Alec Webley
Recent articles
Alec Webley | Trusting Penn’s Trustees
The Penn Board of Trustees needs to be more transparent with how it makes it decisions.
Farewell Column by Alec Webley | Dear Penn
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.
Smart Alec | It’s bigger than racism
For our response to Christopher Abreu's column to merely be a condemnation of racism confuses the symptom with the disease.
Smart Alec | A Fling for the rest of us
I wish we had a culture tolerant of more than one way to enjoy Spring Fling.
Smart Alec | The universal University
By extending our hand to young people across the globe, we are not only serving our national interests. We are feeding the nation’s soul.
Smart Alec | End of the Age of Forgiveness
The internet has made our pasts permanent, ready to haunt us for the rest of our lives. If we can no longer forget, we ought to better forgive.
Smart Alec | Inequality without reason
The reason behind denying transexual faculty and staff benefits is simple. It boils down to two things — perspiration and politics.
Smart Alec | Let students try students
Why are we honorable enough to dispense the death penalty but not to mandate community service? Penn should introduce true student juries in the disciplinary system.
Smart Alec | Abolish University Council
In the place of the University Council (which is currently no more than a mothballed roundtable), create a “University Forum” where anyone can speak.
Smart Alec | U.K. no longer A-OK
By ransacking its higher education to pay down its budget deficit and cutting immigration, the U.K. stands to lose great American students — including those from Penn.
Smart Alec | Thinking past the crisis
President Gutmann should increase the general fee to give SAC the resources to pay fully for our least-funded academic division — student life.
Smart Alec | End the over-budgeting crisis
Enacting a moratorium on new groups is exactly the one measure that will do nothing to help the current crisis. Too much money is going out to existing groups.
Smart Alec | A free market for booze
The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's monopoly should end. State Rep. Mike Turzai’s bill to privatize the liquor business in Pennsylvania is as good a way as any to do it.
Smart Alec | Abolish final examinations
The current examination system is both unhealthy and unnecessary. Professors should eliminate finals altogether and replace them with continuous assessment.
Smart Alec | The trouble was trust
DPS had the ability to send an alert if there were an active danger and it didn’t because it wasn’t necessary. We were safe. And as helpless as it may make us feel, we should trust our police.
Smart Alec | To students: shout in
To everyone who submits Shoutouts: please don’t be mean. By making Shoutouts all about how much we hate each other, we have lost an opportunity to create something that will make us feel better.
Smart Alec | Fund real interculturalism
I urge the new leadership of the minority coalitions to at least divest themselves of sole control of the Intercultural Fund and work with the University to use that money to promote true interculturalism.
Smart Alec | An alternative aid model
Penn could implement need-blind admission for international students if it really wanted to. All it would need to do is roll back no-loan financial aid.
Smart Alec | It doesn't get better
The response to the slew of bullying-linked suicides has been a touching nationwide movement to send messages to teenagers that “it gets better.” Pity, then, that it simply isn’t true.
Smart Alec | Lessons from Voldemort
One of the ways to learn about leadership is to study the good and bad examples of others, so in that spirit I present the lessons we can learn from the example of Lord Voldemort.
