Universities: Old Ben’s New Penn

Leaf for leaf, the iviest campus in the Ivy League may well be the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. For decades, this ivy masked a nagging inferiority complex. Outsiders mistook Penn for a state university; insiders yearned to rename it Franklin after Ben, its patron. Though blessed with great graduate schools, Penn was cursed with inert trustees, inept presidents and indolent rejects from Yale and Harvard. “The plaything of the Main Line,” Penn dreamed of past glory while dying of the slums that choked its campus and strangled its spirit.

All this is changing fast under President Gaylord P. Harnwell, a high-energy physicist of national renown. When he succeeded the feckless Harold Stassen in 1953, Harnwell launched a fiveyear, $750,000 self-study, the most exhaustive ever attempted by a U.S. university. As a result of the study—and, as one dean puts it, of the fact that “the right people died”—Penn has been reborn.

The “Harnwell Climate.” Long dominated by its graduate schools, the University of Pennsylvania has upgraded its undergraduate liberal arts college, loosed a freshet of liberal learning throughout its technical schools, and started pruning its 2,000 courses, which still include such “guts” as business-letter writing. For the first time, coed Penn’s 18,347 (10,354 fulltime) students are griping about a “grind school.” For the first time, grand old Penn is reaching briskly for clarity and corporate purpose.

In ten years of the “Harnwell climate,” Penn has nearly doubled faculty salaries, tripled scholarship aid, and boosted research contracts to $26 million. The operating budget has almost tripled, to $75 million; endowment has more than doubled, to $86 million. In Harnwell’s reign, Penn has completed 45 major construction projects, jumping its plant value from $56 million to $111 million. In the next ten years it aims to spend another $120 million, eventually expanding its 145-acre campus by more than 80% .

Penn remains a city campus with too little housing: one-fourth of its fulltime students are commuters. But it no longer talks of moving to the suburbs; instead, it made the city its new frontier. Aroused by the street-corner murder of a Korean student in 1957, Penn mobilized four other institutions (Drexel Institute of Technology, Presbyterian Hospital, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, and Philadelphia College of Osteopathy) in renewing West Philadelphia from a slum to a sprightly University City. By aiding the public schools with advice and scholarships, Penn stemmed a white flight—without driving Negroes away. Some house prices have doubled, and so has the number of faculty men living in the area.

Philadelphia Lawyers. Penn’s new look would surely delight Ben Franklin, who in 1749 led in launching Penn’s parent—a pioneering academy that stressed physics and politics rather than classics. By 1765 it was a full college, with the country’s first medical school. A year older as a university (1779) than Harvard, Penn practically founded the Republic. The Continental Congress met in its old College Hall in 1778; ten Penn founders signed the Declaration of Independence and seven signed the Constitution. But later, Penn’s deliberate religious freedom sent believers to churchy schools such as Presbyterian Princeton, and by 1807 Penn had only 17 students.

It survived in part because it got state aid—as do other private Pennsylvania campuses (last year the state paid about 10% of Penn’s budget). Proceeding to turn out good architects, engineers and Philadelphia lawyers, Penn’s graduate schools became renowned. Ranking in the nation’s top ten, the medical school is part of a vast empire bossed by Surgeon I. S. Ravdin, who operated on President Eisenhower for ileitis. It treats animals (7,000 a year) as well as people, includes university and graduate hospitals with 1,325 beds, and alone accounts for 33% of the university budget. Equally famous is the big (2,165 students) Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, the first university business school in the U.S. (1881). As imperial as it is impeccable, Wharton owns the university’s departments of economics, sociology, political science and “regional science” (urbanization). “We’d all like to get out,” mutters one imprisoned political scientist. Shrugs a Wharton dean: “I guess it’s traditional.”

Run, Girls, Run. But in gaining preeminence, the graduate schools overwhelmed the liberal arts college. To balance the university, Harnwell provides a bigger ration of liberal arts for all undergraduates, notably those at Wharton. The liberal arts college has finally acquired an honors program and its own faculty, calling on such top scholars as Anthropologist Loren Eiseley. Also strong: American civilization, Oriental studies, history. By 1970, Penn hopes to start a house plan like those at Yale and Harvard.

Still to be dispensed with are some old customs. One is riots, called “Row-bottoms” after Joseph Rowbottom (’12), whose roommate was allegedly wont to start trouble by bellowing drunkenly from the street, “Rowbottom! Rowbottom!” The student guide still warns girls to “seek immediate shelter” when Rowbottoms strike; they must lock doors, douse lights and hide until the official all clear. Also looking increasingly archaic is the discriminatory system of fraternities, eleven of them Jewish and 25 gentile.

Whatever its final shape, Penn is growing up fast. Once provincial Philadelphians, its students now come from 48 states and 83 foreign countries. Once given to favoring alumni, it now promotes teachers on merit. Penn’s faculty is vital, distinguished and outspoken. Academic freedom is real. The once sleepy school beside the Schuylkill River still lacks a crackling intellectual air. But it has the will, the leadership, and—as ever—the ivy.