Letter to the Editor: A worthy rival?

To the Editor:

The Penn basketball team and its fans have a problem. We count on Princeton each year to be a worthy rival. While Tuesday night's game was a come-from-behind thriller -- a flash of the old rivalry for Penn at least -- it was a death blow to the already-miserable Princeton season and to the serious competition that we need to stay sharp and so improve our chances for reaching the NCAAs. Even in Penn's admittedly rare bad years, two victories over the Tigers have made it a reasonably acceptable season. The opposite of that is now impossible for Princeton -- and a climb out of the cellar seems unlikely.

All that remains is to dismantle Princetonian sportswriter David Baumgarten's lame attempt at humor. ("Face it Penn, we're better than you are," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 2/8/05). First, it is typical of an institution like Princeton for its acolyte jokers to tout shop-worn achievement factoids that support such a hierarchical worldview. Any careful reading of Quaker history and philosophy would place Penn squarely within the Franklin-esque tradition of creative pragmatism.

So our focus is less on the "great man" view of history than public service and lateral impact in the social order. Princeton may have Einstein (never as a student though), but Penn is noted for tasks like creating the first large general purpose computer. Within Penn's tradition of what the late historian of WASP elites E. Digby Baltzell called the "solid citizen," I'll happily take the selfless service to country of a Richard Clarke (Penn '72) over the haughty arrogance of Donald Rumsfeld. OK, we do have our own awful Donald (Trump), but then Candice Bergen compares pretty favorably with Brooke Shields.

I could go on, but the point is simply this: Penn by its Quaker nature has long been a diverse, social results-driven urban university that also produced its share of major artists and intellectuals. Penn historically rejected the more Platonic vision of "learning for learning's sake" a la some of the other Ivies, and as a result it is more directly concerned with positive transformation of the social order than most.

While Princeton's per-student endowment puts it at the top of many heaps -- for those who like to measure heaps -- the socially engaged intellectual atmosphere at Penn is, if anything, more exciting than Princeton's. Just ask former provost Amy Gutmann -- who, like many students, chose Penn over Princeton, one assumes because she wanted to have a much larger impact on the public intellectual and social discourse of the United States and the world. At a far less worldly level, the bottom line: Penn 70, Princeton 62.

Nick Spitzer,

College '72

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.