Spring Cheers and Jeers

CHEERS * To the University, for maintaining its dedication to quality medical education by not selling the Health System or any Penn-owned hospitals; * To the University, for celebrating its first official Martin Luther King Jr. Day with an appropriate array of programs and commemorations; * To Political Science Professor John DiIulio, for his trailblazing appointment as director of the new White House Office on Faith-based and Community Initiatives; * To SPEC Connaissance, for rebounding from the disastrous Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appearance with outstanding spring speaker Madeleine Albright; * To the University, for recognizing the importance of the discipline and maintaining the status of the South Asian Regional Studies Department; * To the latest retail additions to Penn's campus -- The Freshgrocer, El Diner, Papaya King and Billybob -- for providing much-needed, high-quality services to the students of this University; * To Wharton alumnus and University Trustee George Weiss, for his generous $20 million gift to fund additional undergraduate financial aid as well as a technology hub; * To the women's tennis, men's fencing and women's basketball teams, for capturing their respective Ivy League titles; * To the Political Science Departments, for recruiting several crucial new senior faculty members to Penn for next year.

JEERS * To the University and Campus Dining Services, for the unfair, unwarranted and absolutely unreasonable changes they recently made to the structure of Penn's freshman and upperclass meal plan offerings; * To the University and Campus Dining Services, for attempting to obscure their misguided dining changes by claiming to "promote community" within the college houses; and for their foolish justification that students should be forced to reconcile financial difficulties likely brought on by their own poor fiscal management; * To the University, for raising next year's tuition by more that 5 percent -- the highest increase in the Ivy League; * To the University, for failing to establish even a plan for remedying its faltering undergraduate financial aid system, even as our comparable peer institutions keep dumping millions into their own programs; * To the latest retail additions to Penn's campus, as well as the University, for a constant string of unreasonable construction delays; * To the Preceptorials Committee, for lauding Institute for Human Gene Therapy Director James M. Wilson by naming him a preceptorial leader for the fall. Wilson's status as a scientist is in serious question, and he clearly has no place at this university; * To the University, for letting a semester pass without naming permanent leaders of the Nursing School, Medical School, Health System and the Division of Public Safety; * To the University, for quietly raising prices at Houston Market and shutting down McClelland Marketplace entirely.

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