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Jeremy Dubert: Home sweet home: the Palestra

(02/05/03 10:00am)

The Palestra, even after being refurbished three years ago, is one of the old, venerable vestiges of an earlier era in college basketball. New facilities spring up constantly across collegiate and professional sports, as demands for more luxury boxes, increased media space, improved weight rooms and other amenities contribute to the growing trend. But the Palestra, for all the signs of being in its 77th year of use, continues to be extraordinarily effective in performing its most critical responsibility -- providing a terrific home-court advantage for Penn. And it has been especially apparent in league games over the past few years. Excluding the annual holiday on which Princeton comes to town, the Quakers have won 28 of their last 29 Ivy League home games. This includes a 21-game winning streak from 1997- 2002. The lone slip-up in that stretch was last year's memorable and shocking 54-53 loss to Columbia. Prior to that, you have to go all the way back to Feb. 15, 1997 and a 60-58 loss to Yale to find the last non-Princeton home defeat to an Ivy. This bodes extremely well for the Red and Blue to take an early stranglehold on the conference in 2003. Penn already knocked around Dartmouth and Harvard this past weekend at the Palestra to open league play, and five of the Quakers' first seven games of the Ivy season will take place right here on 33rd Street. Even more encouraging from a Penn perspective is that the only two road contests in that stretch, which come this weekend, are against two clubs that spend most of their time trying to get out of their own way -- Cornell and Columbia. While, of course, anything can happen -- see last year's Columbia result -- the Quakers should be less apt to fall victim to the early-season trap than it was last year, and have the talent to emerge with a pair of victories on this weekend's roadtrip. If Penn can, in fact, return with a 4-0 record, it might be staring a 7-0 start right in the face, if the home-court trend holds true to form. "This is a really big stretch that we have," Penn coach Fran Dunphy said after the Red and Blue cruised past Harvard on Saturday night. "And we need to really pay attention to every detail we have in front of us." By the time Penn finishes its game against Brown at the Palestra on Feb. 15th, the Quakers should be in fantastic position to repeat as league champions. It is even conceivable to picture a perfect 14-0 romp through the Ivies. We at Penn have become accustomed to -- perhaps spoiled by -- undefeated campaigns, since Penn has attained this feat four times in the last decade. But the point is that such a run will probably not be necessary. A strong start to the season by Penn, made increasingly possible by its frontloaded home schedule, could remove much of the pressure in the second half of the year. For example, last year Penn, Princeton and Yale all tied for the league title with 11-3 records. If such a mark were again sufficient to qualify for the postseason, Penn could get by in the difficult, road-heavy latter stages of the year by merely being very good -- or even very average -- rather than dominant. The key is winning the games it should win early in the year -- especially those at home. In Fran Dunphy's tenure with the Quakers, Penn has gone undefeated at home five times. Not surprisingly, that has led to an Ivy League championship on each occasion. After the Harvard game, Dunphy said, "We went up there last year and they beat us, and I'm quite sure that when we go up there again this year, it's going to be a war." That makes the next ten days especially critical. If the Quakers embark on the challenging portion of their schedule having swept their first seven -- which includes current Ivy leader Brown and Yale -- that war up in Boston may not be so important after all. The main, unwavering objective is naturally to secure a league championship in any way possible, but following last year's occasionally bumpy road, wouldn't it be nice to see the Quakers coast to the finish line? It's very possible. It all comes down to winning at home, and as aged as it might be, the Palestra remains the perfect venue for Penn to accomplish just that.

https://www.thedp.com/article/2003/02/jeremy_dubert_home_sweet_home_the_palestra

David Copley: A program without morals

(01/20/03 10:00am)

With the Trent Lott debacle of last December, political pundits from across the country assumed the Republican Party would abandon its core principles and cave on racial issues. These predictions seemed on target when Senator Lott publicly declared himself a supporter of affirmative action during an interview on Black Entertainment Television. But President George W. Bush is a principled fighter. He will not accept a policy as misguided as affirmative action because of pressure from special interest groups. In the words of the eminent TV philosopher Homey the Clown of In Living Color fame, "Homey don't play that." Last Wednesday, President Bush made the decision to file a "friend of the court" brief opposing affirmative action in the cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, now heading to the Supreme Court to be heard this spring. Nowhere is the moral bankruptcy of affirmative action better illustrated than in these cases. The University of Michigan is being challenged for its use of race in the undergraduate and law school admissions processes. The university grades candidates on a point system, with 100 out of a possible 150 usually good for admission. A perfect SAT score is worth a meager 12 points. The color of your skin can earn you a whopping 20 points. Ironically, the beneficiaries of such admissions policies are rarely underprivileged but in fact from well-to-do families. Should the child of a wealthy black businessman receive a 20-point preference over the child of a working-class mechanic from Detroit? Not only are these preferential treatments immoral, they're also illegal. According to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." So a program that receives federal funding cannot differentiate between applicants based on race, color or national origin. Nothing to debate. Nothing to discuss. It's that simple. Yet affirmative action has remained at least marginally legal in this country for many decades. Thanks to Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, universities have been able to discriminate for or against applicants based on race as long as they don't use a numerical quota system in doing so. How did this violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 become codified in case law? Through unmitigated judicial activism. A group of five Supreme Court justices decided to legislate from the bench and override the law of the land because they felt they had a "compelling government interest" in doing so. But if we allow our judges to change the law based on their own personal whims, then why even bother to have a legislature or a written Constitution? Most Americans realize the hypocrisy of preferential treatment in college admissions and hiring. According to a Washington Post poll conducted in the spring of 2001, 92 percent of Americans are opposed to race-based preferences, including 86 percent of African Americans. While affirmative action was originally intended to rectify past discrimination, its proponents now argue for it based on the need for "diversity" on college campuses. Most people on college campuses want diversity. But diversity is more than skin deep. True diversity includes differences in thought, culture, background and experience. Skin color should have no more bearing on this than height, weight or shoe size. There are reasonable programs that can benefit underprivileged minorities while passing both legal and moral litmus tests. But these programs should be based on economic position rather than race. Universities should seek out promising students who haven't had access to the opportunities afforded to wealthier students, regardless of their skin color. The government should develop programs that extend credit to entrepreneurs establishing businesses in impoverished areas. These programs will directly benefit minorities that need help, without generating the much-deserved outrage of current preferential treatment programs. I believe people in both major political parties ultimately have the same goal -- that every American, regardless of skin color, has access to a quality education and the opportunity to be successful. But using race as a factor in hiring or in college admissions is antithetical to this mission. It's exactly what we're supposed to be fighting against. I applaud the Bush administration for its stand on the issue. Hopefully, the days of color-conscious admissions policies will soon be buried on the ash heap of history where they rightfully belong. David Copley is a sophomore Finance and Real Estate major from Bellevue, Wash.

https://www.thedp.com/article/2003/01/david_copley_a_program_without_morals

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