Recruiting a new image

Penn's Political Science Department has seen some tough times in recent years. Popular and high-profile faculty members have been lost to retirement, other universities and a demanding tenure system. And the task of replacing them has proven overwhelmingly difficult -- hampered by the perception that the department is forever in a "rebuilding mode," and laden with few legitimate senior scholars. Those fortunes changed somewhat in 1999, when the University succeeded in recruiting Princeton's John DiIulio to head the Fox Leadership Program. This week, the indications are that the department is once again on the upswing, with the news that Yale Professor Rogers Smith and his wife, lecturer Mary Summers, will be coming to Philadelphia this fall. The recruitment of Smith -- one of the nation's leading theorists on constitutional law and American political thought -- is noteworthy not just because he and his wife bring with them a wealth of insight into the world of American politics. What makes this arrival so remarkable is that Smith and Summers are coming to Penn, in part, to help set a new recruiting precedent for a department that has had difficulty bringing the big names to town. Smith -- a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the obvious headliner in this deal -- even alluded to these intentions when he said that the Political Science Department's recruiting fortunes were, "pretty much a matter of somebody making the first move." For this optimism and intellectual boldness, Smith and Summers deserve the recognition of a University that will soon benefit from their knowledge and experience. But so too, of course, does the Political Science Department itself. With every new senior professor it brings to University City, the department is succeeding in filling the holes that have weakened it over the past few years. That kind of rejuvenation is exactly what the University needs right now. But now it is incumbent upon the Political Science Department to take advantage of this new opportunity; to use the draw of a professor like Smith to reach out and bring further new faces into a department that has, until late, known little more than frustration.

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