The proposed construction of a casino in Center City was a point of contentious debate at Sunday's Undergraduate Assembly meeting.
Almost 40 representatives from several of Penn's minority and religious groups came to support the Casino Development Proposal.
The proposal brought up a number of concerns and recommendations, including questioning the development of a casino in Center City without proper consultation, requesting that the University conduct a study to determine how the casino will affect Penn and its students, creating more opportunities for Penn students to debate the issue and instructing the UA to reach out to other Philadelphia universities on the issue.
Some members of the UA objected to the proposal because it was not under UA jurisdiction, that it brought up issues of morality and that the enactments assumed that the city had not conducted a transparent democratic process in moving forward with the construction of the casino.
Others spoke in favor of the proposal, as did representatives from student groups including the Living Water Christian Fellowship, the Latino Coalition and the Asian Pacific Student Coalition.
After about three hours of debate and several amendments to the proposal, much of the background information included in the proposal that members decided was biased was omitted. The enactment to question the development of the casino without proper consultation was also removed. The remaining three enactments passed.
There were three other items of business: two policy updates and a last-minute proposal. The policy updates were postponed until the UA general body meeting on Dec. 8, and the proposal was quickly discussed before being passed unanimously.
The College Online Syllabi Proposal was written in response to Information and Computing Services' recent cost estimate - between $167,250 and $272,500 - to put College syllabi online. It expresses concern at the significant delay of posting course syllabi online, calls upon the University to continue exploring the potential for an affordable system and urges the University to make the construction of an official College syllabi database a higher priority than it currently is.
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