when they try to let commoners know just how great they are by tacitly mentioning Penn, they get blank stares instead of wide-eyed veneration. So we ask ourselves, what can Penn do to gain the national fame that our other Ivy peers seem to enjoy?

We could change the name!

To Ben Franklin University, not to be confused with Franklin and Marshall or the Franklin University in Ohio, which offers a bevy of online-degree options. I'm sure it'll work out perfectly well and lots of folks outside of academia will be just as keen to report on this as they were on Beaver College's name change to Arcadia University, which the once all-girls school made to spare itself from ridicule.

What, you didn't hear about Beaver?

But what then? Clearly, the simplest method to gain the national recognition our student body yearns for is a national ad campaign. It could be called "Penn, the Ivy League University ranked fifth nationally that you've never heard of!"

Buy a few spots on American Idol and during the World Series, and pretty soon the entire nation will know all about the University of Pennsylvania. Sure, it might cost a few million dollars and only make us look crass and desperate, but at least we'll get the recognition we so justly deserve.

But there's another option.

It won't require replacing all the signs on campus or spending millions on an ad campaign. This option would actually make money, generate school pride and fill Franklin Field every Saturday.

We should drop out of the Ivy League.

But not just for grins; by dropping out of the Ivy League, we would be free to offer sports scholarships.

Want to gain national notoriety? Leave the Ivies and you'll see Penn on the front page of every paper in the nation, the lead story on every cable news channel, and the Pardon the Interruption (especially Kornheiser) guys would go nuts.

With the right investment, our football and basketball programs would become national powerhouses within a decade. Soon, when you tell people where you go to school, and they reply, "Penn? Helluva football team you got there!" you wouldn't have to correct their mistake.

Imagine the tons of toast 50,000 Quaker fans could throw! More importantly, the two programs would become money makers for the University, which could be used to further improve the school.

Now, I understand that this might seem a bit rash. For many of you, Penn's inclusion in the Ivy League was a primary reason for enrolling here.

Lord knows, you would never want to go to Stanford. Heavens to Betsy, no. Not quite Ivy. Same goes for Duke or MIT.

For whatever reason, this sports conference moniker created in the '50s holds a magical sway over some of you - the ability to say "I go to an Ivy League school."

But what's the point of being Ivy League if no one knows it? We're already, for all intents and purposes, just a really great school that no one has heard of, another Washington University in St. Louis or University of Chicago.

Let's look again at Duke and Stanford, and while we're at it, Notre Dame and Georgetown. Without Notre Dame Football being Notre Dame Football, there could be no Rudy. These schools make millions annually from their teams and generate free advertising for the universities.

We'd still hold the most rigorous academic standards in the nation, and continue to expel student-athletes who couldn't maintain a 2.0. It wouldn't hurt our academics, only help our athletics.

I imagine this suggestion will rub people the wrong way. Ideally, Penn should start offering scholarships and dare the rest of the Evil Eight to do something about it. Rather than tossing us out, I'd bet they would join us.

And why not? At one point, Penn was home to the best football in the nation, and the Harvard-Yale game was more than just the world's largest congregation of pretentious assholes.

So let's drop out, and maybe we'll be higher than a 15 seed come next March.

Jim Saksa is a College senior from Philadelphia, Pa. His e-mail address is saksa@dailypennsylvanian.com. You, Sir, are an Idiot appears on Tuesdays.

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