Jenny Zhan | Size matters (to universities)

The time was Oct. 20, 2007 and the place was College Green. Attendees of the campus-wide fiesta queued up for some promising opening remarks from President Amy Gutmann, an array of scrumptious food, gratis booze and ear-splitting hip-hop beats. Just like that, Penn's much-anticipated capital campaign was officially set into motion.

Among other things, Penn hopes to use funds raised from the campaign to fulfill its manifest destiny - eastward expansion, as the cornerstone of the "Penn Connects" project, will bring about the complete transformation of 24 acres of blighted postal properties along the Schuylkill River.

But let's face it. Eastward expansion isn't just a nice idea; it's become absolutely necessary. As an urban school awkwardly squeezed in between Center City and West Philly, Penn's relatively miniscule stature has become prohibitive.

The need to accommodate Penn's enormous student body is only one factor for expansion. On top of high population density, Penn's emphasis on scientific and other academic research further aggravate the pressing issue of space deficiency.

According to the school's official Web site, as of the fiscal year of 2006, Penn's highly esteemed research community includes 4,200 faculty, 870 Ph.D. Fellows, 3,800 graduate students, 5,400 academic support staff and graduate assistants, in addition to a hefty research budget of $660 million. Penn's phsyical campus is simply not large enough to house the research centers and institutes that such figures demand.

To help maintain Penn's renowned position in the competitive world of academia, more buildings and more room are needed - for those universities that weren't blessed with such vast expanses of land (think Stanford's rolling plains and foothills) adding campus acreage provides a solution.

In a New York Times article published this July, Amy Gutmann commented that "major urban research institutions like Penn are frequently challenged to find contiguous space for new facilities, and room to expand is in short supply."

Gutmann isn't the only Ivy League president whose recognized this reality.

Harvard, for instance, already the proud owner of 4,938 acres of lands, still purchased large tracts of land in the Allston region of Boston. Harvard plans to build several research complexes, beginning with a life-sciences building this fall. In New Haven, Yale announced this summer that it's going to buy the 136-acre campus of Bayer HealthCare to facilitate science and medical research.

For quite a while now, Columbia has been entangled in a brawl with angry local residents of Manhattanville over 18 acres of land. According to the New York Times, Columbia even threatened to conquer the area with the government's eminent-domain powers. The rationale behind all these endeavors? The school believed that expansion will help it to compete with other educational institutions.

"As knowledge grows and fields grow, we need more faculty, we need a certain scale," Columbia University's President Lee Bollinger was quoted saying. "And we need places to put them."

In other words, high-quality institutions need vast amounts of space.

Under the new initiative, Penn can altruistically help revitalize the city and strengthen its community relations. But as important is the potential to gain a competitive edge in the research industry, boost our school image and attract even more high-caliber faculty and students.

At the new sites, Penn plans to offer additional research centers such as the sophisticated-sounding "nanotechnology center" and a "Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine." Other constructions include a College House, office space, academic buildings and shops and restaurants. The postal lands will also be home to new athletic fields and posh tennis courts.

Such top-notch new facilities will appeal to eager Nobel laureates and other renowned scholars to join Penn's teaching and research teams. Potential Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships recipients will follow suit. And perhaps even a few NFL hopefuls or U.S. Open champions are eyeing the new athletic facilities. The possibilities are endless.

Yes, it's tough to be a good school in an urban setting with the limited space cities offer and the plethora of people, ideas, and resources our schools contain. Size matters, and Penn has finally learned to embrace the challenge with an innovative solution.

Jenny Zhan is a Wharton and College sophomore. Her e-mail address is zhan@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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