Letters to the Editor

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To the Editor:

As an alumnus of both Penn and MIT, a university in a city that has very successfully retained college graduates, I read with sad bemusement of Penn's participation in the slick marketing sham called the "Knowledge Industry Partnership" ("Rodin leads campaign to market Phila.," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 4/9/03). It's just like Penn to focus on image rather than substance. Everyone knows Philly is a great place to live, has reasonable housing, excellent restaurants, vibrant cultural life; we don't need an $8 million ad campaign to tell us that -- especially those who spend years here in college or grad school.

The solution is pretty obvious: Philly needs lots of well-paying jobs in cutting edge fields, and Penn needs to play a central role in encouraging job-creation. Penn's faculty brings in over a half-billion dollars in research funds from the NIH and other public sources and produces some of the best biotech research in the country. The public should demand more return on its investment!

However, judging both by the facts on the ground over the past decade and by its "Campus Development Plan 2001," Penn seems mostly interested in creating a bland theme-park atmosphere around campus via high-end real estate development. The public should ask itself: Should Penn spend its considerable, publicly-subsidized resources building atrocities like Huntsman Hall, buying up residential West Philly real estate and opening super-expensive movie theaters and supermarkets, or should it aim to become a high-tech incubator?

Sadly, Penn's role in KIP, combined with a decade-long downsizing campaign, leads me to conclude that Penn seems bent on image enhancement rather than job creation. (I eagerly await the response from Penn's aggressive PR department...)

Jeffrey Hornstein SAS '95

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