Mara Gordon | A toast to practicality

I started off Fling with a bunch of relative strangers.

I had only met most of them the week before, but there we were last Wednesday, crammed into a house on Baltimore. I only knew a handful of their names, but I wouldn't have begun my last Spring Fling any other way.

That's because we are members of the most exclusive club at Penn: seniors who took the wine tasting preceptorial.

Last Wednesday was a "reunion" for a class that only met three times.

Maybe it was the drinking that made us more buddy-buddy than usual, but I think we shared something special. We had a bond that nobody else can truly understand - especially those kids on the UA trying to get rid of the wine tasting preceptorial.

For those of you not up on the latest student government drama (probably most of you), the Undergraduate Assembly voted a few weeks ago to reduce the preceptorial funding by $1,500. Since the Provost's Office matches the UA grants for preceptorials, it means the budget went down by $3,000 - almost the exact cost of this year's wine tasting course.

The UA had a bunch of perfectly valid reasons for cutting the budget. About 900 people signed up, and only 20 or so got in. $3,000 is a lot of money for about 10 hours of class. And the obvious: We were using University money to get, well, drunk.

But there are a whole host of other reasons why the preceptorial should stay - and why Penn students deserve other opportunities to get the kind of real world education that this class offers.

I really do believe that the wine tasting preceptorial has a legitimate educational goal. I only attended the last session because I got in off the waiting list, but that three-hour class was a crash course in chemistry, European history and etiquette.

"We want to serve as one bridge between the world of undergraduate life, in which students are mostly the recipients of hospitality, and life after Penn, when young men and women are increasingly called on to be gracious hosts," the preceptorial's faculty leaders wrote in an open letter to the UA.

I doubt my post-graduation salary will let me buy any of the vintages I tasted in the preceptorial, but there's no doubt that some wine savvy will come in handy in the future. This invaluable practical experience - this is the real reason why the UA is short-sighted in trying to cancel the class.

At other schools, they've got ample opportunity to learn what it takes to be a functional adult. A friend of mine from Bowdoin went to a school-sponsored multi-course meal to learn dinner-party manners.

At Princeton, there's a one-time class about how to fix a car.

Seniors who have been sheltered from the real world for the past 22 years have a few similar options here at Penn. The Class Board, for example, held a panel this spring with advice about finding housing in New York City. A number of Wharton clubs offer sessions about investing and money management.

The wine tasting preceptorial is the best organized and most prominent example of this kind of real-world crash course.

It's a testament to the wide variety of knowledge our faculty have to offer, and it's exactly the kind of informal class we could use a lot more of at Penn.

If the UA continues with its arbitrary budget cuts, it risks setting a precedent that innovative classes like this have no place at Penn.

And instead of using our faculty to help us get ready for post-college life in fun and creative ways, we'll all be stuck in yet another preceptorial about Ben Franklin's vision for Penn.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington, DC. Her e-mail is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Wednesdays.

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