Jeff Millman: Juggling form and academic function

You've heard the old adage about "form following function." Well, for most of its existence, Penn has been an excellent school because its infrastructure and management were designed in strict adherence to its core teaching function. What's worrisome is that Penn's current expansion of form -- in real estate, in its Health System and even in community service partnerships -- could convolute and distract this school from its main function: the academics that have been so good here for so long. Students need to look no further than their mailboxes to realize that this problem is already occurring. Ideally, students should only receive transcripts, registration information and other things relevant to academics. But since that first acceptance letter, students' mailboxes have been barraged with much more. We receive more because the University has goals unrelated to academics; thus, it wants to establish various relationships with its students beyond the classroom. By seeing the students as having several forms, the University expects the students to perform several different functions. One is the form of the student as the emerging market, where Penn expects students to function as consumers. In this form, Penn establishes marketing relationships in which companies like Visa and MBNA pay Penn for access to mailing lists. Then we open our mailboxes and are exhorted to "Show Your PENN Pride" in the form of a credit card "worthy of the Quakers." Another is the form of the student as the future alum, where Penn expects students to function as donors. We open our mailboxes and are implored to give a Senior Class Gift. We apparently owe Penn even more for the education for which we haven't finished paying and the diploma we haven't yet received. Then there is the form of the student as the focus group, where Penn expects students to function as product testers. In this form, Penn establishes customer service relationships, allowing Dining Services or the Bookstore to access a mailing list. Then we open our mailboxes to find professional-looking polls that implore us to help Penn know how it can better help us. We should think of this as empowering, but inevitably these services have offered fewer choices to students after the survey data is collected. While it may be convenient for the University to view students as consumers, future alumni and product testers, it is fundamentally detrimental to the Penn experience. These various student functions may invariably strengthen the academic quality of the school, but they also cheapen what was not long ago a more purely scholastic student relationship with the school. More importantly, these various University functions raise the likelihood that our school may become distracted from its essential mission. It's hard to believe that Penn can be an excellent manager of our education while also vying for its diversified portfolio of interests. Because we pay tuition, Penn students should be able to bank on a unity of purpose within the University. We should expect a single-minded focus toward education. When Penn adopts additional functions, it forecloses critical investment in education. One goal mentioned in the latest articulation of President Rodin's strategic vision for our University, entitled "Building on Excellence," is "finding ways to help Philadelphia renew its regional economy." But how is this educationally valuable? And isn't this a job for our government? This refocusing of resources toward outside ventures is therefore troubling. Individually, most of these outside initiatives are constructive, intended either to generate institutional revenue or enhance the welfare of the community. One good program is Penn's effort to manage three Philadelphia public schools in addition to the Penn-Assisted School on 43rd and Locust streets. Surely, Penn can provide its Graduate School of Education faculty and students to help a beleaguered public school system. Undoubtedly, students will not be troubled by a small diversion of their tuition dollars to help those in failing Philadelphia schools. But when you combine this program with dozens of other equally positive ventures -- from the University's aggressive real estate program to enhance the commercial and residential opportunities in its neighborhood to its collection of hospitals and managed care plans to its attempts to politically administer University City -- Penn has a problem. These various interests, often unrelated, serve to overwhelm Penn's administrators, making them spread their energy and their genius too far and too thin. Penn's Health System clearly demonstrates this perilous possibility: when its governing officers had other things to worry about, like the 11 other schools, scores of outside ventures and internal University departments in a state of unyielding uncertainty (dining, housing), they couldn't act effectively to prevent losses of nearly $300 million. Hopefully, the administration will remember something students haven't forgotten since they applied here -- while all those extracurriculars are nice, it's the academics that really count at Penn. Jeff Millman is a senior Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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