Kevin Collins: Learning from history and traditions

A free dinner, a free t-shirt and hearing J. Ro talk about getting sloppy at her Hey Day -- what more can one ask from an hour and a half? At least that's what I thought when I decided to go to the Penn Traditions event held for the sophomore class last Thursday.

In the end, two of three wasn't bad, as all President Rodin had to say about her Hey Day experience was that it was held with the other women behind Bennett Hall. Yet that wasn't a bad thing, for while the event offered just what its name implied (a discussion of Penn traditions) and then some (repeated, blatant fundraising pitches, but that too was to be expected), it was entirely worthwhile, and not just for the t-shirt.

Conservatives tend to monopolize the idea of tradition. They oppose gay marriage by saying that they are defending "traditional" marriage; they defend outdated ideologies by calling them traditional values; and they invoke the concept of tradition to imply that what was then is necessarily better than what is now.

But what attending this event made me realize -- other than the motivational power of a t-shirt (let's be honest, if they had just handed out the cash value of the t-shirts at the door rather than the cottony goodness they did, I wouldn't have been there) -- is the relevance of tradition for liberals: We cannot have an appreciation of progress made without traditions to remind us where we've come from -- and, accordingly, where we've come to -- and without that appreciation of past gains, future progress becomes far more difficult.

Those in attendance saw photos of and heard about some of the first black students, female students and female black students here at Penn. Amidst the critiques of Penn's policy toward ethnic minorities, we should recall that Penn was ahead of its time in integrating higher education. While we look to the milestones we've yet to reach as an institution, it is worth taking note of the ones we've already passed.

We saw photos of a protest seeking to prevent the downsizing of the Education Department at which cello and trombone players were present -- a far cry from the papier-mƒch‚ puppets and bullhorns we see at protests today. We heard about how before Spring Fling, students of a generation past would toss "an automobile" into the Schuylkill -- and that's even before they made the goalposts invulnerable to all but a nuclear blast.

But the history of the University is also an amalgamation of many individuals' histories, as the personal stories of President Rodin and Chairman of the Board of Trustees James Riepe made clear. Among other amusing anecdotes, Rodin alluded to sneaking into the boys' dormitory when residence was separated by gender, and she told us how when being interviewed by Riepe -- who was only a year ahead of her as a student here at Penn -- for her current gig, he told her, "I remember you from those parties," to which her unspoken response was, "Oh my God, I'm not going to be president."

Seeing photos of the grand old buildings we take now for granted when they were just as grand but not nearly as old leaves one to wonder if someday people will gaze back in quaint appreciation at photos of Huntsman Hall and the high rises. Moreover, recollection of dreams past allow one to dream anew: Just as women no longer must sneak into the Quad, perhaps someday lowly College students will be able to use Wharton computers without the pretense of a statistics class.

Seriously though, we're told in every high school history class George Santayana's maxim: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." While I'm sure that piece of advice would come in handy if I were contemplating invading Russia in wintertime, history's and tradition's relevances are not always immediately obvious.

Yet in recalling our nation's history, like that of our university, we not only learn not to avoid past mistakes, but also learn those faults we've already overcome and thereby realize our potential to step beyond ourselves to become something greater than we are. Yes, we've made great progress in social justice, equality, freedom and other democratic ideals, but in recognizing this, we liberals must also recognize the possibility to grow further in our fulfillment of the American ideals laid out in our nation's founding documents.

At the event, Rodin also referred to a picture in The Daily Pennsylvanian of her younger self, saying, "I was that woman, and she ... is the person I didn't know I would become." That question of possibility and potential is not just one for President Rodin, but one for our school, one for our nation and one for each of us individually. How far we've come leads us to wonder how far we can go, and that is a question fully worth the effort of our liberal imaginations -- well, worth that and also a t-shirt.

Kevin Collins is a sophomore political science major from Milwaukee, Wis. ...And Justice For All appears on Mondays.

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