Becoming an upperclassman sneaks up on you, truly. One minute, it’s New Student Orientation — you’re new and wild and 18 — and the next, you’re a junior. Friends are having 21st birthdays, planning post-grad, and if you’re from a small town, like myself, some are even starting families. Meeting first years prompts a withered laugh and a piece of advice, instead of instant conversation about writing seminars and the lack of free printing included in that nearly 100,000 dollar tuition. We’ve all heard it before. Penn, in all its good and bad, is old news.
Getting older is wisdom, comfort, freedom, and friends that you love, rather than those you happened to find in your hall. But being on the precipice of leaving also means that the little bug called legacy begins whispering in your ear: “Did I do enough? Did I meet everyone I could’ve? What was it all for?” These questions run through my mind frequently, though I find regrets to be a Schrödinger’s cat situation.
But there’s one box even Schrödinger can’t keep me from opening: a vivid vision of our tenth, twentieth, thirtieth-year reunions. When I walk away from this place, will I tote a Penn sweater and describe it as the best years of my life? Will I donate, or advise my children to apply? Will I talk about it fondly with all of the other WASP parents at piano lessons? After all I’ve learned about this place, is it truly one I want to be associated with? And that has to be the most incredibly privileged stance to take — to question the value of an institution millions would dream of attending. I know. The ivory tower is a strange place from which to complain. But perhaps our position is exactly why we should look closely at what it asks us to defend.
Penn has its plethora of problems; we all know it. Once again, cue the broken record. I could — and The Daily Pennsylvanian has — spend years detailing them in excruciating detail. Institutionally, we operate like a business, prioritizing profit over student education. Most of those students already come from wealthy families and areas, while those who aren’t exceedingly privileged or connected get maimed by financial aid year after year. Culturally, we promote hollow connections, status, and exclusivity, while lacking empathy, humility, and an appreciation for careers in service. I could go on.
When my mother reads this, I expect a text along the lines of: “If it’s so bad, then what am I paying for?”
Well, Mom, I’ve wondered the same thing. How can all of these things be true, and yet so many of us still love this place? Talk about cognitive dissonance. I don’t pretend to be a paradigm of morality, but as Penn slowly becomes something I’ll remember rather than somewhere I reside and learn, I’ve started wondering what it means to remain loyal to an institution whose values I don’t always recognize as my own. Especially when some of its failures fall hardest on the very students who stand to gain the most from being here.
Then enters my very dear friend, who each time I find myself in this hole, reminds me with a sheepish smile just how very lucky we are to be complaining. How enriched she’s been in lecture, fascinated merely to be in the orbit of some of our world’s brightest minds. Reminding me that after every low of Penn, there’s that insurmountable love from our wonderful friends, that makes all of my complaints quite dull, actually. She reminds me how every other member of my high school graduating class doesn’t get access to the connections and capital that Penn basically drops in our lap. And her argument is compelling.
When I think about the students whom Penn has brought out of poverty, from generational disadvantage, or countries in which higher education once felt impossibly distant, it becomes difficult to reduce this place to its failures. I think about the professors who could make double the salary in research or consulting, but show up to teach us anyway. And let’s not forget the angels in the financial aid office working overtime, against their higher-ups, to get students and parents that discount. The cooks, security officers, and cleaning staff that work for countless hours to give us the most convenient life possible. How can I call Penn the belly of the beast after seeing all the good it gives?
If Penn is somehow a deeply flawed microcosm of American values, and yet also an extraordinary place of opportunity, we find ourselves essentially where we started. I ask again, can we be proud of Penn? If it was an easy question, I would pick a side and camp out there. I could say we should all be entirely cynical, that Penn is inherently flawed and no sane person would be proud to be a member of it. Or, I could instead be so full of optimism and gratitude that I refuse to critique such a privilege. Neither seem quite right, and frankly, oscillating between them is a bit exhausting.
Perhaps, treating love and criticism as friends rather than enemies is the solution. Recognizing its failures does not require me to resent the years I’ve spent here. I’ve seen what Penn can give people — the education, the friendships, the opened doors, the chance to live a life previously unimaginable. Yet, I don’t want gratitude for those things to make me complacent about who gets them, who doesn’t, or who gets hurt along the way. My sweater-toting loyalty doesn’t have to defend Penn just because it gave me something worth loving. It could be expecting Penn to become more deserving of that love.
So, when that little legacy bug inevitably returns, I’m going to let it ask a different question. Hopefully, I won’t remember Penn as the best years of my life. But I imagine I’ll return for those reunions anyway. Not because a sort of Stockholm syndrome has convinced me that this institution was always worthy of my pride, but because loving a place and wanting better from it can exist in the same breath. Pride doesn’t have to be blind. I’ll wear my sweater, but I’ll wear it hoping the Penn I return to someday gives me even more reason to be proud of it.
PIPER SLINKA-PETKA is a College junior studying health and societies from West Virginia. Her email address is pipersp@sas.upenn.edu.
