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My computer died last week. She revved up, beeped twice and, after a few moments of blue skies, went black. The words I will appeared at upper left. Will what, I don't know. She has done nothing since.
Just before 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 22, nearly two dozen police officers gathered on the Spruce Street sidewalk outside of University Pinball. A pair of squad cars with sirens flashing and at least two motorcycles waited in the street; several senior officers stood alongside. A crowd of students, noisy and drunk, milled around just a few yards east of the police phalanx, largely oblivious or indifferent to the police presence. As the clock struck two, the blue wall began to move down Spruce Street, forcing the revelers on the corner and those in fraternity houses along the 3900 block to go elsewhere. It was a scene that played out all over campus this weekend, and always in the same way. A party would break out. The police would arrive, assemble and break up the party with a huge show of force. Sometimes, they even brought motorcycles. All because Spring Fling weekend is one of those special occasions when the gap between what is best for you and me and what is best for Penn stands in sharpest relief. The University of Pennsylvania pays many people to ensure that the school's image remains bright and shiny and marketable. There are professors and administrators and janitors; coaches and fundraisers and needy students, too. And then there are police officers. Most of the time, the fact that Penn is more concerned about its image than your happiness doesn't really matter. The two goals are usually indistinguishable. Professors teach and janitors clean; real estate officials bring new stores to campus and the police keep you safe and everyone is happy. There are, of course, some well-known exceptions. Penn gives tenure for research, not teaching, because teaching is not glorious. Campus green spaces are revitalized at the end of the spring rather than the beginning of the fall because that's when the alumni arrive with their wallets. And on Spring Fling weekend, Penn's party-hearty, beer-loving student body becomes the enemy. Penn has two good reasons for wishing you wouldn't drink. First, it greatly increases your chances of dying. And when students die, applications for admission drop and alumni donations decrease. Second, for most of you, drinking is against the law. And Penn can't afford to be seen as anything but law-abiding, particularly if you die and your parents sue Penn for allowing you and alcohol to associate freely. The flip side, of course, is that Penn can cause the same problems by being too rigid. Drinking will happen; the question is just whether the environment will be regulated. Which brings us to the administration's ambiguous relationship with its students' favorite party. Penn is torn between protecting its image and keeping students safe and happy, and the results -- like the frequent lights-flashing-sirens-bleeping drive-bys -- are comic and counterproductive. So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Penn felt like cleaning up its act. For one thing, it would make a lot of sense to announce the rules of the game in advance. Tell students that everyone needs to be home (or quiet) by 2 a.m., and give us your best attempt at an explanation. Let us know under what circumstances you'll send in the motorcycles before then. (In case it needs to be said, underage drinking is not a reason to break up a party. The notion that all laws need to be enforced equally is a farce. There are entire books -- funny books -- which list all the laws that no one bothers to enforce. And that doesn't even include the likes of jaywalking, which puts your average student in greater danger than a few Yuenglings.) Also, instead of kicking students off the streets, get rid of the cars. Block parties are a fact of urban life. Help students file the necessary paperwork to close down Sansom or Delancey or any other seldom-travelled alleyway for the evening. Instead of running three patrol cars up and down Sansom, put a single car across the mouth of Sansom at 39th, redirect traffic to Walnut Street and send the rest of the police force to protect the rest of the campus. The bottom line is this. Whenever Penn works up the courage to deal with drinking as a fact of normal life rather than a deviant activity, good things happen. Sure, the law says that's a dangerous game. But so is the game Penn is currently playing.
There are days when I want to deliver marijuana to whomever is in charge of this University, so that they need not plead mere stupidity when they are asked to account for their actions. Tuesday was such a day. Penn announced that all freshmen will be charged $3,444 for a 17 meals-per-week plan -- proceeds to benefit Dining Services -- because not enough students were paying voluntarily. Actually, the decision wasn't announced, it was discovered. And the student Dining Advisory Board didn't have a clue. Funny how bad news never gets its own press conference. This is not, however, a column about crime reporting. It is a column about crime. In this case, the crime of mugging. The victims are two in number: the freshman class and the profiteering U of P. This is their story. Dining Services has a problem. As students eat more meals in dining halls, they become less likely to sign up for another meal plan. The drop-off is particularly sharp between the first and second semester of freshman year. As a result, Dining Services is perennially cash-poor and customer-short. Now, if you are reading this while sober, you will probably conclude that the problem is some combination of bad food, high prices and the fact that variety is the spice of life. The role of bad food and high prices is fairly intuitive. As for variety: meal plan or no, there will always be times when it is easier to stop by a food truck or more enjoyable to head out to a restaurant with friends. In all seriousness, there is a word for people who have the time and the inclination to eat 17 times a week at Dining Services. That word is unaffiliated. If you have a work-study job, participate in an extracurricular activity or play a varsity sport -- hell, if you're taking five classes and have midterms next week -- there is no way you have the time for 17 meals a week at Stouffer Commons. Penn officials are, of course, oblivious to this brand of common sense. From their perspective, it is readily apparent that the real problem lies with the student body and its incomprehensible refusal to deliver sufficient quantities of appetite and money to Dining Services. The solution is obvious: Remove the opportunity for error. Unfortunately, upperclassmen could not be saved. They are already creatures of habit, and more likely to cry "Wolf!" at any rate. And then there are freshmen. Gullible freshmen. Freshmen with parents who will pay for anything. A perfect market for high-price, low-quality PennFood. Tour guides have been instructed to sell the plan to prospectives trooping across the campus this month, but that's hardly necessary. What's another $4K between you and your alma mater? Not much, perhaps, but students aren't the only ones being hurt by this idiocy. In the long run, Penn is also damaging its own ability to provide high-quality service. Other than truth, justice and the American way, that is the most important reason why mandatory dining plans are a bad idea. Allowing people to spend their meal money as they please encourages Dining Services to keep prices low and quality high. Competing with food trucks and local restaurants for student business is a good way to keep Penn's leaden bureaucracy on its toes. Forcing students to underwrite dining operations irrespective of their quality is an equally good way to ensure that nothing ever changes for the better. There are already too many reasons for Dining Services not to care what students think. For starters, the dining halls have an inherent advantage over other sources of food: they remain the only place on campus where your parents and/or financial aid package will pay for your dinner. They remain a good place to see friends. And sometimes, an unlimited amount of mediocre food is exactly what's needed. Now, with the impending death of competition, there is even less reason to take students seriously. And any incentive to keep prices down or food quality high goes right out the window. Which brings me to today's fortune cookie: The right to blackmail students is like the right to shoot yourself. It is best exercised with extreme caution. And never while high.
After four years at Penn, I am more than ready to leave the classroom behind. I've taken the courses that interest me -- many of them, anyway -- and I'm too tired to take the rest. For the most part, I don't even have the energy to attend my current classes. I'm not sick and therefore tired, or sick-and-tired. I'm just plain tuckered out. After a lifetime of classes, I'm desperate to begin applying the knowledge I already have. Like Voltaire said at the end of the Enlightenment's first phase, "Now is the time to cultivate our gardens." So on the first day of spring, I said to hell with classes and set out to learn a thing or two. Or so it seemed in retrospect. Historically speaking, what happened is that I ran into an old friend outside the library en route to my afternoon class and he talked me into coming along to help pick out a present for his girlfriend. This was better than class, but entirely devoid of educational value. And since I'm paying $270 per day to get educated, that didn't feel quite right. So I resolved to seek redemption by voluntarily attending a lecture at Meyerson Hall. It was now 4:30 -- still a little early for serious thinking -- and the lecture hall was about half-full. The speaker was Ronald Dworkin, a philosopher so famous that I know his name, but here I stop with the particulars of the speech, because they are not relevant to my broader point: Guest speakers make great teachers, even for tired old 22-year-olds. For one thing, they tend to be famous, and deservedly so. For another, because they are only speaking for an hour, they rarely move beyond the material they know best. Finally, the format benefits the audience. There is no need for attentiveness, long-term commitment or written proof of comprehension. You are free to enjoy the experience on your own terms. As a result, the most important lesson I took from Dworkin's talk is that a microphone standing alone always looks out of place. There were two in the lecture hall, both jutting up from the aisles like railheads waiting for people to pull up and discharge their questions. They looked vaguely ridiculous until people did just that. It is quite likely that I will remember other things about Dworkin's speech in a month's time. If I do, it will be because he spoke well and I chose to listen. This reminds me of the way I imagine life to be outside of the Ivory Tower. I have never been outside myself, but I have friends who have gone. Some quickly panicked, and retreated to graduate school. Others are happily employed. One wrote to tell me that his unemployment check is larger than expected. But they have not been out for long, so I turned to someone who had -- Madeline Albright. I won a lottery for the right to hear her speak, which was nice, because giving out tickets by lottery is a good way to ensure that a good time is had by all. My excitement over winning the tickets and over the speech itself were thoroughly intermingled. I was smiling before Albright told her first joke, and I laughed along with everyone else in celebration of the fact that we were not watching from the Hall of Flags. The words Albright said -- and they were not new -- do not concern me. I learned plenty just by listening to her say them. Take a class on foreign relations, and you will learn the theory and the history of the field. Spend an hour with Madeline Albright, and you will touch the reality of it. It is an opportunity to take the measure of a person who has left a mark on the world around them. For this reason, the provost recited Albright's resume before she stepped onto the stage. It made the connection between her and us, allowing us to glimpse the road one person had taken to the very top of the mountain. And that is an education. Oh, I'll go back to class tomorrow, and back again for another few days after that. But it won't match the whimsical joys of College Green on the first day of spring, and of lectures voluntarily attended, and of time spent with friends and beer. Twenty years from now, those are the things I will remember about college. And they will make me smile.
If it's March, it must be time for another tuition increase. Sure enough, the most recent meeting of the Board of Trustees produced a 4.9 percent increase in total student charges for the upcoming academic year. The price tag for a year at frugal Franklin's practical academy is now $34,614. And for the first time in history, the cost of a Penn education is greater than America's per capita Gross Domestic Product. You may have felt, even before this most recent tuition increase, that you were already giving Penn enough money. That may be true. What is important, however, is that you were not giving Penn all of your money. Sixty percent of Penn students did not receive financial aid last year. It stands to reason that most of them will be able to pay full tuition this year, as well. To be sure, the number of students receiving financial aid will increase slightly. And the average aid package will probably increase as well. But financial aid is funded by tuition dollars. So as long as the increase in revenues exceeds the increase in aid -- and you can be sure it will -- Penn gets more money than it did last year. A lot more. For the half of students who live off campus, Penn has actually jacked up the tuition bill by 5.8 percent -- 4.9 is what you get if you average in the 2 percent increase in the cost of room and board -- though University officials told anyone who asked that the increase was actually 3.9 percent, the average rate of increase over the last four years. Now, there is nothing wrong with squeezing people for the money they do have. But the number of people who have $34,000 a year in excess income is not all that large. Which means everyone else, even if they can scrape the money together, will be feeling the pain. Tuition increases do damage in other ways, too. Ever more students don't have time to be intellectuals. They need to take pre-professional courses so they can make professional salaries so they can pay off their college loans. And increased reliance on aid packages will prevent a growing number of students from taking advantage of early acceptance plans at increasingly competitive top-rank schools. Of course, the Board of Trustees doesn't have a very good grasp on such home economics. These are not the kind of people who do their own taxes. They sympathized when Bush Sr. didn't know how much milk cost, and they celebrated when Bush Jr. announced that they won't have to pay taxes any more. And then they went back to work and made a lot of money. This should have qualified them to run the business side of a $3 billion university. Unfortunately, for reasons that remain unclear, they managed to lose money during the longest bull market in United States history. If The Corporation -- as Harvard of course calls its Board of Trustees -- had managed to lose money, it would have been bad. For Penn, it was nearly catastrophic. Just as the University was launching a massive building program, two of its major sources of income -- the endowment and the Health System -- went very dry. And so, while Princeton was busy getting rid of loans entirely, Penn was left scrambling for cash to finish the construction projects it had started. And tuition is a good source of cash. (Incidentally, it seems to me Penn ought to start endowing construction sites. How about "Coming Soon: Sundance Cinemas, Sponsored by SEPTA -- We're Getting There.") Does Penn have the money to fund competitive financial aid packages? Sure -- but the University would have to concede defeat in the constant and desperate push to remain in the top tier of American universities. The present campaign is not an effort to build for a better future so much as an effort to keep Penn where it is in the hierarchy of research institutions. And Penn simply can't build for the future without milking its present student body for every dime it can spare. Which means that this is what it has come to: Penn is forced to devalue academic priorities today so that it can devalue academic priorities again tomorrow.
Harold Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota who famously and unsuccessfully sought the Republican Party's presidential nomination on nine separate occasions, died on Sunday at the age of 93. He is survived by his name, which has become a byword for the persistent and futile pursuit of public office. Between campaigns, Stassen served as president of the University of Pennsylvania, arriving in 1948 after losing the Republican nomination to Thomas Dewey, and leaving in 1953 to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's administration, after having thrown his support behind Ike the previous year. Stassen is often remembered as the president who set Penn irrevocably on course to join the Ivy League and renounce big-time sports. This is probably the only kind break the history books ever dealt the man. In truth, Penn's choice of physics over football happened before, after and despite the tenure of Harold Stassen. What the quadrennial candidate did contribute was an object lesson on the need for a choice between the two. No one ever forgot what happened when Harold Stassen's Penn tried to have its cake and eat it, too. The effort to enhance the University's academic reputation while de-emphasizing football began with the Gates Plan of 1931, which put Penn's football program on a budget for the first time and required that coaches also hold faculty appointments. The measures did not have their desired effect. A decade later, Penn was still drawing more fans to its home games than any other program in the country. The bottom line was that the program made money. Athletics accounted for 11 percent of Penn's total revenues the year the Gates Plan was released. Wartime research funding finally changed that bottom line. By 1944, fully a third of Penn's annual revenues came from government research subsidies; athletics pulled in about the same amount of money, but accounted for a mere 3.3 percent of the pie. At long last, the Ivies no longer needed football, and so in 1945, they signed an informal agreement barring athletic scholarships and spring practices. Penn honored the agreement in the breech, waddling along in a never-never land between big-time football and academic excellence, committing to neither and watching both slip away. By 1948, Penn was struggling with a lack of funds as well as a deficit of vision. Even the Athletics Department was running a deficit. Penn went looking for a proven fundraiser who could put the University back in the black and found Stassen, who had just lost the Republican nomination and was looking for a job that would keep him in the public eye. It seemed like a good idea at the time, despite faculty apprehensions about Stassen's lack of academic experience. As it turned out, Stassen's tenure would be marked by long absences and little in the way of academic initiatives. What did result, however, was Victory with Honor, Penn's last bid for football greatness. Under the plan, Penn would revitalize its football program as a means of clearing its debt load and of bringing greater glory the University. Passing mention was made of the Ivy Group code of 1945, but the emphasis was on winning. "We can live up to the code without bending over backwards to follow it," Stassen said. "We shall do all we can" to produce winning teams against first-class opposition. He backed up his remarks by hiring Franny Murray, who had played for Penn during the glory days, as the new athletic director and promising a more aggressive schedule. In 1953, Penn's opponents would include Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame and Army. Cornell was the only Ivy on the schedule. After the fact, it was labeled the suicide schedule. And then Harold Stassen tried to have it both ways, which is not to say that he had a choice about the second way. Needing to convince the Ivy League of Penn's commitment to its principles, Stassen signed a 1952 agreement banning spring practices, this time for good. His timing could not have been worse. The NCAA had just reinstituted "ironman" football, which required players to line up on both offense and defense, after a 12-year absence. Penn's opponents would have all spring to adjust. The Penn players pleaded with administrators to either change the schedule or allow for spring practice. Murray responded by accusing the team of cowardice, and refusing both requests. It would be Penn's first losing season in 16 years. In 1954 and 1955, the team would not win a single game. Within a year, Stassen, Murray and football coach George Munger had all moved on, but the story truly came to a close four years later. In 1957, President Gaylord Harnwell renewed the contract of Munger's successor, Steve Sebo, despite the suicide schedule losing streak. "May I also publicly thank Mr. Sebo," Harnwell said in announcing the decision, "for his example of maturity, stability and perseverance during a period of Pennsylvania football when the satisfactions were few and the disappointments many."
Last week, after nearly a decade of intensive campus development, Penn's Board of Trustees signed off on a Campus Development Plan. The plan, the first in a generation, will function as a zoning code of sorts, orchestrating the general tenor of development. It also attempts to give new shape and structure to a very old campus through the extension and improvement of three major campus axes: Locust Walk, 36th Street and Woodland Walk. Under the plan, Locust Walk would be extended west to 43rd Street in modified form, and east over a new footbridge into Center City. That will require a pathway through the present Palestra complex. Accordingly, the plan recommends the relocation of the Lott Tennis Courts and the landscaping of a "Palestra Park" in their place. It further recommends the creation of an new connection between Palestra and Hutchinson Gymnasium, allowing the Walk to run between the two. This is a wonderful idea. The tennis courts and driveways and paths presently before the Palestra do no justice to the building's interior or history, nor do they provide a particularly welcoming space for the throng of thousands before and after games. Additionally, if Penn is serious about developing the west bank of the Schuylkill, there will be abundant room for tennis courts and a need to extend the campus infrastructure eastward in coherent fashion. The newly articulated 36th Street walkway is primarily intended to tie the Health System and its Medical and Nursing schools more firmly to the University City Science Center on the north side of campus. And then there is Woodland Walk, which runs from the corner of 34th and Walnut through the campus center, between the Wistar Institute and Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, and then behind Stouffer College House. At present, Woodland is the least articulated of the three axes, and fittingly connects the fewest buildings. However, the plan envisions an extension of the walk past the new Life Sciences Building southwest to the Woodlands, and northeast to 33rd and Chestnut, past a proposed dormitory on the present site of the Blauhaus. If realized, the new walk would integrate two underdeveloped sections of campus into the broader whole, giving shape and dimension to the northeast and southwest campus boundaries while marking both with distinctive structures. The space between Steinberg-Dietrich and the Wistar Institute also richly deserves to be rediscovered. The old building facades front nothing but dirt these days, and the area is rendered all but impassible by a series of bizarrely twisting paths and unfortunate walls. But the most interesting passage in the plan concerns the present site of Stouffer College House. Mention is made of the fact that "the southern and eastern areas of the campus are inadequately served with retail and service amenities" and that "finding and developing additional, new space for active recreation within Penn's campus is critical to the health and well-being of the on-campus population." The logical place for such a development is the present site of Stouffer College House, which the plan alludes to in passing. Should something like a facility combining a dining hall, gymnasium and streetfront retail come to fruition, it would further justify Woodland Walk's selection as a campus axis and immeasurably enhance the quality of life in the southwest quadrant of campus. The plan's zoning proposals are considerably less exciting, as all three merely reiterate existing University priorities: Connect Penn to Center City with appropriate urban development; connect Penn to West Philadelphia with appropriate suburban development; and kick fraternities out of the center of campus to make way for further academic development and more student centers. (Naturally, the authors of the plan have found nicer ways to phrase objectives two and three.) Connecting Penn with its neighbors is a thoroughly unobjectionable goal, notwithstanding specific problems with specific plans. The vision of a purely academic campus core, however, is considerably more troubling. The authors of the plan believe that that the dormitories ringing the aca
When Robert Fox gave $10 million to his alma mater in the spring of 1999 to endow three chairs and a leadership program, it seemed like manna from heaven. The Fox endowment gift would produce enough interest to fund the salaries of three senior professors.The cash-strapped School of Arts and Sciences could then use the savings to hire new professors without spending more money. Cut to the spring of 2001 and cue "Ain't that a shame." Because last week, SAS Dean Samuel Preston announced that University President Judith Rodin would fill the third and final Fox chair. She was, Preston said, the most appropriate person for the position. That may well be true. Over the course of her career, Rodin's contributions as a researcher and an educator are second to none. The problem is that Judith Rodin has another job. Since becoming president in 1994, Rodin has co-written about a dozen refereed articles and taught infrequently and irregularly, often in extracurricular settings. In the context of her other obligations, that is a remarkable achievement. But when measured against the research and pedagogic activities of the average Penn faculty member -- let alone those who hold endowed chairs -- it is hardly adequate. The School of Arts and Sciences exists for two reasons -- research and education. Rodin's appointment serves neither very substantially. That said, Rodin will replace John DiIulio as the head of the Fox Leadership Program for the duration of DiIulio's tenure in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, she has the opportunity to make a significant, if unorthodox, contribution to undergraduate education. In the long term, it makes sense for a Fox professor to head the Leadership Program. But in the long term, Penn has already selected the man for the job -- John DiIulio. Surely, an interim director -- even Rodin herself -- could have kept the Fox Leadership Program on track without an accompanying permanent appointment to a Fox chair. Now, when DiIulio returns, Rodin won't be teaching, researching or directing leadership programming. She will, however, still hold a Fox chair. DiIulio, of course, is the success story of the Fox program, a good example of how endowed chairs can be used to a school's advantage. The Philadelphia native was a professor at Princeton University when Penn offered him a Fox chair in 1999. DiIulio not only accepted; he also agreed to head up the Fox Leadership program, in keeping with the requirement that recipients of a Fox chair assume programmatic responsibility for leadership education at Penn. Of course, each recruitment process -- particularly at the senior faculty level -- is highly individualized. At such an advanced career stage, academics tend to have very focused interests and very particular needs. The extracurricular requirements of the Fox chair would doubtless prove a turn-off for many. But you don't need to use the Fox chair as a direct recruiting tool to reap its benefits. Take Psychology Professor Martin Seligman, already a member of the Penn faculty when he was appointed to a Fox chair in the fall of 1999. Seligman -- a past president of the American Psychological Association and a best-selling author -- regularly teaches at the graduate level and is actively involved in a wide variety of research. He is the kind of professor that makes Penn look good. So Penn gave him a Fox chair, in recognition of services rendered and in expectation of future performance. Seligman had previously held the Kogod Term Chair in Psychology. With his appointment to the Fox chair, Penn was able to give the Kogod Chair to Martha Fara this past fall. That took Fara's salary off the SAS payroll and freed up valuable funds for the recruitment of new faculty members. In contrast, Rodin's appointment won't save the School of Arts and Sciences any money whatsoever, because she wasn't being paid by SASin the first place. While Rodin holds a joint appointment on the faculties of the Medical School and SAS, she is paid at the University level. The interest that would have been used to pay the third Fox professor will fund leadership programming instead. Of course, Robert Fox gave a separate sum to fund that programming. Which makes Rodin's appointment a waste of two million dollars.
If West Philadelphia were an independent municipality, the residents of Black Bottom would not have been displaced in the 1960s, Hamilton Village would still be a neighborhood of tree-lined streets rather than a nice way of saying Superblock and when the West Philadelphia School Board built a new elementary school, admission would be by lottery. If West Philadelphia were an independent municipality, the dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts would not be the head of the City Planning Commission and no University vice presidents would sit on the Redevelopment Authority. If West Philadelphia were an independent municipality, the businesses would be owned by the residents, the police would firebomb fewer homes and compensate the innocent when they did, and it would not have taken quite so long for a black man to be elected mayor. Of course, West Philadelphia is not an independent municipality. Its residents do not exercise sovereignty of any kind. And the odds are that the imaginary City of West Philadelphia would still dance on Penn's command. But for many residents of Philadelphia's western reaches, the logs of possibility continue to fuel the fires of discontent. These individuals perceive a disjoint between their own interests and the actions of the City of Philadelphia on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania. And they feel frustrated, betrayed and powerless. Who can blame them? There is no question that the broader interests of the City of Philadelphia have often conflicted with the particular interests of West Philadelphians. Specifically, there is no question that Penn's century of expansion has been good for Philadelphia and bad for any number of West Philadelphians. In fact, Penn's growth has been good for every constituted community of which the University is a part. It has meant a better educational experience for students, a better environment for professors and more jobs for Philadelphians. Not only is the University Philadelphia's largest private employer, but it provides healthcare services for one third of the city's residents. Its graduates serve at all levels of government and in every part of America's corporate and cultural infrastructures. Penn's researchers collectively receive more federal funding than those at almost any other institution, and their research benefits every American every day. In fact, the only people for whom Penn's growth has been a mixed blessing are the residents of West Philadelphia. Some lost their homes to eminent domain seizures, others have merely had to endure the invasion of their neighborhood by transient students with drinking problems. Few have gained much affection for Penn along the way. But does Penn have any obligations to the West Philadelphia community simply because it occupies land in West Philadelphia? Set aside Penn's obligation to follow the laws of the land, and its somewhat lesser obligation to conduct itself with civility and grace. These are functions of proximity, not community. Beyond that, Penn's participation in the community is voluntary when it occurs, and it is difficult to imagine why that should not be the case. Consider, first and foremost, the very nature of Penn's membership in the West Philadelphia community. As with all communities, the residents of West Philadelphia together constitute a mutual defense organization dedicated to the preservation of whatever it is that they share -- ethnicity, culture, socio-economic status or architecture -- in the face of a changing world. In West Philadelphia, of course, the University of Pennsylvania is the major force of change. Therefore, to participate in the community, Penn must conspire in its own limitation. The price of membership in a community defined by its opposition to you is, and always has been, a pound of your own flesh. Remarkably enough, Penn pays. The University develops plans and projects on its own, and then reaches out to the community. The community then works with Penn against Penn to limit the scope of the plans and projects and to extract money from the University for the neighborhood. In the long term, of course, that sort of relationship is neither healthy nor desirable. And so, while Penn interacts with the area's present denizens, it is working to create a very different reality in the future. Rather than invest extensively in residents who don't share its vision or values, Penn's objective is to create an environment that will consistently attract the right kind of residents in the future. This impatience with the present residents -- born of a realistic evaluation of their relevance -- comes through every so often when a University administrator slips up. The latest example is the response of Carol Scheman, Penn vice president for community relations, to neighborhood opposition to the construction of a McDonald's on the corner of 43rd and Market. Scheman's remarks said little about their ostensible subject, the Rev. Larry Falcon. But they spoke volumes about the University and its administrators. Which makes this column what they would have said if honesty paid.
Out in the borderlands of University City, where things haven't changed for the better since the Eisenhower administration, something remarkable is happening. Slowly, and without any planning or direct investment, Penn's redevelopment of the 40th Street corridor is having a perceptible effect on this campus fringe. It's not Hallelujah Chorus urban renewal, but it's the first good thing that has happened to these blocks in a long time, and it's worth recording. Urban and Bye Realtor, a University City landlord that numbers me among its clients, moved its offices northwest over winter break. The old office was at 41st and Walnut; the new office is at 42nd and Chestnut, two blocks away and a world apart. The old office sat across the street from Beige Block, in a neighborhood of renovated apartments that is home to a good chunk of Penn's post-freshmen. It was only a block from campus, close enough so that most students wouldn't think twice about walking there at night. The office was, in fact, so well-located that Penn decided to kick out Urban and Bye in favor of a tenant that would contribute to the area's nightlife. The new office sits across from a bombed-out diner and an abandoned factory. A gap-toothed row of houses lines the cross street, the sidewalk gives concrete a bad name and the campus is decidedly not in sight. The most obvious effect of Urban and Bye's move west is that there is one less vacant storefront in West Philadelphia. But the move has also added a few more blocks to my mental map of University City. And not just mine -- the company estimates that up to half of its 180 units are rented to undergraduate tenants, each of whom must now walk two blocks further west to drop off their rent checks. A little further to the north and west, on the corner of 43rd and Market, is a piece of property that may be the future home of the McDonald's that currently sits at 40th and Walnut. The hamburger joint doesn't want to move any more than Urban and Bye did. But it, too, will likely be displaced by Penn's redevelopment plans for the 40th Street corridor. And it, too, will likely choose to move north and west, community opposition or not. What is happening to the northwest is the beginning of a process that has played out a dozen times as the Penn campus has moved westward over the last century. Urban and Bye's old location sat in the middle of the most recent area on the border of the campus to undergo gentrification. 40th Street's growth began in earnest with the 1998 opening of the University Police station at 4040 Chestnut, which made the northwest shoulder of campus feel safe for the first time in memory. An unprecedented number of good, cheap and ethnically diverse restaurants line the streets, a new supermarket is on the verge of opening its doors and someday, there may even be a new movie theater. The renewal effort has been such a success that Penn has extended its plans to properties like Urban and Bye's old offices at 41st. Once, that office was in an area where Penn students feared to tread. Now, as a direct result of gentrification, Urban and Bye has again been pushed further than most students are comfortable walking. Ten years ago, the area around Beige Block -- already the moniker for the then-unrenovated homes along 41st -- was full of crumbling, dilapidated apartments. The streets in the area were all pretty dark, which meant you had to watch your step, because the pavement wasn't in good shape. Many upperclassmen lived in the area, and crimes against their person and property were not uncommon. Outside of Burger King, on the southwest corner of 40th and Walnut, shootings were semi-regular occurrences. The blacktop parking lot across the street was empty by night, and the rundown Rotunda was never used for much of anything. Slightly to the north sat an abandoned blue warehouse; the nearest police station was out at 44th and Walnut. Students walked further north at their own risk, particularly after dark. To the south was Billybob, which sold cheesesteaks and beer -- just cheesesteaks and beer -- and next door was the video arcade, where fights broke out on a nightly basis, and twice a night on weekends. For a dime, you could call a University spokesperson and get him to call the whole complex a breeding ground for crime. Now, for 35 cents, you can get her to call it the future. Only you and I know that the future is to the west.
Next week, the Undergraduate Assembly will vote on whether Penn should make public the results of disciplinary proceedings in which a student is found to have committed a violent or sexual offense. The UA's recommendation will be forwarded to a committee chaired by College Dean Richard Beeman and tasked by University President Judith Rodin to formulate a disclosure policy. When the UA speaks, it will speak with your voice and with mine. And because you and I are both potential victims, both potential offenders -- because we have friends who have been victimized by other students, and friends who have been disciplined by the Office of Student Conduct --it is important that the UA and Dean Beeman's committee hear from us. The need for the new policy arises from a 1998 adjustment to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which had previously prohibited the release of any student disciplinary records without written consent of the student. Under the revised law, the University can release up to four pieces of information about cases in which the OSC has found a student guilty of a violent or sexual offense: the perpetrator's name, the rule or rules that were violated, the essential evidence supporting the conclusion that an offense was committed and the nature of the penalties imposed. The single most important point to be made is that Penn does not have to release all four types of information. Particularly valid objections have been raised against the release of student names, over questions about the ability of the OSC to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and questions about whether public humiliation is a proper punishment for all of the offenses that fall under the statute. Furthermore, many note that the goals of Penn's disciplinary process are only partially punitive. The OSC also serves an intensively rehabilitative function that might well be compromised by the disclosure requirements, which would put alleged offenders on guard and limit their willingness to work with the office. Finally, particularly in cases of sexual misconduct, victims might well be reluctant to come forward for fear that releasing the assailant's name would jeopardize their own privacy. (It should be noted that the FERPA exception does not premit the release of victims' or witnesses' names.) That may well constitute a compelling case against the release of names, perhaps even against the release of evidence, which can lead to the same problems of identification in our small community. But the protection of student privacy can and must be balanced against the benefits of disclosure. That balance is to be found in the release of offenses and consequences -- what the nameless student did and how the OSC responded. Right now, after all, you probably don't know what the punishment is for slugging another student. And that's not only unfair, it's stupid. When man first figured out how to write a couple thousand years ago, laws were one of the first things he scratched onto stone. Even the earliest societies understood that men have the right to know the consequences of their actions. And they certainly understood that half the value of a given punishment is its deterrent effect. There's another kind of fairness at stake in the disclosure of offenses and consequences -- equality in punishment. As things stand at present, the only guarantee that all are equal before the law -- in this case, the rules and regulations of the University of Pennsylvania -- is the law's own commitment to equality. Given the propensity of even the most transparent of legal systems to sometimes allow things like celebrity and money to influence determinations of guilt and innocence, that's not much of a leg to stand on. And while, absent the disclosure of names, money and athletic prowess may remain factors in the assignment of consequences, the community will be able to judge whether the consequences for a given category of offense fall within a consistent range. That is good for the administrators meting out the punishments, it is good for the students receiving the punishments and it is good for you and me. This is my letter to the UA. You can send yours to ua@dolphin.upenn.edu, or directly to administrative committee member Michele Goldfarb, the director of the OSC, at goldfarm@pobox.upenn.edu.
Rest assured, you who worried that William Jefferson Clinton might go gentle into that good night. Only days after Clinton himself secured a grant of immunity from Special Prosecutor Robert Ray, he lifted 176 Americans out of their own legal troubles, issuing 140 presidential pardons and 36 commutations of sentence in one of his final acts of office. I would like to report that Clinton acted justly and mercifully, correcting the mistakes and excesses of an imperfect legal system and tempering the rigid application of the law with a touch of human mercy. Instead, I must report Clinton's decision to pardon Marc Rich, who escaped to Switzerland in 1983 after being charged with the largest tax evasion scheme in United States history. Rich has never stood trial. His wife has donated over $300,000 to Democratic Party causes over the last two years. Draw your own conclusions. And what of the fact that 10 of the 176 pardons went to Arkansas residents, when not even one in every one hundred Americans is from Arkansas? But the icing on the cake is Clinton's decision to pardon virtually every member of his administration who was in trouble with the law. Henry Cisneros, formerly the head of Housing and Urban Development, had lied to the FBI about how much money he had given his mistress. He and his mistress were pardoned. Richard Riley Jr., son of former Education Secretary Richard Riley Sr., had conspired to sell cocaine and marijuana. He was pardoned. And five members of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy's staff, who had been variously involved in the receipt of bribes from major agribusiness firms, were also pardoned. Ah, to think that Alexander Hamilton truly believed "dread of being accused of weakness or connivance" would make the president think twice before pardoning his friends. Of course, this is not the first time a departing president -- immune to political consequences -- has pardoned those who have served him well. On Christmas Eve 1992, President Bush issued pardons to six men who had been involved in the Iran-contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Back then, President-elect Clinton told the media, "I am concerned by any action that sends a signal that if you work for the government you're above the law." Me, too. Notwithstanding, at least three good reasons remain to keep the pardoning power in the hands of the president. Grants of clemency were initially the prerogative of monarchs; just as God showed mercy, so did these kings. And, in the eyes of the founding fathers, so should America's chief executive. The majority of the people on Clinton's list received post-sentence pardons, granted to individuals who have served their full sentence and led productive, law-abiding lives for at least five years. "You're not saying that these people didn't commit the offense," Clinton told reporters in Chappaqua, N.Y. "You're saying they paid, they paid in full, and they've been out long enough after their sentence to show they're good citizens, so they ought to have a chance to get full citizenship." While the recipients of these pardons will retain their criminal records, they will again be able to vote, carry a gun, adopt a child or sell alcohol. Pardons also serve to correct the real deficiencies and cracks in any legal system. Clinton commuted David Ronald Chandler's federal death sentence for a drug-related murder; the prosecution's main witness has since testified that he himself committed the killing. The president also granted varying degrees of clemency to several individuals serving absurd prison terms under the harsh provisions of mandatory sentencing law. Finally, the founding fathers believed that the president could also use the pardon as a tool of national reconciliation. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 74, "In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth." The first presidential pardon, of two Whiskey Rebellion leaders by George Washington, served precisely this purpose. So did Andrew Johnson's pardon of Confederate soldiers in the wake of the Civil War, and Jimmy Carter's blanket pardon of Vietnam-era draft evaders in the late 1970s. If there is a way to preserve these real and important benefits while curbing the certainty that an outgoing president will abuse his power, it has yet to be found. Until it is, the words of Emmanuel Kant will continue to ring true. The pardoning power, wrote the 18th-century German philosopher, "is the most slippery of all the rights of the sovereign."
After a year of hard work, late nights and neglect of self and school, The Daily Pennsylvanian's 116th Board of Managers and Editors will hand over the reigns of power at a gala affair tomorrow night at the University Museum. Almost 300 dignitaries, staffers and family members will be on hand for the DP Banquet, one of Penn's oldest traditions, at which the outgoing 116th board and the incoming 117th board will be honored. Speakers will include University President Judith Rodin and incoming Executive Editor Michael Vondriska, a Wharton junior. Philadelphia Magazine Editor Loren Feldman, a DP alumnus and formerly the executive editor of George, will deliver the keynote address. In a year that will be long remembered for the closest presidential election in United States history, the 22 editors of the 116th Board raised the DP's coverage of campus and national issues to a new level. The fallout from the death of Jesse Gelsinger, the continuing battle to regulate the production of Penn-logo apparel, the failure of the Sundance Cinema project, the continuing difficulties of the Penn Health System and race relations on campus were just some of the issues that made headlines. And "Bush wins uncertain victory" -- the lead headline for the November 8 edition of the paper -- remains the quintessential summary of events that followed. In 2000, the DP also posted record profits, launched a new Web site, tinkered with its design, increased its emphasis on special issues, supplements and feature writing, and improved the quality of 34th Street magazine. Now a new board, led by Vondriska, will work to continue the tradition of excellence. A native of St. Louis, Vondriska served as the corporation's Finance Manager last year, and sat on the DP's executive board. He had previously served as Credit Manager. Over the next year, he aims to "improve the depth and consistency of our coverage while continuing our tradition of journalistic integrity and excellence." The Wharton junior added that the DP remains committed to its mission of serving its readers, advertisers, and staff. Managing Editor Rod Kurtz and Business Manager Cassandra Howell will join Vondriska in leading the 29 editors and managers of the 117th Board. Kurtz, a College junior from Lynnfield, Mass., will be responsible for the day-to-day editorial operations and content of the DP and dailypennsylvanian.com. His background as a crime and city reporter, and as a design editor on the 116th Board, will serve Kurtz well as he leads an effort to "make picking up a DP a more complete and enjoyable reading experience." 34th Street Editor-in-Chief Oliver Benn, a College junior from Gainesville, Fla., will direct operations and content at the weekly arts and entertainment magazine following a year as editor of its Voice section. On the other side of the operation, Cassandra Howell will head up the DP's business operations. A College junior from Alexandria, Virginia, Howell served as Advertising Manager on the 116th Board. She will act as the Vice President of the corporation and head up the Business Board. Other members of the Editorial Board include Arman Anvari, Andrew Armstrong, Kyle Bahr, Jason Bodnar, Will Burhop, Mia Villarreal Frietze, Paul Gulesserian, Rebecca Kahan, Jonathan Margulies, Matthew Mugmon, Stacy Humes-Schulz, Theo Schweitz, Jonathan Shazar, Michael Sonsino, Aliya Sternstein, Caryn Tamber, Alec Templeton, Jessica Tuchinsky and Dave Zeitlin. Members of the Business Board include Stephanie Beyer, Geoff Fichte, Rachel Foltz, Andrew Hegyi, Andrew Klein and Lauren Plackter.
I was caught behind a pair of ladies slowly strolling down Locust Walk at rush hour on Tuesday, when I heard one say to her friend: "This campus changes every time I'm on it." And her friend responded, "I know, I hardly know where I am." And as I cut left and walked on by, I thought to myself, "What are they talking about? We still don't have a supermarket or a 24-hour diner or enough basketball courts to accommodate even half of those who want to play. "My four years at Penn are running short, and the University has yet to fix most of the problems that existed when I arrived." Not, of course, that I'm entirely forgiving of the University when it does try to solve problems, particularly when I'm inconvenienced by construction that won't be finished until after I've graduated. Like most students, I'm happy to benefit from buildings whose construction inconvenienced my predecessors. But when it comes to new construction, I wish the University would wait until next year. Next year, when I'm no longer living here. This is not how long-term residents relate to the neighborhood around them. When workers in my hometown began construction on a sidewalk in front of my house, my parents were overjoyed. No matter that the jackhammer chorus woke us at dawn. This was home for a long time to come, and having a sidewalk out front would make it a better place to live. But we are just four-year residents of University City, and we often live in three or four different places during that time. There is little in the way of construction that won't seem more trouble than it's worth when you're only living somewhere for a year. This rule also holds true for retail development. When Burger King closed to make way for Sundance Cinemas, it was hard to find an upperclassman who saw an upside in the loss of another fast food establishment. So what if a movie theater was coming in a couple of years? Penn might as well construct a telephone switching facility on the site. Juniors and seniors would be long gone by the time either was done, and benefit about equally. The mantra of not-during-my-time-at-Penn is reinforced by the perception that the University never finishes building anything on time. So if you were a sophomore when Sundance Cinemas was first announced -- and I was -- you still felt justified in turning to your nearest friend and betting that you, too, would never see a movie there. As I did. It's not that anyone really expects that Penn will build everything and do it on the announced timetable. Perelman Quadrangle took a wee bit longer than planned. So did Sansom Common and Freshgrocer. And so will Huntsman Hall and the new Dental School building. Plans to upgrade recreational facilities are constantly revised or set aside, the Dorm-Dining project has been circumscribed past recognition and Robert Redford has left us with nothing but an abandoned construction site. But hey, that's life. You aim high and fall a little short and pat yourself on the back and try again. And no one expects that Penn will announce realistic timetables. I can just imagine the startled looks on the faces of the assembled dignitaries if a University official stood up and said: "This here building is going to cost us more money than we have -- what with our little problem over at the Health System -- and there's not a chance in hell we're going to get it done on time." The real problem is existential. The rate at which Penn's landscape and skyline change is not commensurate to the rate at which we ourselves change during our time at Penn. Our rapid evolution from childhood through experimental excess and into gradual maturity seemed entirely unreflected in the University's relatively static physical form. We move from a room in the Quad to a High Rise apartment to an off-campus hovel. From freshman seminars to lecture halls to senior seminars. From frat parties to bars to Smoke's. And from high school girlfriends to random hook-ups to mature relationships. But ah, the frustration. Through all of these transitions, the campus remains largely the same. Yesterday, I was a different me than I am today, and yet my classes are still in the same buildings and I still live in the same place. And I still can't get scrambled eggs at 3 a.m. And so, next year, I'm moving on.
Objectivity is a big word. For starters, it has five syllables and 11 letters and people stumble when they pronounce it. But the real kicker is that no one has any idea what it means. It must mean something, or at least everyone seems to agree that it does. But no two people think it means the same thing. Which means that most everybody is confused. As far as I'm concerned, no good journalist should go anywhere near a word that confuses so many people. Journalism and objectivity should stay the hell away from each other. And for the most part, they do. Newspapers have hewed close to the time-honored principle best articulated by an ornery, utterly subjective editor many years ago: "You don't have the right to compel me to print your views. Go buy your own press." Throughout American history, groups of like-minded citizens have done just that. Time was, most major cities had at least one German-language newspaper; now, most have at least one printed in Spanish. Tories, abolitionists, suffragettes and trade unionists have all run papers at various points in the nation's history. So have gays and lesbians, African Americans and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. No two of these groups -- nor the newspapers that served them -- saw the news in quite the same way. Newspapers that survive the special interest group they were created to serve do so by changing with the times. The Boston Globe served the city's Irish population at the turn of the last century and the Yuppie population at the turn of this century; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the New South child of a merger between the old Democratic and Republican papers. Even The New York Times' famous motto, "All The News That's Fit to Print," is just an old centrist pledge to stay out of the pocket of the Democratic Party, a goal it more or less retains to this day. A paper's perspective manifests itself in its selection and prioritization of stories, and in the contents of the stories themselves. Subjective selection is a necessity, a creature of limited space and relevance. The justification for subjective story-telling, however, may seem a shade less obvious. So here it is: If an objective story introduced itself ("Hi, I'm objectivity personified"), I almost certainly wouldn't like it. And neither would you. Subjectivity is the string that runs through stories. It lends disparate facts a unified purpose and ensures that new topics can be understood in the way we understand everything else: by comparison with the known. Subjectivity is the lens through which we make the unfamiliar intelligible, place the random in context and aggregate a body of knowledge rather than collecting a series of discontinuous facts. Candidates for internships at Newsday, Long Island's dominant paper, must write a story based on a list of 20 bullet-pointed facts and quotes. Success is impossible without concluding that you are making subjective choices about which facts to use and how to use them. There is no way to pass the test without making the choices that the editors of Newsday think their readers desire. If they make the wrong choices, readers will stop reading, advertisers will take their money elsewhere, and Newsday will no longer have the money to play the journalism game. The same is true for The Daily Pennsylvanian, broadly speaking. We are helped by the fact that our staff is a constantly changing reflection of a constantly changing student body. We are hurt by the fact that we are young, and not long for our jobs. We are independent so that we can tell you what you need to know, and student-run so that we can tell you what you want to know. And in the end, you determine our success and failure through your daily decision to pick up the paper or to pass it by. Beyond your wants and needs, our gold standard is fairness: Have we, burdened and advantaged by our own subjectivity, given all sides a chance to explain themselves? Have we given you, the reader, the chance to make up your own mind? Have we ever let our opinions color the very facts as we tell them? By my lights, we've been on the right side of these questions more often than not over the past year. And so I end my year atop the masthead with a smile on my face. Thanks for reading.
What a tale it would have been. A movie theater, where people go to escape reality, would be built in defiance of financial reality. Sundance Cinemas, Robert Redford's come-for-a-movie, stay-for-an-evening multiplex, would spring to life despite the financial difficulties plaguing General Cinemas, the project's major investor. For a few months, it looked like Redford and Rodin, Sundance and Penn, just might pull it off. Construction proceeded in fits and starts. Tours were given to the media. Opening dates were predicted in hush-hush conversations. But alas, it was not to be. No movie theater at the corner of 40th and Walnut. No escape from financial reality. In the end, General Cinemas' October bankruptcy managed to drag Penn's dreams down. You might be wondering how a company like General Cinemas managed to go belly up at a time when more Americans spend more money to see more movies than ever before. Losing money would seem to be a difficult thing for a theater chain to do. Nonetheless, most major theater chains have been managing to do just that. They built theaters to meet the demand that would have existed if all of their competitors weren't also building theaters in all the same places. Sometimes, they built theaters in places where there wasn't any demand at all. They accumulated massive amounts of debt. And then, when it turned out there just weren't enough people to fill all the seats, many chains went bankrupt. Quite a few more are not far behind. Of course, these companies knew full well that showing a film on more screens only increases the number of people who will come watch to a certain point. To avoid overkill, theater companies divide the country into "film zones," extending three to five miles from any theater showing a particular film. No other theater in that area can show the same film. As a result, theater companies didn't build new theaters in film zones where they were already operating unless they were ready to relegate the old theater to showing films that were less likely to make money, or close it altogether. These seem like simple rules to follow, and until 1995, most cinema chains were following them without difficulty. Then AMC opened up a 24-screen theater in Dallas and revolutionized the cinema business. Soon, if your theater didn't have surround sound and stadium seating, it just couldn't compete. This enabled companies to move in on their competitor's turf -- something you can't do unless you've improved upon the established product -- and forced companies to build new theaters long before their old theaters could or should have been closed. What's worse, theater companies were often unable to close now-unprofitable older theaters because they were tied up in long-term leases. Which meant that the new theater not only needed to cover its own construction and operation costs, it needed to make up the construction and operation deficit for the older theater it supplanted. Suddenly, there were 37,000 movie screens serving a national market able to support, by most estimates, no more than 28,000. Something had to give. For General Cinemas, Sundance and Penn, it did. Still and all, I say Penn administrators deserve a pat on the back for trying. Yes, Penn got caught up in the theater craze. And why not? After all, this campus was a better bet for a multi-screen theater than any number of other towns that now have 14 screens and about the same number of people. This is one of the projects that should have been built, one of the places that actually did need a new theater. Sure, the coffee shop at the back was overkill and the art gallery was nothing more than soul candy for the casually cultured. But this thing could have worked, and we would have loved it. Which means that no one should be gloating this morning, save the owner of Cinemagic 3. That man is entitled to a sigh of relief.
An impossible dream played out on Franklin Field Friday night before an audience of 700. Two football teams, both consisting of men no larger than you or me, took the field to play for a shot at perfection. Sure, there was also a Collegiate Sprint Football League championship on the line for 4-0 Penn and equally undefeated Army -- the game's winner would clinch a tie for the crown. But championships are just second-rate certifications of preeminence; perfection is the only way to know. And in 66 years of sprint football, no Penn squad had ever known. Twice champions, an undefeated season had remained out of reach for the Red and Blue. And so when the clock expired with the score standing at 20-16, Penn, the impossible was finally in reach. With a victory over Princeton this Friday -- a team Penn already trounced once this fall -- 66 years of imperfection will become a trivia question: How many years stood between the inception of sprint football at Penn in 1934 and the first perfect season in team history? The sport -- originally called lightweight football -- had its beginnings at Penn but, like the invention of computers, left the University with little to boast about thereafter. At the beginning of this season, the team's all-time record stood at 127-220-11. Forty-one of those losses came against the United States Military Academy; forty-eight were suffered at the hands of its naval counterpart. And while the evident preponderance of scrappy bangers at the service academies bodes well for the national defense, it did little for the nerves of Penn players or fans on the eve of the latest battle with Uncle Sam. Having already beaten Navy earlier this season, Penn was on the verge of another unprecedented accomplishment. Never before had the Quakers beaten both service academies in the same season. This, too, will soon be a footnote on perfection. But records are easy to capture, order and set aside. What should not be lost by those who watched or played on Friday night is the magic of the moment. At night, under the lights, Franklin Field is not so very large, and a group of 700 fans seems not so very small. The athletes on the field have not yet learned to stop listening to the fans behind them; there have not been enough fans behind them to learn that trick. What they heard through three quarters was silence, occasional cheers and quite a few conversations about Friday night plans. It would have stayed just like that except for the players down on the field. They wanted to win in a way that could be felt, let alone seen, from a seat a couple hundred feet away. There were no conversations in progress, no one loosening up or cooling down or turning his head long enough to get a drink from the Gatorade table. Every eye on that sideline was locked on the football. And so, in the stands, support began to build. As the fourth quarter wore on, chants began to coalesce. "De-fense, De-fense," at two different speeds and then as one. Down by two, Penn tried twice to drive down the field. Each time, it punted away and held on defense. Throughout, the crowd stayed in the game. But with time running out, fourth-and-three from the 43-yard-line, the crowd stood in silence once again, watching their team take one last shot at Army's end zone with time running out. They remained silent, first in nervous anticipation and then in disbelief, as Scott Moore came down with a Jim Donapel prayer for a 30-yard pick up. And then, all hell broke loose. They roared through Mark Gannon's game-winning, tackle-breaking five-yard run. They gutted it out through the last gasp Army effort and, with a roar of admiration and approval, stormed the Franklin Field turf in celebration as Donapel took a knee and let the clock run out. Later, as the celebration was winding down, players could be heard thanking friends, families and random fans for coming out to watch. But it was the fans thanking the players who truly got the point.
The Health System was already bleeding green back in the fall of 1998, when administrators first announced a 10-year, $300 million plan to overhaul every dormitory and dining hall on campus. Not that administrators were paying much attention back then to the $2 billion behemoth on the other side of Spruce Street. They had other things on their mind. Big things. Things like rebuilding Penn's campus and revitalizing the neighborhood around it. The next summer, when the Health System posted a $198 million loss, administrators remained unfazed. This won't change a thing, they said. And when it did change the University's bond rating, they pasted on their Sunday-best smiles and declared that a solution was in progress. Last week, a bad case of reality set in. Penn indefinitely postponed plans to add 1,000 beds -- and at least one new dormitory -- to Hamilton Village, pushed back the renovation schedule for existing dormitories and bumped up the total price tag to $380 million. The consequences are substantial. For one, the recent housing shortages are likely to continue, forcing undergraduates into the Grad Towers and the Sheraton hotel. Second, the neighborhood revitalization plan is in trouble. Increasing the number of homes occupied by owners has always been a linchpin of the effort. To create openings for people looking to buy homes, Penn had hoped to move students out of off-campus apartments and into the new dormitories. Of course, that may still happen someday. But Penn doesn't necessarily have until someday. Neighborhood revitalization is a little like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire -- you keep on growing until a recession hits, and then you retreat to a base level. Penn is not yet at or above the $32,000 mark, and it just became a little more difficult to get there. Administrators know this. Which is why Penn has announced countermeasures: The University is going to buy the neighborhood. Penn and Fannie Mae, equal partners at $5 million per, plan to buy up apartment buildings throughout University City and institute rent controls. When the inevitable recession hits, the consortium can ensure that the housing market and the houses in it don't fall apart. This way, Penn doesn't need to build new dormitories because students can stay right where they are because homeowners are no longer needed to stabilize the neighborhood. Penn, the biggest homeowner of them all, is going to do the job instead. Of course, if you ask a University administrator, he'll tell you that the consortium's goal is to keep prices from rising as the Philadelphia housing market continues to heat up. But the Philadelphia housing market could continue to heat up for the next half century and there would still be cheap housing for everyone, their sister and their extended families. Administrators also like to point out that the new dormitory construction has been postponed, not canceled. They are correct. And construction will begin as soon as America's system for financing health care changes completely and/or the University receives hundreds of millions of dollars in unexpected donations. But don't hold your breath, because the Health System's problems stand to get much, much worse. The system's difficulties -- and those of hospitals nationwide -- stem in large part from the federal Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which slashed reimbursements for Medicare below the actual cost of service. Those reimbursement levels are scheduled to decline even further when the next phase of the act goes into effect. Penn and many other academic health systems are frantically lobbying Congress to prevent that from happening. But if it does, then baby, you ain't seen nothing yet. The Health System will dive right back into the red. And if the Health System starts hemorrhaging money all over again, unbuilt dormitories will be the least of Penn's worries.
You can't underestimate the intelligence of the Penn administration. H.L. Mencken said that. And you know what? He was right. The most recent example is the University's decision to close McClelland Marketplace and the Quad commissary because, in the words of one administrator, "we were opening up Houston [Market]." The nicest thing that can be said about this decision is that the administration is confused. Perhaps they thought that "Perelman Quadrangle" was a new name for the old Quadrangle and decided to close McClelland because, as everyone knows, no quadrangle needs more than one marketplace. Or maybe some administrator overheard a student saying that there were too many convenience stores on campus. And so, ever sensitive to student needs and responsive to their concerns, the administration quickly shut down the Quad commissary. But my own best guess is this: The administration has decided that every time students ask for more cheap retail, Penn will close another convenience store. Clap your hands, Uni-Mart dies. Clap again, there goes the Quad commissary. Wanna try for three? Everyone on this campus -- from Judith Rodin on down --pays lip service to the idea that there should be more cheap retail on campus. Many people -- members of the Penn administration included -- also happen to think that we should have more high-end retail. Well and good. But if you think we need more cheap stores and you think we need more high-end stores, then the one thing you probably don't want to do is close down stores of any kind. University administrators, like the wise men of Chelm, have an answer for this: They say that the stores are being closed because they have been replaced. The arrival of Freshgrocer.com and Houston Market has obviated the need for Uni-Mart and the Quad commissary. McClelland Marketplace is no longer needed. Good point, guys. Except for a couple of minor details. For one thing, there is no Freshgrocer.com. It's just a big construction site. And until it actually opens (in June... August... November...) it's really not much of a replacement for anything. Which brings us to the idea that Houston Market is going to replace the Quad commissary. Does Houston Market sell toilet paper or laundry detergent? Can you buy a loaf of bread and a container of peanut butter there? Are they going to start stocking cases of soda or boxes of cereal? Of course not. Because Houston Market is a food court. And if it seems to you that this is transcendentally obvious, so obvious that even a Penn administrator could not miss it, then you, too, have just proved H.L. Mencken's maxim: You can't underestimate the intelligence of the Penn administration. But let's grant, for the sake of the argument, that the stores are redundant. So what? Why do administrators think that a store needs to be closed every time a new one is opened? I, for one, have never met a student who thinks that there are too many convenience stores on campus. The very name convenience belies the idea that there could be too many. In our own private heavens, each of us would no doubt like to have a convenience store in our basements. So is it really too much to ask for the University to keep a convenience store in the basement of the four biggest dormitories on campus? If Penn really feels it needs to change something about the commissaries, I have a modest proposal. Extend the hours, expand the selection and hire people to staff the stores during finals. You'll note that I've carefully omitted "close them down" from the list.
The second annual Clark Park Welcome to the Neighborhood Festival never happened. The reasons why are many, complicated and explained below. But they all boil down to one thing: A festival that was good for Penn and good for the surrounding community fell apart because the two sides did not speak the same language. This sort of failure is all too common in the borderlands around the University. It is the type of failure that no one notices because nothing changed. It is a tragedy of what could have been. The first Welcome to the Neighborhood Festival was held at Clark Park in the fall of 1999. It was moderately successful. The second time around, Penn decided to partner with the Clark Park Music and Arts Committee, which had run its own fall festival in most years out of the last 29. The idea for a combined festival first popped up in June in a conversation between Glenn Bryan, Penn's director of city and community relations, and CPMAC President Glen Moyer. Each had something the other wanted. Moyer had a festival "the neighborhood" actually attended. Bryan had money. One thousand five hundred dollars, to be exact. Nearly as much as the festival's entire $2,000 budget and enough to put the festival on solid financial ground. But like any good donor, Bryan had very definite ideas about how that money should be spent. He wanted the festival name changed to the Clark Park Music and Arts Festival and the University of Pennsylvania's Welcome to the Neighborhood Festival. He asked that President Rodin be invited to give a Welcome to the Neighborhood address. And he mentioned that Penn Police would provide security. Moyer felt like Penn was taking over his neighborhood festival, but he also knew that he needed the money. And so, Moyer spent much of the summer talking to Dawn Lee in Bryan's office, trying to get Penn's support without ceding too much control. Miraculously, it sounded like Penn was listening. By August, Lee had acquiesced on all key points. The Clark Park Funtabulous Fall Festival was back on track, community-run and Penn-sponsored. Only one problem: The $1,500 check that the festival had been depending on had yet to arrive. On August 31, Moyer arrived for a scheduled meeting with Lee and Bryan to make final arrangements and pick up the check. Storm clouds were brewing. Just days earlier, Bryan had told Moyer that he still wanted Rodin to give a welcoming speech at the festival. Moyer said no and, by his account, Bryan responded, "It's Judy's money and she'll say what she wants to." According to Moyer, it was not the first time Bryan had shown a measure of contempt. Moyer says Bryan had canceled several meetings and failed to arrive at others. On one occasion, he arrived on Moyer's porch two hours late. When Bryan finally showed, Moyer was across the park walking his dog, but he figured better late than never. That was the day Bryan first told him about Penn's conditions. Now, Bryan failed to show up to address his concerns. That, for Moyer, was the last straw. The festival might have been better with Penn's money, but it would not be the best community festival that $3,500 could buy. The deal was off. Of course, Dawn Lee knew nothing of Moyer's growing irritation. All she had was an e-mail informing her that his group had not accepted Penn's latest proposal. She says she never even knew that the Penn Police presence was of concern. And the festival's title? Funtabulous Fall Festival was fine, Lee said. But how was Penn supposed to market the event to freshmen without linking it in to the broader Welcome to the Neighborhood theme? And then there's Judy. Both sides knew she was a dealbreaker. Cut her and the University walked, keep her and CPMAC was having no part of it. In a letter to Lee, Moyer wrote: "Judith Rodin can be included as a guest as long as CPMAC approves the content of her speech. "Since this is not an orientation event, a welcome to the neighborhood speech to freshmen would be inappropriate." Bryan had no idea what Rodin was going to say, but he was in no position to impose conditions upon his boss. Penn was providing $1,500, and Rodin would speak as she liked. Only now, there was no festival for her to speak at. At this late date, there was no way to do it with CPMAC and no way to do it without them. Bryan hadn't requested funding for his own fall festival. It was too late for Lee to pull a listing in the Almanac's September at Penn calendar: