Newly elected SCUE chairman outlines his vision

This past Sunday, College and Wharton sophomore and former Daily Pennsylvanian columnist Charles Gray was elected the new chairman of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education.

Gray sat down with the DP to explain SCUE’s plans for the upcoming year.

The Daily Pennsylvanian: What are your goals for next year?

Charles Gray: The goals for next year are that we have this great document, the White Paper on Undergraduate Education, and we’ve been working on this for a about year now ... this booklet represents our ideas about education and the kinds of reforms that should come about at Penn and how we see the vision for education in the future. Our work now is to try to implement some of the ideas and to turn then into reforms.

DP: Why did you run for this position?

CG: The reason I ran for [this] position is because I’ve been working on this document, and I believe that it is truly great for this University, and it is a milestone that I think can help us to move forward and improve education.

DP: What’s the biggest challenge facing SCUE this year, and how do you propose to fix it?

CG: We have all these ideas written down on paper, and now we have to present them. It would be important for us to listen to the feedback that others provide us about these ideas and to take that feedback and use it to improve the ideas and then continue on our goal of turning them into reforms and improving education. That will be pivotal.

DP: How would you describe the presence of SCUE on campus? Do you want to increase it?

CG: As always, we want the student body to look at this document [the SCUE White Paper] and to really learn from it. There is going to be a symposium. We view that as an opportunity to publicize this document to administrators and to the student body if they want to come, and we would really appreciate them coming because we think this is a great opportunity for education at Penn.

DP: What would you like to see SCUE do differently next year?

CG: Well, what we need to do differently is that for the past year we have been focusing on writing and on ideas, turning them into words. Now we need to turn them into actions, meaning that we need to meet with administrators, we need listen to administrators, we need to listen to the students and through that change — that transition — I think our success will continue.

DP: Are there any big events or administrative goals that you and the new board will try to push?

CG: There are a lot. Let’s just use this as an example — one example of something that we want to do is expand the use of problem-solving learning courses in the University. We feel that the PSL model that has been used a lot for Academically Based Community courses, is a model that we hope to expand to other fields. That’s just one example. The other thing that we have been doing a lot on is we have these events called Food for Thought, and those events happen about once a month and it’s where we bring a professor to talk about education at Penn.

DP: How has SCUE progressed from when it started to where it is now?

CG: When SCUE was started in 1965, education was at a very different place. The idea behind SCUE was revolutionary on campus, and we appreciate that tradition and don’t take it lightly. We, like our predecessors in 1965, feel that education is something that students should be a part of shaping.

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