Penn’s culture has been called “toxic,” “performative,” “homogenizing,” and even “elitist.” The cause? We’ve blamed preprofessionalism, wealth disparities, and even just elite higher education itself. So, how do we make it better? It’s not like students, professors, and administrators aren’t actively devoting efforts toward making Penn’s culture better, but the solution might be easier than we think. Penn’s culture will not change until it asks its students to stop looking outside and start looking within.
In classes like WH 1010, students are taught that leadership is built on connections and external achievement. The inner work of asking who you are, what you stand for, and who you want to serve is an optional — and largely unnecessary — part of being the people that Penn creates.
Following my first year at Penn, I spent time reflecting on myself: What do I believe in? What are my values? Am I living in a way that is authentic to myself? How am I showing up for others? These aren’t questions my world-renowned Penn education asked me to answer, they’re ones I had to ask and answer for myself.
That was until I became a student in what may be Penn’s first experiment towards a course dedicated to self-work. Penn Global Seminar ASAM 2920, titled “Compassionate Leadership: Power Love, Service and Inner-Work Experiencing the Life of Gandhi,” asks students to look at world leaders and “examine and practice the principles of nonviolence, service, the transformative power of love, and the ‘inner-work’ required to have deeper impact in the world.”
Led by Nimo Patel, a hip hop musician, humanitarian, and ambassador of love and peace, as well as University Chaplain and Vice President for Social Equity and Community Charles Howard, and assisted by Tia Gaines and Mercedes Lee, the course will end by taking its 16 students on a service trip to the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India.
Though we’re only a few classes in, I am confident that this course will change my life. A typical class begins with moments of grounding, followed by supportive discussion. We’re guided through the lives of visionaries like Grace Lee Boggs and Mahatma Gandhi. Homework assignments consist of letters of self reflection, hours of volunteer service, and kindness challenges. We spent one class entirely on spreading random acts of kindness around Penn’s campus and reflecting on their value.
A view shared by me and other members of the class is how necessary this class is for self-development. Never before has a Penn course required me to evaluate my values and beliefs while learning the value in compassion, selflessness, and introspection.
Naturally, this calls into question the entire purpose of a college education. Is Penn’s only responsibility to educate us for our future careers, rather than our future lives? Maybe. However, I think those are insufficient goals for a University with unimaginable prowess and privilege. Penn has the capacity to grow our careers (of course) but also to grow us as individuals and contributors to the world.
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Most Penn students don’t arrive on campus with values of greed, elitism, and hypercompetition, but we assimilate quickly. In actuality, if we took a quick look at our applications, I’m sure the words “passion” and “make change” are somewhere in there. These words mean difference; they mean being changemakers and revolutionaries.
Yet, once we arrive, we immediately participate in Penn culture, whether by joining the “right” (finance) clubs, changing our closets, or funneling ourselves into the same fields. The culture we inherit typically becomes the one we help perpetuate. And of course we do. Humans (especially over-achieving ones) need connection and belonging; naturally we will adapt to our new environment as a form of survival.
But instead of waiting for students to do the reflection by themselves, or until a rare course like “Compassionate Leadership” comes along, we could require every first-year student to pause at the beginning, taking a class centered on introspection, grounding, service, mindfulness, and discussions that ask, “Who am I? What do I want to give to the world? Who do I want to be?” Of course, this is no magic bullet. Penn is, after all, a microcosm of the real world, and most of our students come from the very environments that built that culture.
However, catching students early is what matters. First years are raw and impassioned. Behind the practiced nonchalance of our generation is a real desire to do good. If we were asked, in our first semester, to pair our passion with reflection, I think most students would rise to it. Although change only happens if students truly want to look inward, Penn can at least set the conditions. Especially when Penn has the bandwidth to hire revolutionaries that could inspire even the most skeptical students.
If we design a course that shows us that leadership is not just about strategy or networking, but about courage, compassion, and authenticity, it would plant a seed. When so much of our culture pushes us to look toward jobs, titles, and prestige, planting a seed of introspection could change the trajectory of an entire generation of Penn students.
PIPER SLINKA-PETKA is a College sophomore from West Virginia studying health and societies. Her email address is pipersp@sas.upenn.edu.
