Search Results
Below are your search results. You can also try a Basic Search.
(12/05/00 10:00am)
When you think of Penn, what comes to mind? Is it a community of scholars, a US News ranking or a collection of ivy-covered buildings? For many, a university means a campus.
Why else do you think Penn spends immense amounts of money on new buildings and then plasters them across our admissions bulletin?
I saw something in last week's Economist that made me reconsider what exactly constitutes a univeristy and what role, if any, it will have in the future.
Opposite the obit there was an ad for a joint program between NYU's Stern School of Business, the London School of Economics and HEC in Paris offering an executive MBA from anywhere in the world. To my knowledge, it's the first truly global inter-university endeavor.
The TRIUM consortium offers executives a joint degree in global business in 16 months through online course work and quarterly two-week study modules at the three schools. In addition, each class will also attend two one-week courses at other partner universities. This year, studentst will visit Chinese University in Hong Kong and Fundacao Get£lio Vargas in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
In essence, this means that with the advent of the Internet age, education will no longer be relegated to a campus or a single university. In the not-so-distant future, the alma mater as we have known it may no longer matter.
The Internet is beginning to fulfill its promise to render the bricks-and-mortar facilities that make college excessively expensive and inaccessable virtually irrelevant. It's a welcome promise at a time when institutions of higher learning are checking their academic missions at the door, attempting to corporatize the intrinsically medieval university.
However, that very benefit poses a profound challenge to the university because its promise and its threat are one and the same.
The earliest universities were much like the modern incarnation we know today, basically communities of scholars and students offering regular courses of study leading to recognized degrees.
After all, the Latin word universitas means "all" in a collective sense and could be used to characterize any group of people cooperating toward a common end. The university is essentially an educational guild, no different from a medieval Venetian gondola builders' guild.
The first schools -- Paris, Oxford and Bologna -- drew students from all over western Europe, who flocked to study under the various masters concentrated at these schools.
Buildings were in no way as important then as they are now. Often univerisities would pick up and move when the need arose.
Even Penn moved from Center City to then-suburban West Philadelphia in 1872. Today it would be inconcievable that the University would leave its 262-acre campus nestled in post-apocalyptic West Philly.
These very buildings that house scholars and students, fostering the university environment, also constrain our educational mission.
The TRIUM project promises for the first time a possibility to divorce the connection between university, campus and degree. With the help of the Internet, students may no longer have to travel to attend college, and if the TRIUM program succeeds, they could seek an advanced degree at a single or a combination of schools from any part of the globe.
Why would anyone get a degree from just one school, when you could get a degree from any collection of the top schools?
Imagine under the education section of your resume: B.A., History from Penn, Cambridge and Heidelberg. Not bad in my book.
Were this to work, I could be working on my thesis from Venice, sitting in the archive with access to primary documents, a specialist in Barcelona and my dear advisor in Philadephia.
The TRIUM project has the potential to destroy the notion of the university as we know it, dismantaling regional academic communities and replacing them on a global level.
In doing so, universities could return to their original vocation of academics and recreate the medieval communities of scholarship that have eroded in the face of growing corporatization.
There are hundreds of programs like TRIUM already readily available worldwide, covering every point on the educational spectrum -- from an e-MBA at Duke to an online VCR repair certificate course from DeVry.
And there are currently more than 450 online universities generating more than $2 billion in revenue, according to Chase Manhattan Bank. By 2005 they expect more than 1,600, a sector they predict will be worth in excess of $9 billion.
Ironically, the decorporatization of academia could be a better business in the end, something for capital-crazed administrators to consider.
Maybe Stanley Chodorow was right after all...
(11/28/00 10:00am)
It's always amusing to see the alma mater -- soon to be, anyway -- in the press. And last Sunday's New York Times was particularly rewarding.
The first piece I saw was a 3,000-word story on the unprecedented growth of American university endowments in recent years because of a willingness on the part of school officials to accept greater risk during the great bull market of the late 1990s. It chronicled the growth of Duke, Harvard and Yale universities' unparalleled endowment gains from nontraditional investments like venture capital and leveraged buyouts.
Last year, Duke's endowment was up 59 percent; Notre Dame, 58 percent; MIT, a respectable 50 percent; and Harvard, 32 percent, to $19.2 billion.
Over the last five years, most major universities have pursued more aggressive investment strategies, and it seems to have paid off. Six other universities netted gains above 40 percent.
And where was Penn mentioned?
At the end of the story, as an example of how not to invest an endowment. During a time when college endowments have skyrocketed, Penn's went Chernobyl.
During Fiscal 1999, Penn's once-respectable sum of $3.2 billion lost about $60 million, or 1.8 percent of its value. The loss was attributed to our longstanding policy of value investing, buying beaten-down stocks whose financial positions and long-term prospects make them appear undervalued. Although Penn was well served by this policy in the '70s and '80s, we should have jettisoned the policy years ago, about the same time that we got rid of 50 percent admission rates.
Penn Vice President for Finance Craig Carnaroli was quoted recently as saying, "Why change the horse that's been working for you? You can't fault us for sticking with what works."
Mr. Carnaroli, we absolutely can fault you. Sir, my cousin's elementary school class opened an E*Trade account last year and played the market. They understand growth investments; their holdings grew 28 percent over the course of the fourth grade.
To Penn's credit, it has moved in the last couple years to change its strategy from value investment to growth investment, but wait.... Growth investments suffocated like a beached whale over the summer. Did anyone else notice Nasdaq fell below 3,000 last week?
The Times writes that our new policy faces "the danger of buying overpriced investments just as their value is beginning to fall." And they're right.
As of late, Penn has been following the leader on a number of fronts. Yale has residential colleges, and we repackage our Soviet-style gulags. MIT has an incubator, and we create P2B. Our peers have 40 percent returns on their endowments, and again we try to follow.
What happened to the days when we led? When Penn built the first law school, the first medical school and the first business school?
Apparently we still lead in some things -- and not just crime; the second article in last Sunday's Times spotlighted President Rodin, as she again led the nation in salary and benefits among university presidents.
All the better for her; it is always good to see a woman paid well in a field where women have been underrepresented and in a world where women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn.
For the most part, Rodin has greatly improved Penn, particularly the appearance and our reputation in publications like U.S. News & World Report. Her legacy is secure; during her tenure, Penn has experienced a mini-renaissance and shaken its "safety Ivy" reputation. Things will only improve if all of her projects, like the massive dorm and dining renovations, are finished.
In my short time at Penn, I have witnessed a transformation of Penn's campus. When I arrived here there was no Sansom Common, no Huntsman building, no Addams Hall and certainly no neo-fascist architecture in Wynn Commons.
And when I arrived, Penn's endowment was $2.9 billion, and today it is $3.2 billion. When I was rejected from Harvard, its endowment was $9 billion; today it's $19.2 billion.
Regardless of our new investment strategy, even Rodin is bearish about our prospects, recently saying that "we are never going to recoup that period of private equity payout."
Maybe we will, maybe we won't. But unless Penn starts concentrating on making sure it is in the top 10 of university endowments -- we fell from 12 to 18 last year -- and not just magazine lists, all of Rodin's current efforts will be in jeopardy.
And we will end up reading a lot less about Penn in the papers.
(11/21/00 10:00am)
Last Monday, the University libraries celebrated the acquisition of their five millionth volume, a hagadah -- a Jewish prayer book read during Passover -- dating from 1695 and containing the first map ever printed in a Hebrew-language book.
The hagadah has little in common with Penn's first book, an inscribed copy of Milton's Paradise Lost, except that both are housed in the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library.
Like the rest of Penn's unusual or uncommon 250,000 printed books, over 10,000 linear feet of manuscript collections, and more than 1,500 codex manuscripts -- many one-of-a-kind maps, broadsides, playbills, programs, photographs, prints, drawings and sound recordings -- are housed in the collection. And in about 10 minutes, you or any other Penn student can sit down, request and read from the same copy of Paradise Lost that Milton once held in his own hands or browse through its recently acquired hagadah.
Every volume is made available to any student. But while the collection is a fantastic University resource, it is unfortunately underutilized.
Sadly, few students ever venture to the sixth floor of Van Pelt. But those who do will find the Rosenwald Gallery, which displays highlights from the University's rare book collection.
Currently, the department has an exhibit celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Dreiser's Sister Carrie. The room is filled with paintings of major contributors to the University libraries, among them Edgar Fahs Smith, whose collection forms the backbone of the library's extensive chemistry collection.
On one side of the room, one can find the Henry Charles Lea Memorial Library, which holds Lea's extensive collection of works on medieval history, religion and literature. The Lea Library is unique in that the entire room in which his collection was housed was moved into the Van Pelt Library, complete with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, sculptures and furniture.
Lea's collection is also this country's largest resource of medieval material.
Opposite the Lea Library is the Rare Book and Manuscript reading room, where students can access any other book housed in the University collections.
In fact, all that is asked is one register and keep all books within the room. Aside from that, the staff will show you any part of the collection -- be it Shakespeare's First Folio or a Venetian manuscript on the dangers of Jacobin societies.
Penn's collection is particularly strong in history of science, Italian history, colonial American history, Shakespeare and English literature and American anthropology. It also holds many of Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Swift's letters and the largest collection of primary documents -- letters, diaries and newspapers -- on early Philadelphia history.
The collection, however, is in no way limited to these fields. It also has extensive sub-collections whose subjects range from Third Reich propaganda pamphlets to Phyllis Wheatley's poetry to major histories of the occult.
The only rule with the Rare Book library, it seems, is that you have to cast your research net a little larger.
Since only 60 percent of the collection is listed in Franklin, the library's online catalog, finding what you need requires making an inaugural visit to Van Pelt's card catalog, which is located on the first floor between the east and west wings of the library.
Although it may seem archaic, it is currently the only way to fully discover what Penn has in its most prized collections. Special Collections Director Michael Ryan is working diligently to get the collection online and hopes to have every English language volume online within a year and half.
In the meantime, however, his staff of six Ph.D.s in various disciplines will work tirelessly to assist any student in his or her research.
I tell you the value of this collection from experience. In conducting research for my History thesis, I traveled to Venice to look for a particular collection of documents that I thought could only be found in Italy.
After weeks of searching in the Venetian archive, I finally found the book, in deplorable condition, and asked that it be microfilmed and sent to America. I am still waiting.
One day by chance, I entered the name of the book I needed from Venice in Franklin. To my surprise, it came up in the rare book collection and I had it in my hands the next day.
In a time when students are willing to spend such vast amounts of time in the basement of Van Pelt Library, it's about time they checked out the paradise, lost and found, in the sixth-floor penthouse.
(11/14/00 10:00am)
Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus school, said upon arriving in America to teach art that he intended "to open eyes." It was his first sentence in English and the beginning of contemporary art education in America.
As the University prepares to usher in a new era of arts education with the dedication of the renovated Addams Fine Arts Center in the heart of campus, perhaps we should follow Albers' advice and open our eyes. Let's not just stick a Penn shield on yet another building.
Late in his career, Albers was asked to give a lecture when Trinity College opened its own arts center more than 30 years ago. He called the center an opportunity "for a new era in teaching in which, after a too-enduring emphasis on auditory methods, visual perception -- seeing and vision -- will achieve proper recognition."
Addams Hall could indeed provide the opportunity to experience visual perception first hand and, in doing so, erase the artificial gap the University has created between the the so-called liberal arts and the fine arts.
Albers wrote in the '60s that "the cultural explosion today makes it obvious that a separation of these two educational disciplines is not only antiquated but anticultural." Penn's current curriculum places theory before practice, retrospection before creation and thus Albers' famed "re-search before the search."
Fortunately, the renovated building comes at a time when the College is re-evaluating its General Requirement.
Currently, the General Requirement does not include studio art courses like painting, drawing and photography in its seven distributional sectors -- an omission that plainly contradicts its mandate to "expose students to the variety of disciplines and approaches to knowledge pursued in the modern university."
The exclusion of studio courses makes one question the College's emphasis on
a "variety of approaches" in attaining a liberal arts education. It is important to keep this in mind this week as an external review committee is due to present to President Rodin the results of an investigation on the progress of the undergraduate fine arts program. With its report, the committee will likely address the issue of including studio art courses within the General Requirement, an idea whose time has come.
This fall, the College began a five-year experiment with a Pilot Curriculum that may replace the current General Requirement. The pilot program's goal is "to introduce you to broad interdisciplinary areas of human knowledge" through four large, interdisciplinary subject areas.
This semester, the Image, Representation and Reality section offers a course on the self-portrait. Although the course promises creative assignments -- a natural opportunity to include the fine arts program -- a studio component to the course was overlooked. A true interdisciplinary education goes beyond pure text-based courses and allows the student to create and not just recite, stimulating both the memory and the imagination.
There are many reasons why Fine Arts courses continue to be excluded from programs like the Pilot Curriculum. In the past, Fine Arts was most often ignored because of a lack of studio space for undergraduates in the Blauhaus. The completion of Addams Hall will triple the amount of studio space for undergraduates, allowing for additional sections of popular courses like painting, drawing and photography.
Having bridged the physical constraints, the issue then lies within the complex politics that govern the University. Many argue that studio courses should not be allowed in the requirement because they are not part of the College.
But as Penn promotes the value of interdisciplinary studies, it should take advantage of all the resources of the University, especially in Fine Arts, whose undergraduate program was ranked in the top 10 by the Princeton Review. After all, is this not the primary advantage of attending a major research university over a liberal arts school?
Sadly, this conundrum may be a question of money. Since the College must pay the Graduate School of Fine Arts for each course an undergraduate takes, additional courses are a financial liability for the College and are therefore unlikely to be included.
Albers faced the same arguments at Yale in 1950, when he arrived and fought to revolutionize how the university valued visual education. In his 10 years at Yale, he created a vibrant community of artists that developed "eyes and taught students -- including doctors, bankers and lawyers -- to see."
In Addams Hall, Penn has the opportunity to create an environment where all students can be taught to learn visually. To truly improve undergraduate education, it is vital that visual learning be included in the Pilot Curriculum.
As Albers said, hundreds of people can talk for one who can think. But thousands of people can think for one who can see.
(11/07/00 10:00am)
Today marks the end of more than 18 months of presidential campaigning and I find myself suffering from a critical case of fatigue.
During the process I've been through its various incarnations: charisma fatigue, Clinton fatigue, New Hampshire fatigue, "W. stands for..." fatigue, Tipper kissie-porn fatigue, Nader fatigue, DUI fatigue, soft money fatigue, focus group fatigue, lockbox fatigue, inspirational God story fatigue, alpha male fatigue, Karl Rove fatigue, Zogby poll fatigue, prescription drug fatigue, Spanish-speaking candidate fatigue, top 1 percent fatigue and surplus fatigue.
I am exhausted -- this democracy thing is downright grueling. Our electoral process can kill us.
I suppose part of the reason that this election tired me so much is that because right after Campaign '96 ended, even irrelevant players like Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes literally moved to Iowa to drum up support.
I wonder if perennial campaigning will just be part of what the future will be like. Scary as this may sound, Dan Quayle recently said that regardless of the outcome of today's election, he would take steps to prepare himself for 2004.
What is this?
Perhaps this is why the campaign has been so boring. Its script was written four years ago -- I first heard Karl Rove utter the term "compassionate conservative" the night Dubya won re-election back in 1998 -- and we are just getting to the part in each program where everyone lives happily ever after.
Can't you see Rove sitting down at his desk in Austin and writing, "Erasing the horrors of the previous years, W. takes the election by a landslide with his mantra of being a uniter, not a divider?" He and his Democratic counterparts -- my favorite being Tony Coehlo -- have made the American public sit through the longest political soap opera ever written.
As we come to the end of the story, both scripts have been increasingly divorced from reality. We were told that this election would be about what course America should take in an age of prosperity, when we have record surpluses and peace in the world -- to plot America's direction in the 21st century.
Has anyone looked at how much the Dow is down lately? We are not exactly at the high point of the "greatest economic expansion ever," as Gore would have us believe.
Then it seems everyone is having conniptions deciding how best to spend the surplus. We talk like it is still there, but as The New York Times reported two weeks ago, Congress has spent more than 40 percent of next year's surplus on pork barrel spending projects.
Then we turn our attention to the peace and prosperity we have enjoyed. To what peace are the candidates referring -- terrorist attacks in Yemen, or perhaps strife between the Palestinians and Israelis or the lasting peace on the subcontinent?
Scripting elections and following consultants' advice is nonsense. True leadership is not something that can be written in advance and tested on potato-chip-munching focus groups. It happens "in the arena," as Theodore Roosevelt said; it requires challenging people to grow, change, make a sacrifice of some flavor or another.
The possibility of such leadership emerged for a moment last year when John McCain unleashed his stirring personal story and let candor loose throughout New Hampshire. In doing so, he won its primary decisively, although it waned the moment he actually won a primary and was forced "on message."
McCain's challenge to inspire members of a new generation to take on a cause greater than themselves was his greatest applause line -- and there was a reason for that. While folks may not say so in focus groups, they are looking for leaders who will inspire them, who will say where the country should go next, who will convince them that they must be part of something greater than prescription drugs and tax cuts.
There have been no applause lines in this campaign. Each candidate followed an exhaustingly scripted, narrow, tactical campaign of future surplus management and pandering to the elderly -- a campaign too small for such a great country.
Tomorrow will be the first day of the presidential transition. Don't worry, I already had Colin Powell fatigue three weeks ago. Wake me up after the inauguration.
(10/31/00 10:00am)
CHICAGO -- Lost in Hyde Park and looking for Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House this weekend, I came across a gigantic banner, University of Chicago Parents Weekend: A View from the Inside.
As I walked around the massive, sparsely populated stretches of campus without finding my cherished Wright building, I remembered not applying to the school because it was, as my counselor put it, in "America's worst ghetto." (Yet, she prodded me to apply to Penn....)
Chicago's majestic university grounds, with its Gothic buildings and the Rockefeller chapel that gives Chartres a run for its money, is not exactly the decaying neighborhood that I had been told to expect. That was until I crossed 61st Street.
Within 10 minutes, I saw three university security officers. The fourth stopped to ask if I knew where I was going and advised me to return to campus as "directly and quickly as possible." It was obvious from his reaction that my present location, though only two blocks from the pristine well-fortified campus, was not kosher.
Chicago, like Penn, Yale and USC, finds itself in the awkward situation of being a multibillion-dollar institution in an impoverished inner city. Chicago, unlike Penn and Yale, has decided to barricade itself in to create a safe community for its students, faculty and staff -- but only after several attempts of varying success to improve the surrounding area. An interesting twist, because after the crime panic of 1996, Penn cited Chicago as the model it planned to follow to make the campus safer.
The problem started soon after the University of Chicago was founded by John D. Rockefeller in the then-upscale suburb of Hyde Park after the 1893 World's Fair. The Fair disrupted the natural growth of the community, its massive pavilions altering the neighborhood's ability to expand south. The transformation of the pavilions into a campus was done in protest of a community that, rightly, saw such massive construction as detrimental to property values.
The ensuing departure of educated professionals and small tradespeople in the 1940s and '50s was seen as a call to action by administrators. To stabilize and enhance the neighborhood, the university acquired neighborhood residential buildings for use as student housing and partnered in the building of new shopping centers. Urban renewal quickly rose to the top of the university's agenda, similar to what we have experienced at Penn during the tenure of Judith Rodin.
Chicago, like Penn is attempting to do now, created its own police for the campus neighborhood, created a community improvement district, built a local school, redeveloped area retail and bought enough residential properties to become the largest landlord in the area.
Today, Hyde Park is home to more than 65 percent of the university's faculty and nearly all of its students and boasts a "lively" cultural community.
The plan on first glance seems to have worked. Hyde Park is a multicultural neighborhood -- even Louis Farrakhan lives there -- where on Sunday morning one can see parents and children playing in the leaves on their walk home from some flavor of religious services. This is the ideal that Rodin must have envisioned when Penn embarked on its massive construction projects.
Admittedly, Rodin's efforts have greatly improved the appearance of Penn's campus and our borders with West Philadelphia. Within a year, if all goes well, we should witness the opening of the inaugural Sundance Cinemas, the yuppie.com grocery store and the Left Bank (which coincidently is on the right bank), all of which should make Rodin's dream of turning Penn into a cultural destination for Philadelphia-area residents a reality.
However, we must look at the example of Chicago to see the potential failings of our current efforts. If Rodin succeeds in building her community adjacent to campus, she will also succeed in pushing the problem areas farther away.
Although Penn will keep expanding and improving the neighborhood, whatever it does short of building a fence -- as Chicago has done -- will not keep the campus periphery safe from crime.
Penn and Chicago's problems fit within a greater framework of urban decay. West Philadelphia and Chicago's South Side are in dire of need of more substantive employment than the entry-level service jobs currently available.
In the November issue of Philadelphia, Rodin is called the de facto "mayor of West Philadelphia" and "Philadelphia's second mayor." President Rodin should use her honorary title and her position on Sam Katz's Greater Philadelphia First, the city's premier business organization, to bring the types of jobs to West Philly that will make deep economic impact so that Penn will never need to build a fence at 45th Street.
If she doesn't manage this part of her plan, it won't matter how many suburbanites come to Penn for dinner and a movie. The lack of campus safety that she is trying to combat will only be moved further away and not necessarily solved.
(10/24/00 9:00am)
The first time I got it was from my friend George. The subject of his e-mail was "another Penn tool." I was a little concerned, but only because he reminds me of Patrick Batemen from American Psycho, but that is neither here nor there.
Then five minutes later I got it again, from my friend Paolo.
Then it became ridiculous -- the damn thing came 17 times.
Honestly, I became less than amused at about No. 14.
Attached to the e-mails was a cover letter from a current Penn senior, Nidhi Chadda, who had applied for a position at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Menlo Park, Calif. What propelled this letter around the globe is puzzling.
In her letter, Chadda said she and the company were puzzle pieces that would "fit perfectly together," demonstrating her point with appropriately labeled visual aides.
She went on to provide a checklist of how she and the bank fit -- i.e., all the typical Whartonian overachiever stuff: top 10 percent in her class, JWS, BFS, a financial internship in New York, community service, yadda, yadda.
That is all very well and good, and she should get a job or a cookie or something, but it was no reason for anyone to send me her resume. Reading the letter was not nearly as amusing as reading the comments others supplied as they passed it along; it was like reading the first generation commentaries around the Talmud.
"Exactly why not to hire Wharton undergrads," one commentator from Goldman Sachs said. "Do you believe those Penn kids?" asked a trader at Merrill Lynch. It was like that hundreds of times, everywhere the cover letter went. The trail went through every major banking institution and consulting firm, and then back through the Ivy League.
Princeton kids were particularly pleased to see a rival getting slammed; I was told one student from the wastelands of New Jersey wrote that the letter was an example of "the bourgeois element at Penn."
Surprise: Touchdown, Nidhi Chadda!
This is absolutely the finest cover letter I have ever seen. Whether she knows it or not, everyone on Wall Street -- and London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo and the bastion of capitalism that is the Toledo, Ohio, school system -- has seen who she is and what she has to offer an organization. Intentionally or unintentionally, she solved the conundrum of how to differentiate herself before the rat race even began.
This letter, as uninteresting as it was, managed to overwhelm the industry and live up to Morgan Stanley's recruiting mantra of "networking the world." Chadda made everyone who forwarded the e-mail look bored and inconsequential, only confirming my doubts about those two-year programs everyone seems so excited to interview for this week.
This fiasco speaks dreadfully of the Morgan Stanley office in Menlo Park and the HR person who forwarded Chadda's letter to the world.
Sharing an individual's personal information is unprofessional and demonstrates the lack of ethics of which corporate America is so often accused. Although it is expected that once you send a resume to an employer it will share that information within the firm, there is a tacit understanding that it will stay within the company.
Patricia Rose, the director of Penn's Career Services office, said she was appalled by the level of "immaturity that is almost mind-boggling and how quick others were to criticize her, piling on critiques." Rose spelled out the "impropriety of sharing information outside the bank" and explained how she was in touch with the institutions through which the e-mail had been passed. Those who improperly passed on Chadda's letter, she assured me, "would be appropriately disciplined" by their firms.
Rose was quick to add that in her 20 years of advising students, she had never seen anything like this, and that such a breach of privacy was unlikely to happen again.
But e-mails like this will be sent again and again until ethics catch up to the technology that is simplifying the recruiting process. I imagine Morgan Stanley will have it down in no time.
What remains impressive is that a girl from Penn sent a single letter out about a month ago and friends of mine on three different continents wrote to tell me about it -- that, without question, is a success.
So Nidhi, wherever you are, could you look over my letter next week?
(10/17/00 9:00am)
Bill Gates has proven again that he is indeed a quick study. In the midst of a massive antitrust lawsuit, Gates just single-handedly broke up a 98-year-old monopoly.
Yesterday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it had endowed a $210 million trust to fund graduate scholarships to Cambridge University, which may break the Rhodes Scholarship's monopoly as the top academic fellowship for U.S. undergraduates.
The program will allow upward of 225 students from around the world to matriculate in Cambridge's graduate programs. The award covers the cost of tuition, travel and related expenses for a maximum of four years of study.
The generosity of the gift and the value of the prize are expected to make this one of the most coveted awards in academic circles.
Unfortunately, if history is any indication, few Penn students will bother applying. As the University flies upward in the U.S. News rankings, we can't seem to back up our academic prestige with an elusive Rhodes Scholarship. Sadly, Penn has not been graced with the pleasure of a Rhodes since 1991, a fact that must give Rodin and Barchi nightsweats.
As of late, this trend has begun to turn around. Last year, the University proudly paraded around then-senior Andrew March when he won a Marshall Scholarship to study political philosophy at Oxford -- Penn's first Marshall in a decade. An impressive feat, but without the intellectual je ne sais quoi of the Rhodes.
The quest for bragging rights led Penn to found the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships last semester. The center is part of Rodin's mandate, implemented by Barchi, to secure more notches for the University's intellectual bedpost, and is headed by former Harrison College House Dean Art Casciato.
CURF, located on Locust Walk, has already implemented drastic changes in the application process for graduate fellowships -- an impressive feat given that the center has only one phone, is prone to the vile odor of broiling meat emanating from the Palladium and had to make a Bookstore run yesterday to make sure it had enough envelopes to mail out this year's Rhodes applications on time.
It is under these dire conditions that Casciato and Associate Director Clare Cowen have begun to overhaul the way Penn students apply for fellowships.
For starters, Casciato streamlined Penn's screening process for the Rhodes Scholarship. He reduced the volume of paperwork candidates must submit, instead putting his focus on helping them fine-tune their applications.
The centralized resources of CURF allowed each applicant to revise their plans of study and personal statements one-on-one with Cowen. A current Rhodes applicant said that it made the process remarkably supportive and the odds of winning the award -- 1 in 30 -- less daunting.
Casciato and Cowen also prepared candidates for the grueling Rhodes interview process by re-creating the event at the Inn at Penn during pre-screening.
In less than two months of operation, CURF has become a fellowship incubator aiding students with not only the Rhodes but also the Marshall, Fulbright, Churchill and Thouron awards.
Once the current round of applications is mailed safely, CURF will turn its attention toward increasing the number and quality of candidates in the future. In November, CURF will begin building what amounts to a scholarship farm system by conducting information sessions on graduate fellowships with all students, including freshmen.
The intent is to breed a culture where students don't receive a diploma and automatically enter banking or consulting.
The lack of applications is the primary reason that we rarely wins such awards. Penn averages 10 Rhodes applications a year, while Rhodes titans, like Harvard, have more than 40.
(It should be noted that perhaps we have a smaller number of Rhodes applicants because the Thouron Award, unique to Penn, gives a similar scholarship to any British university. Since the Thouron usually sees 50 applicants, of whom one in 10 will receive an award, it is generally thought that this greatly reduces the number of Rhodes applicants from Penn.)
Cowen, however, was adamant that the Thouron should not be an excuse for students not to seek the Rhodes, but an opportunity for Penn students to win even more fellowships -- and she is right.
It would be wonderful for Penn to christen CURF this year with an inaugural Gates Scholar. The application is due November 30, and Art Casciato and Clare Cowen are waiting to help.
(10/10/00 9:00am)
Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of bombing an interview.
Every question had been answered according to plan, but near the end I was confronted by the inevitable "Where do you see yourself in 20 years?"
I blanked, hit an intellectual iceberg and my ship went down fast.
Later that evening, as I sat watching the presidential debate in utter disbelief of my lack of vision, I began to empathize with the candidates.
As painful as the debate was to watch, it was comforting to see those two squirming about, trying to answer questions about the future they envisioned for the country. In a sense, the presidential debates are a longer, more public interview where the candidates are asked how they see America progressing over the next 20 years.
The debate gave me the oddest feeling of deja v—. A couple days later, while avoiding additional research into the abyss that is my thesis, the familiar face of Ronald Reagan on C-SPAN revealed why.
"There you go again..." he intoned with his famous radio delivery, questioning Jimmy Carter's representation of his stance on Medicare during the 1980 presidential debate. Reagan's line, now a cliche, might well have been applied to both candidates in last week's debate.
The first question in 1980 was on each candidate's willingness to intervene militarily in foreign affairs. Reagan responded that we needed a strong military in order to "control the events and try to intercept before they become a crisis" -- a not too distant departure from George W. Bush's argument that we need a stronger military "to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place."
Like Reagan, Bush used this theory as a lead-in for a spiel about the sickly state of our armed forces, emphatically calling for a "rebuild of our military power."
The next question in 1980, directed at President Carter, asked about the dangers of the recent OPEC oil shock. Carter called for additional conservation and noted that the country had increased its domestic energy production, boasting that "more coal [had been mined] this year than ever before in American history."
Surprisingly, although we no longer face the spiraling inflation of the '70s, concerns about oil supply still worked their way into the discussion. Both Gore and Bush answered a similar question by suggesting we increase domestic production and invest in clean coal technology -- surprising given that over the last two decades, we have chosen to build less-fuel-efficient cars, import more foreign oil and cut domestic exploration while hoping, in Carter's words, to "to replace OPEC oil with American coal as a basic energy source."
Carter's statement that the Social Security trust needed to be separated from the federal government budget, an identical, though less animated, version of Gore's promise -- repeated nine times -- to put the program in an "iron-clad lockbox."
Conversely, Reagan argued for a study on the options available for Social Security and emphasized the need to determine its long-term viability, suggesting something like Bush's proposal to privatize a portion of Social Security by allowing individuals to invest their contributions in the stock market.
Amazingly, in 1980, Carter suggested in an off-topic answer to a question about Medicare that "we have an opportunity to move toward national health insurance, with an emphasis on the prevention of disease; an emphasis on out-patient care, not in-patient care; an emphasis on hospital cost containment to hold down the cost of hospital care far those who are ill [and] an emphasis on catastrophic health insurance."
The proposal along those lines by Ralph Nader -- this year's John Anderson -- makes Bush and Gore's prescription drug plan seem rather conservative.
Reagan closed the with the memorable "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" -- a question I ask myself all the time.
That line made me wonder whether we are better off today than we were 20 years ago. At the moment, as Gore invites a similar searching look at the last eight years, we are enjoying a ridiculous economic expansion and the Cold War is over. But from listening to the debates, there is nothing fundamentally different in what the candidates were saying then as compared to today.
Tomorrow night's presidential debate is another opportunity to see what challenges this country still faces. From listening to the debates, it seems that while we as a country have advanced greatly, we have not progressed far enough politically to change the focus of the debates.
Perhaps as a country we lack a shared vision, and perhaps we should all think of a better answer to where we see ourselves in 20 years.
(10/03/00 9:00am)
Over the weekend I happened to get my hands on a copy of the Forbes 400.
For those of you who don't know, the Forbes 400 -- or the "rich list" as it is commonly known -- is an annual report on the 400 wealthiest Americans. Attaining a spot in this issue is no small feat; this year the cut off was $725 million.
As I read through the profiles of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen and Warren Buffet, I couldn't help thinking how close this issue hit to home.
Lately it seems all we do is talk about money and how to get more of the stuff. It's everywhere. Just look at the pages of the DP during the last couple of weeks: a story on how the endowment is up, but not as much as Harvard's; another on how Judy is making more this year; a groundbreaking revelation that College grads make less than Wharton grads in the financial services field; and all those full-page recruiting ads.
The campus is obsessed.
I gather that many of you are in the midst of trying to figure out what exactly one does after Penn. For those of you wondering how best to reserve your place on the Forbes list, here are a couple points to consider.
Of the 400 members of the rich list, 108 never finished college. This must be a disturbing thought particularly for you Whartonistas who came to Penn because you heard the names Trump, Milken and Perelman and figured that a similar education could lead to similar rewards. In fact, however, a fourth of America's richest people have no embossed diplomas hanging on their walls.
Something to keep in mind as you struggle to juggle your academics with the weight of recruiting.
Speaking of recruiting, you may find yourself going from one pointless company presentation to the next, each stressing the advantages of the firms' corporate culture and the marvel of having the company supply workout attire -- with logos of course -- in their executive gyms.
Well if a place on the Forbes list really matters to you, the last place you should be is at a recruiting event for an investment bank or consulting firm.
Not a single person on the list is a partner at a consulting firm or investment bank and only 49 of the 400 are financiers.
This means that 88 percent of the Forbes list did not follow the sacred route of consulting or banking that Penn is so fond of paving for its graduates.
For some unknown reason, this school is hell bent on sending a large part of every graduating class to New York for a two-year stint at some corporation or other. Career Services seems to have this down to a science -- everything leads to two years in the Big Apple.
Why?
The majority of those on the rich list spent no time in New York in some god-forsaken cookie-cutter two-year program.
In reading the hundreds of profiles in the issue, it appears that a common trait exists among America's billionaires. Aside from those who inherited their place on the list, each charted his or her own course.
This week, as you go over to see if one the "big firms" is calling you back for an interview, keep this in mind. Graduation, if you make it, does not have to lead to a job where you are worked like a dog for two years. Make what you want of it; thousands of companies are starting out, just like you. They won't be advertising in the DP, but they are out there and have room for you.
Or if an existing company doesn't do it for you, start your own. This past week, Penn started its own incubator, P2B, and a partnership with the Philadelphia private sector to make your crazy business plan a reality and help bring your ideas to market.
It seems that Penn, finally, is beginning to realize that there are other paths to success that don't go through banking or consulting. So if company presentations leave a foul taste in your mouth, don't wait until two years from now to do something meaningful.
Leave Penn and stake out on your own. You'll be better off, even if you never grace the pages of Forbes.
(09/26/00 9:00am)
Tomorrow, we will have the opportunity to purchase a ticket to hear Kareem Abdul-Jabbar speak on campus next month, possibly on his role in co-writing a book or maybe his July arrest on marijuana charges.
All this thanks to the good folks of Connaissance, the self described "speaker people."
Aside from sharing a slogan with a disreputable South Jersey car audio establishment, the folks at Connaissance are responsible for bringing distinguished speakers to campus in order to enlighten the University community and foster intellectual discourse.
However, as of late, it has been difficult to understand exactly what they expect us to gain from their speakers.
Benjamin Netanyahu's visit a year ago, aside from generating a healthy black market for tickets, showed Connaissance at its best. His visit served as a vehicle for a renewed discussion on Arab-Israeli relations and led to substantive discussion in the student body.
For this reason, I shudder to think what kind of discourse they seek to foster through such recent speakers like Billy Joel, Ellen DeGeneres, Danny Glover and Dick Vitale, not to mention Abdul-Jabbar.
Like the DeGeneres event, the Abdul-Jabbar speech should prove to be a disaster. Although I acknowledge the place of bringing entertainers like Conan O'Brien and Bill Maher to campus, I do not expect to gain greater understanding from these events. Connaissance's recent attempts at mixing entertainers with serious issues, such as DeGeneres with homosexuality and Abdul-Jabbar with black courage, are misguided.
Connaissance must decide what kind of "speaker people" they want to be and how that will affect the university community.
In their decision, perhaps they should consider whom a Tier II university in Texas brought to their campus last year:
A panel discussion moderated by U.S. News Editor David Gergen with columnists Bill Moyers and George Will, former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, presidential advisor Mary Matalin, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Titanic wreckage finder Robert Ballard, former British Prime Minister John Major, former defense secretary and current vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney and former President George Bush.
Impressed? Me too.
That list would be a good decade for Connaissance, yet they brought all these people to Texas of all places. Maybe even more impressive is the fact that all this was done without cost to the university.
The program that makes this possible is the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Established in 1982 to bring a greater number of extraordinary speakers to the university and foster a heightened intellectual environment, the lecture series has brought more than 121 high-profile leaders in fields such as government, business, the sciences, literature, the arts and education to SMU.
Perhaps even more appealing to the folks at Connaissance, at SMU instead of having to ask the administration for money, organizers of the Tate Lectures actually raise money for financial aid and other student programs.
In my one year there, I saw how the Tate Lecture Series solved for SMU the problem that we at Penn face in wanting to bring more and better speakers to campus without the high cost of honoraria.
SMU's answer was simple -- it extended the lecture series to the entire Dallas community, from area businesses to disadvantaged high school students. Under the plan, an interested firm would sponsor a lecture, for which it would receive a large block of seats.
Additionally, tickets are sold to the public on a subscription basis, and this revenue is channeled into financial aid, student programs and library acquisitions. The remaining half of the tickets are designated for students and distributed on a lottery basis.
Since only half of the seats in the lecture hall are reserved for students, additional afternoon question-and-answer sessions are held for university students and area high schoolers.
This year, the lecture series will generate a million dollars for financial aid, a quarter of a million for student activities and a half a million for a first-year student retreat.
Not bad for a Tier II school in Texas, and a clear model for Connaissance to bring to Penn. Perhaps, sometimes you have to look down in the rankings if you're looking for a way to move up.
(09/19/00 9:00am)
I have a job, I have a good credit history and I have a very good renter's reference. But last week it appeared as if I would not be welcome at the newly renovated Left Bank apartment building because I am an undergraduate.
A week ago, a small ad ran in the DP inviting students to attend a free lunch given by Carl Dranoff, the developer of the Left Bank, the former GE plant at 32nd and Walnut streets.
In reality, the lunch was an under-hyped grand opening to introduce members of the University community to the renovations that will create 282 luxury apartments and retail space.
As I approached the site, a woman hawking the virtues of the place politely asked if I was a student at Penn. I acknowledged my status as a tuition-payer.
"Are you a grad or undergrad?" she asked with a perk.
That was the first sign that there was again no such thing as a free lunch. When Dranoff ran the ad welcoming "everyone at Penn to join us," I thought it truly meant everyone.
However, it seems Dranoff has a different definition of "everyone" than you and I do.
It turns out that the former GE building's renovations weren't intended for everyone. In fact, it appears that the "everyone" that Dranoff meant is only graduate students and young professionals.
Looking for answers on why undergraduates were not worthy to live in luxury, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paula Barren, the leasing director of the Left Bank.
Tthe policy is simple: Dranoff Properties does not accept co-signers, which in her view disqualifies any undergraduate.
I pressed the policy by providing the example of a young entrepreneur or a beneficiary of a trust fund -- certainly no stranger to Penn's campus --that perhaps would not need a co-signer.
She replied that she really didn't think that a student could qualify for a lease, but that she would -- reluctantly, it seemed -- review every applicant. Then came the ringer:
"Regardless, you see, we really don't want undergraduates," she said. In other words, undergrads need not apply.
Then she told me exactly why Dranoff had this policy: "You see, we are trying to create a OCambridge-esque' environment, and undergraduates would not be conducive to creating that kind of residential environment."
This is where things start to stink. What's more "Cambridge-esque" than undergraduates?
This seemed like a clear case of discrimination to me. So I called Alan Lerner, a professor at the Law School who specializes in cases of employment discrimination.
To my chagrin, it turns out that Dranoff is entirely within its legal rights as a landlord. Discrimination is legal in this country, Lerner said, just as long as one does not discriminate against certain protected classes, i.e., on the basis of sex, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality or age.
Students, of any kind, do not fall into any of these protected classes and therefore can be discriminated against in housing.
So legally, there is nothing one can do to prevent Dranoff from not leasing apartments to undergraduates and in doing so creating "whatever-esque" environment in the Left Bank.
Nonetheless, we would expect the University to value its ethics as highly as it does this law.
After my initial inquiries into the validity of the no undergraduate policy, it seems that Dranoff has chosen to redefine its policy.
Officials now say they originally had the "no undergraduate" policy because they thought undergraduates would not be able to meet the stringent criteria of providing proof of credit and income and a previous landlord verification. However, Dranoff and Penn officials said, the apartments are now open to anyone that fits their criteria.
Barren, who just a week ago found it "difficult" to believe that an undergraduate could qualify for Dranoff's apartments, now admits that a few undergraduates have lived in the Left Bank's sister property, Locust on the Park.
It's hard to believe that Dranoff's quick change means undergrads will be any more welcome in its buildings.
And more importantly, we have to see this as a sign of the possible dangers Penn faces in its dealings with outside corporations who see undergraduate students as a liability instead of an asset. Ideally, Penn will always have the best interests of all members of the University in mind when it makes those decisions and, in doing so, avoid discrimination -- legal or not -- against those it intends to serve.
(09/11/00 9:00am)
By the way, did you remember to take your pill today? Ah, birth control, the daily plight of many women. A pill a day keeps the baby away, or so they say. So today's pill was number 272 for the year with only a mere 84 more to go.
What if I told you that in the near future you could cut the number of birth control pills by 97 percent?
Actually, you could cut them out all together. Amused?
A team of Dutch and English researchers find themselves in the secondary stages of developing several possible male contraceptives -- basically a male version of "The Pill."
Organon, a Dutch pharmaceutical company, has been developing such a drug for more than 20 years, with some recent success. Ironically, this drug has had a difficult pregnancy.
Its female counterpart was received with outstretched arms. Given its high demand, the pill's biggest problem was overcoming biological stumbling blocks.
With men, it is the opposite, however. Men's plumbing is much simpler than women's, but finding men in an uproar to control their reproductive future poses a stiff challenge.
But in a world where men are expected to take increasing responsibility for their sexual actions, it may be time for such an option. Whether or not the drug is ready for the real world, the problem remains, how does a pharmaceutical company convince men to take the thing?
Organon's marketing wizards think they have the solution. Researchers expect the male pill to be effective -- as effective as the female pill -- within 10 years. The male pill, however, would only need to be taken monthly. The advantage is clear: 12 pills a year compared to the 360-something that a woman has to take.
But how can the world trust men to take the damned thing?
Organon's solution is to mail the male pill, complete with a water packet, to men each month. You simply open your mail, see that a tablet arrived, open your water packet and pop the sucker -- mail-order responsibility?
But for many men the likely objection is whether the pill is really safe. In a survey conducted during the clinical trials of the male contraceptive, 90 percent of men said they would take the drug if it did not pose an infertility or erectile dysfunction risk.
The latest versions do not affect sperm production or the ability to attain erection. Researchers in the January 6 issue of the journal Nature revealed that unlike other male versions of "the pill" currently on the drawing board, which block the action of the male hormone testosterone on the sperm-producing cells in the testicles, Organon's pill would maintain normal sperm production. However, researchers said, it would block the release of sperm into semen, thereby significantly decreasing the likelihood of pregnancy following sexual intercourse.
Men participating in the tests of hormonal contraceptives for up to a year have reported that their sperm count returned to normal levels within six months, and several have had children without problems, according to David Baird, a professor at the Center for Reproductive Biology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
"If a male pill or shot is developed," he writes in the Nature study, "not everyone will want to use it. [But] it will give people a wider choice."
I spoke with a participant of the clinical trials of the drug in South Africa, who asked to remain anonymous. He was very enthusiastic about the safety of the pill and said that he had not experienced negative side effects in his sex life. He said that as a part of the study, researchers regularly monitored his sperm production and that it had remained normal.
The participant's only gripe was that no women believed that he was on the pill or that it existed. Glowing, he explained however, that the drug company provided him with a letter from a physician proving that he has taken his pill.
As reproductive issues continue to pervade the global consciousness, the male pill promises to provide men with their own "right to choose" -- a choice that will enable men to take responsibility so a woman need not exercise that controversial right. The world expects men to be equally responsible for their sexual choices, and it's about time that men began to have equal contraceptives.
But will men have to go to the Women's Center to get their pills
