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(04/25/01 9:00am)
Over the course of the last week, much has been said and printed about Dining Service's alterations to the meal plan requirement for incoming freshmen and the analogous changes made to the menu of available plans for upperclass students. Originally, the administration touted the new "Titanium Plan" concept as a way to strengthen the College House System by fostering community among student, faculty and staff residents of the Houses in an informal setting.
Once the criticism began to mount, however, the University recanted the fabrication, and stated that the major consideration in these mandates and revisions was the unstable financial future faced by Campus Dining Services.
The Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, the body concerned with academics and the undergraduate student experience, does not and cannot support the new Dining Services arrangement as currently constituted. It directly inhibits the vision we have for the development of the "community of scholars" embodied, in part, by meaningful student-faculty interaction outside the traditional bounds of the classroom.
The Office of College Houses and Academic Services has helped to realize the vision of the intellectual campus, and it has taken seriously its obligation to create a meaningful undergraduate residential experience that infuses personal and intellectual growth into everyday life.
Penn's 12 houses bring together various different residential leaders in order to build community by engaging campus residents in any number of different ways. By getting to know residents and by learning their interests, the staffs of the individual houses endeavor to foster a community in which students can thrive and excel.
These goals are being realized because the College House System is nurturing a community rather than forcing its residents to interact with each other or with the faculty. It is the duty and obligation of the system and its staff to create an environment where students will desire this type of living arrangement. College houses will not succeed if they coerce people to enter a system that clearly doesn't work.
Dining Services, however, seems to have taken the idea of building a workable, voluntary and desirable community, and twisted it into an unrecognizable and perverted form. Seeing that its current enterprise, as presently constituted, was failing in its social and financial goals, the staff of this office elected to alter its environment into one characterized by mandatory participation and mediocre quality.
Rather than addressing logistical and business issues such as facility cleanliness and food quality, the Dining Services management, with the blessing of senior University administrators, is now, so to speak, forcing a community down the throat of each college house. The community that this "fosters" is not something that SCUE supports.
A sense of identity and camaraderie does not materialize overnight, nor is it a phenomenon that exists in a constituency dissatisfied with the product it is receiving. By attempting to require interaction in the dining halls, especially in their current form, the administration is degrading the notion of a community of scholars. This quick fix solution will only ostracize the very students for whom the financial renewal plan for the dining system is based.
The current College House Renewal Project, which will expand the number of beds available to students, while simultaneously refurbishing, restoring and reconfiguring the existing residence halls, was the result of a lengthy dialogue involving students, staff and residential faculty on how best to design a house so as to better community interaction. The administration's subsequent allocation of financial resources to support these plans was equally crucial for their success.
Dining Services should follow the lead of this program, and truly engage members of the University community to create dining halls and meals that accurately reflect the needs and desires of this campus. Additionally, the administration must show its commitment to the ideals of the residential student-faculty community by providing the resources necessary to follow through on these developments.
Until that time, we feel that any attempt to keep an unsuccessful operation afloat by bleeding the pockets of students and parents is unwise, unwarranted and detrimental to the goals of the College House System.
Dining Services will never truly succeed in its mission -- to nourish our students in an environment consistent with the ideals of the residential program -- until it comprehends this reality.
The College House System is based on the model of a wheel. With the current dining spoke effectively missing, the wheel's function is compromised. SCUE is calling for the administration and Dining Services to act quickly and devote the necessary resources to revamping dining services in terms of its facilities, products and services.
(03/28/01 10:00am)
Every five years, the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education publishes a White Paper -- which examines the status of undergraduate education at Penn and offers a variety of proposals and suggestions based on lengthy research and careful analysis. Last week, we presented to the University community the 2001 White Paper, the product of five years of hard work by passionate students.
The White Paper is not a tool with which SCUE hopes to micromanage the University. It makes no school-, department-, nor program-specific recommendations. Rather, it discusses undergraduate education at Penn in the most universal of senses.
It advocates the creation of an outstanding Penn experience for all, characterized by excellence, inquisitiveness and intellectual rigor, by both philosophically and pragmatically examining the tools and resources Penn offers to its students and making sound and reasonable recommendations regarding their usage.
SCUE, as it has done throughout its three decades at Penn, does not simply bemoan problems or cite concerns; it offers practical recommendations for improvement.
SCUE is especially excited about two works-in-progress described in the 2001 White Paper. First, we are in the process of developing the Major Advising Program, through which interested freshmen and sophomores will be paired with upperclassmen majoring in departments they are interested in exploring and majoring in themselves. The program will allow them to attend upper-level courses, meet professors and receive advice from the people in the best position to help guide them -- their undergraduate peers.
We've also begun to work with the organizers of the Penn Course Review to place the results of course evaluation forms online. As a result, students will have free and convenient access to peer evaluations of professors when choosing their courses. Additionally, by making course evaluations more accessible and more prominent, we hope to foster an atmosphere in which teaching is valued, respected and taken seriously.
As outlined in the White Paper, we believe that all undergraduates must have access to the cutting edge research performed across campus. Penn students should, in concert with the faculty and other students, help advance the frontiers of knowledge.
The creation of such a community of scholars requires the destruction of the artificial lines dividing undergraduates from everyone else here.
In addition to other proposals, SCUE strongly supports the continued development of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, which can do much to create such an atmosphere. In order to encourage intellectual exchange and to increase the scholarly connections made between members of the Penn community, we are helping CURF construct an online database listing all Penn faculty and scholars according to research interest. Among other important functions, it should strongly assist undergraduates interested in performing research with professors.
Penn is an outstanding research university, and SCUE fully recognizes the importance of faculty and graduate student research here. But we also believe that excellent teaching is every bit as important as exceptional research. SCUE supports mandatory, extensive pedagogy training for all incoming teaching assistants, not only to improve instruction at Penn, but to lead the way in ensuring that every graduate student goes on to become an exceptional instructor as well as researcher.
While international graduate students are valuable members of the Penn community, strategic use must be made of them as teachers in order to safeguard against the problems that language barriers create.
For faculty members, SCUE has made several recommendations concerning the administration of both lecture and seminar courses, from making good use of seating arrangements to leading discussions more effectively.
We must also work more rigorously to integrate technology into the educational experience at Penn. The interdisciplinary potential found here is unmatched by any university, and can be furthered by programs offered in intellectual property laws, medical informatics and e-commerce.
Additionally, SCUE advocates class listservs, class Web sites and online discussion boards as invaluable ways of continuing learning outside the classroom. Every department should have a functional Web site and should ensure that every course syllabus is posted online. SCUE supports efforts to train and assist faculty members in the appropriate use of these resources.
We also strongly urge the administration to spur the creation of a 24-hour computing facility for students in the College of Arts and Sciences, to create more ethernet connections in classroom buildings and to erase any barriers which exist across undergraduate schools regarding allocation of technological resources.
This only begins to describe the ideas contained in our White Paper. We encourage all members of the Penn community, especially students, to read our thoughts and to contact us with comments and suggestions. We are deeply concerned with working with all members of the Penn community to improve undergraduate education at Penn.
