SCUE: A group with a vision

The Super Bowl will be played in nine days, but several gurus already know the result. Like Inji the orangutan. Every year before the big game, officials at the Oregon Zoo place two T-shirts before her. The team whose shirt she dons wins, as it has in four of five years.

Yet Inji the orangutan has nothing on Sister Jean Kenny of Chicago, who publishes her predictions as a poem in the local church bulletin. Kenny is 17-3 in the last 20 seasons.

And still, here on Penn's campus, one group puts Kenny's record to shame: The Student Committee on Undergraduate Education.

Until this week, SCUE had released six major reports, called White Papers -- all of which accurately anticipated academic trends and envisioned how Penn could adapt to them. Oftentimes, in fact, SCUE's reports foresaw changes administrators never could.

Take study labs, for example. Five years ago, SCUE urged the school to build a lab center for College students, where they could work in small groups at computers.

At the time, faculty called it a bad idea.

Ira Winston, director of computing for the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Fine Arts, said such that a center would be redundant -- even though no such facility existed for College of Arts students. The administration decided not to pursue the project.

That would have been the end of the story. But in the past few years, College students have clamored to use the Wharton School's study labs in Huntsman Hall -- which only Wharton students can reserve.

So the administration reconsidered last year, deciding to build Weigle Information Commons in Van Pelt Library for College students.

Of course, that backtracking is nothing compared to the administration's take on co-education. In 1945, an administrative committee advised Penn to build an entirely separate campus for females because of the "doubts and uncertainties among alumni and members of the community" about educating women. While the University didn't do that, it did maintain a separate College for Women.

Twenty-one years later, in its 1966 report, the very first Student Committee on Education had the foresight to recognize where academia was heading.

"This unnecessary and anachronistic segmentation seems to us to be absolutely contrary to the unity that we are seeking," the report said of separate schools. The report went on to demand that Penn integrate men and women -- the first University document to do so -- which the University did eight years later. But if not for SCUE pushing the issue, the schools might have remained "separate but equal" for far longer.

Clearly, the student committee has noticed the times are a-changing before its faculty counterpart at times.

This is the group, after all, that proposed, in only its first report: individualized majors, study abroad, pass-fail grading and freshman seminars. More recently, SCUE helped create freshman advising, the Center for Undergraduate Research, the College House system and even the position of Vice Provost for University Life.

And yet, over the years, SCUE's work has met with faculty condescension, if not disdain. In the '60s, professors called the committee "politically naive and overly idealistic" for demanding gender integration. Twenty years later, a Wharton vice dean for undergraduate studies said this about the 1985 report: "Always distrust people who know what is good for everyone else."

Actually, the student committee operates under the assumption that it does not know what is good for everyone else. The committee bases its reports on student surveys, interviews and meetings, not on its own opinions. And for the last five years, the members have done it all again, compiling a 23-page report -- their seventh -- that was released Tuesday.

This year's paper discusses the College House system and interdisciplinary study, among other topics, and SCUE will solicit feedback at a town hall meeting next Thursday. If you're a student who consistently rags on the house system, go and be heard.

But it's time, too, for faculty members to take the committee's ideas seriously.

And they can start with one first presented in the 1985 report. That Paper suggested Penn move all freshmen into the Quadrangle, King's Court and Hill and divide them into 125-person sub-grades, or "academies." Each sub-grade would become its own mini-community, like a small high school class in which everyone knows everyone else, and would feature four graduate associates and 16 upperclassmen for advising.

Naturally, Penn didn't act on the suggestion 20 years ago, but as this newspaper reported Friday, the school is now reconsidering freshman housing plans. Which just goes to show: When it comes to vision, SCUE has the orangutan and the nun beat.

Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.

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