Farewell Column by Alec Webley | Dear Penn

Goodbye Penn. You’ve been ambivalent to me; I, in turn, am ambivalent to you.

Blame yourself for that outcome. You’ve taught me too well to love you unconditionally. Your professors have led me to think critically about the world, and so that mindset has rubbed off on to how I think about you.

I know that you are, at bottom, an institution. You don’t care about me or any of my classmates beyond what we can give you — either in reputation as students or money as graduates — because you know there’ll be another bunch following right behind us. You are often manipulative, shallow and propagandistic. You staged a pro-environmental rally, going as far as to decide what the “protest signs” would say, to promote your Climate Action Plan — written almost entirely by administrators and consultants but officially written by the community so we couldn’t complain.

You created a Counseling and Psychological Services department but deprived it of the funding and staff needed to confront the perfect storm of psychological need you yourselves created by allowing students to overload classes, among other things. You gobble up the surrounding land sometimes to expand and sometimes just to gentrify the area. You treat your University Council, the only democratic body designed to review policies, as a wastepaper basket with the aim of quelling dissent. I won’t even mention Seniors for the Penn Fund. You can be monstrously indifferent to the small and vulnerable around you.

Yet you are led and run by people who are as kind, goodhearted and generous as you could find anywhere in the world. Your president cares deeply and sincerely about financial aid; your senior leadership worries constantly about the impact of its actions and in doing the right thing — far more than necessary. Almost every administrator I met was not only exceptionally good at his or her job but also exceptionally willing to listen to often uninformed criticism and work to make things better.

For its faults, your Climate Action Plan is still the most ambitious of any of its peers. You make massive investments into the local community, often-uneconomical ones, to build up local entrepreneurship and make Penn’s economic impact a positive one for Philadelphia. Each of your schools and centers engages in charitable work, sometimes to life-saving effect. You focus your philanthropy, as we just learned, on community impact before prestige. Your professors have far more time and patience for undergraduates than we are at all entitled to.

On those students, they too fill the spectrum. I had an opportunity to meet a lot of students in my Penn career, thanks to student government. On the one hand, some of them are unbelievably entitled, snobby, rude, unthinking, uncaring, deceitful, backstabbing, shallow people it has ever been my distinct displeasure to meet. On the other hand, some have been brilliant, thoughtful, generous, courageous and kind. Occasionally, all of the aforementioned traits have been contained in a single person.

For all these reasons, I don’t know why people say you’re different from “the real world.” Certainly the real world is slightly harsher (though anyone who has survived the College Office has gotten excellent practice for the DMV), slightly colder, its inhabitants slightly less vivid. But who you are, what you do and who you work with are a simulacrum of the wider world, and for that education — with a slim but present safety net to catch me when I fell — I am thankful.

But now we have to break up. It’s not you; it’s me — you know the drill. We both have to move on. Like any relationship, ours contained its good and its bad. Yet, at the end, despite my ambivalence, I think I’ll be excited to see you again.

Alec Webley, a former columnist, is a College senior from Melbourne, Australia. Next year, he will be studying comparative politics at the London School of Economics.

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