Gabe Oppenheim | Learning from past segregation

We all know that Penn is segregated.

Even University President Amy Gutmann acknowledged the divide, when she spent a good chunk of her 2006 Convocation speech urging freshmen "to form lifelong friendships across ethnic, economic, racial and religious boundaries."

But most students - and perhaps a few administrators - don't know how this segregation came to be. And that story needs to be told now, since it holds lessons for the University in welcoming its newest minority group: international students.

Penn first truly welcomed blacks in 1967, after adopting an undergraduate admissions policy that sought diversity. In the next three years, the number of black undergrads tripled from about 40 to 150.

This rapid increase outpahced Penn's development of black-student resources, as Rutgers professor Wayne Glasker notes in his book, Black Students in the Ivory Tower.

At the time, Penn lacked a faculty advising program and employed few black professors. So one black student, George Royal, called for help in a 1968 letter to The Daily Pennsylvanian.

"Our confusion was intensified by a lack of meaningful counseling on the part of the University," he wrote. "No one paid any particular attention to us."

Penn also seemed insensitive to black concerns of the time.

In 1968, an on-campus bank discriminated against blacks.When blacks applied for jobs, they were told there were no vacancies, according to the Society of African and Afro-American Students. But when a white student applied at the society's behest, the bank offered him a job.

This episode so upset students that they spent two months trying to discuss it with administrators. Then-University President Gaylord Harnwell refused to take action until black students blocked the entrance to the bank on April 29, 1968.

In following years, similar inaction pushed the black community to close in on itself. This came to a head in 1972, when black students demonstrated on College Green for the creation of a black dormitory, which we now call DuBois College House. And events came full circle in 1986 when a liberal white student was denied admission to the Black Student League.

The moral is that Penn's lack of planning for blacks led them to plan for themselves. That's not to discount the strength of the Black Power movement, which, as Glasker notes in his book, strongly influenced blacks at Penn to extract themselves from the white community.

But if Penn had better anticipated black students' needs, they wouldn't have separated themselves to such a degree. Indeed, a 1970s study of 13 universities and colleges found that white administrators simply "expected that change would occur smoothly," as Glasker phrased it.

One gets the sense that black segregation on campus today is partly voluntary and partly involuntary.

"You can look at it as social isolation," College senior Jessica Greer said. For me, "it was positive experience defined more by the communal aspect than the isolated aspect."

A 1989 study of undergrad retention rates found that blacks graduate from Penn at lower rates not for academic reasons, but because many want to leave, feeling a "widespread sense of racial isolation," according to a University Council report.

Today, Penn must ensure that international students do not face such isolation as their ranks grow. Nearly 12 percent of students in the Class of 2010 hail from abroad. And, in February, the University's Task Force on Global Engagement urged the school to attract more international students.

I hope Penn can handle them.

The Office of International Student and Scholar Services is supposed to ease the transition. But its 2006 orientation featured only 45 minutes on adjusting to U.S. culture. And Penn's adviser program remains weak.

A faculty resource guide tells advisers to refer an international student with "trouble getting acclimated" to the Penn Women's Center, the English Language Programs Office and the Weingarten Learning Resources Center, among other groups.

A culture-shocked international student could fall through the cracks of such office-reliant advising, lost amid all those faceless groups. That's what happened to Sinedu Tadesse, an Ethiopian student at Harvard University who in 1995 killed herself and her roommate after trying and failing to reach out for help from the school.

Obviously, that's a tragic extreme. But the segregation of another campus group would be tragic, too.

Gabe Oppenheim is a College sophomore from Scarsdale, N.Y. His e-mail address is oppenheim@dailypennsylvanian.com. Opp-Ed appears on Wednesdays.

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