Rodin's door open to some despite low campus visibility

Before University President Judith Rodin took office, students and faculty at Penn were not unaccustomed to seeing their president strolling down Locust Walk on a daily basis.

Sheldon Hackney, Rodin's predecessor and a current history professor, was reputed to walk through campus, greeting those he encountered along the way.

Rodin, however, is rarely spotted on the Walk, and -- whether it is due to her 70-hour work week or other factors -- the average Penn student has yet to meet his president face to face.

"I hope I'm accessible to all the students who would like to have contact with me -- not everyone wants to," Rodin said.

Her interaction with the student body, though, tends to come in the form of planned appearances at popular campus locales and meetings with high-level campus leaders, usually scheduled far in advance. Few students dare to walk into her College Hall office uninvited -- especially since doing so requires bypassing a security desk strategically placed near the entrance.

According to a poll conducted by The Daily Pennsylvanian in 2000, more than 81 percent of the 290 Penn undergraduates polled believed Rodin and Provost Robert Barchi could make themselves more accessible to students. Furthermore, fewer than 19 percent of the students polled had ever met Rodin.

"I have personally never met with Rodin or worked with her on an issue," wrote Ophelia Roman, a College junior and chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education.

However, Roman -- who is one of two undergraduates on the search committee for Rodin's successor -- added that because she works closely with Barchi, she has "never tried to set up an appointment [with Rodin] as it has not been necessary."

Among those who do have the opportunity to converse with the president are campus leaders such as Undergraduate Assembly Chairman Jason Levy.

"Given her time constraints, she does a very admirable job of being accessible not only to the UA, but to other student groups," the College senior said, adding that last year, Rodin typically met with the UA on a monthly basis. She also takes the group's members out to dinner annually, an experience Levy calls exciting, because "everyone on the body gets the opportunity to get to know her as a person."

"I have not heard of a single [UA] chair that wanted to meet with her and was not able to," he said.

Former InterFraternity Council President and Class of 2003 College alumnus Conor Daly agreed with Levy.

Rodin meets with IFC leaders once each semester. However, even beyond the meetings, Daly said that "if a serious thing were to happen, we could easily get in contact with her through channels."

Rodin "makes it a point to know what's going on," he said, adding that she was able to discuss details of the Greek system that "to her must seem minute," without "anyone whispering in her ear."

"A person in her role could easily have been critical of us, limiting our role and shutting us out, but she was exactly the opposite," Daly added.

Other groups -- such as Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania -- have had different experiences.

During the debate over graduate student unionization last year, members of the group said they tried numerous times to contact Rodin, but were unable to.

"We certainly asked for a meeting with Dr. Rodin, but to my knowledge, those requests have never been honored," said GET-UP spokeswoman and fifth-year English graduate student Rachel Buurma.

"In recent years, she has not shown any interest in our request for meeting with her to discuss unionization or to negotiate a contract," Buurma added.

Michael Janson, a GET-UP member and fifth-year Ph.D. student in political science, echoed Buurma's sentiments.

"GET-UP has been trying to get a meeting with the president for three years," he said. "It took several months to get an inadequate response to our request.... She has stone-walled the graduate employees."

According to an email from Rodin's assistant Leah Popowich, while the president, who serves on a dozen corporate boards and committees, "can't always accommodate all requests to meet with her," her office "always ensure[s] that an appropriate person follows up on her behalf."

Janson said that in place of face time with Rodin, GET-UP was able to meet with Deputy Vice Provost Peter Conn, but that the compromise wasn't sufficient, primarily because as a "subordinate, [he] didn't have the same authority" as Rodin.

Furthermore, Janson said that ultimately, GET-UP's decision to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, which it did in December of 2001, was because of Rodin's failure to deal with the problem internally.

However, some students say they simply have no need to meet directly with Rodin.

Engineering sophomore Daniel Greenberg has never had a conversation with Rodin and sees her on campus "maybe once a semester, at most." However, he added, "I would say that if you had to get in touch with her, that she would definitely be there."

College sophomore Allison Parker echoed Greenberg.

"I've never seen her walking around campus," Parker said. "I haven't had a need to look for her, but she seems accessible to the students and the faculty."

Some students who have tried to contact Rodin have been successful -- but have also had to be extremely patient.

In March of 2002, Rodin ate dinner at the Delta Upsilon fraternity house -- almost half-a-year after the group initially attempted to host the president.

It took nearly six months from the time then-fraternity president and College senior Bret Hovell initially contacted Rodin's office to the day of the dinner, but Hovell said that the time lapse was merely a matter of scheduling.

Hovell said Rodin's office was "very receptive to the idea" and that the process was "easier than many of us expected."

And even though fraternity members had to be patient, it was worth the wait.

"She was very warm and receptive to all of our questions," Hovell said.

Rodin's limited accessibility extends to faculty members as well.

But according to Political Science Professor Henry Teune, most faculty members do not have the need to interact with Rodin on a regular basis. He noted that his last conversation with Rodin was at the opening of the National Constitution Center in July.

"She's been a much more external president than some of the others," he said, calling her Penn's "first media president" and saying that she maintains a "decent level of presence" on campus.

Teune added that while Rodin may not be as visible as Hackney was and "faculty members say that she has a bigger bureaucracy than other presidents... I do not necessarily think that's true."

He thinks that the illusion of her absence may be partially due to her absence from Locust Walk.

"I don't think Judy likes to walk as much as Sheldon did," he said.

About this series Penn is a very different place now than it was back in 1994, when University President Judith Rodin first took the helm. And now that Rodin has announced that she will leave her position in June, the University is apt to see more changes in the future. For the next week and a half, The Daily Pennsylvanian will examine a variety of issues, events and people on and around campus that have been affected under Rodin's decade-long tenure. Topics will range from Penn's reputation in higher education to the build-up of retail around campus to expectations for Rodin's successor.

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