Brandon Moyse | Why DRL should matter

You don't need me to tell you that DRL sucks. But I'm not writing to complain about its lack of elevators, its inadequate heating and cooling or its general ugliness.

My issue with DRL isn't about what it is - it's about what the building stands for: A barrier to conquering the acme of academia, being renowned as one of the top-five institutions in the world.

As a numbers guy, this is something near and dear to my heart. Because let's face it: Penn is a step below Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Yale in broad institutional academic prestige. All have elite math departments, something Penn lacks. So everyone else here, from Whartonites to English majors to Nursing students, should care about Penn's math program, too.

Our world is a science-driven one, and Carl Gauss once remarked, "Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences." (He was more than a little biased, being a mathematician himself.) Thus, there's no coincidence Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Princeton have the top four math graduate programs in the world. Yale's math department is slightly less prestigious, but is still somewhere in the top seven.

It's not as if the University's math department is weak, as it typically ranks in the top 20. But Penn doesn't want to be one of the top 20 academic institutions - it's on the cusp of competing with the top five. It should take the same attitude toward its math department.

Dennis DeTurck, dean of the College and a math professor, laments that much of the problem is due to legacy perceptions.

"The top-five math departments have been the same five for the last 100 years, and they probably will be for 100 more," he said.

Penn's math tradition is not as storied as other universities'. It was only in the 1950s that Penn undertook an effort to build a competitive math department, but rather than build big, the University stratified its hiring, taking a handful of professors every decade or so who specialized in a certain subfield. As a result, the department became reputed in narrower areas but still does not garner broader accolades because of its small size - it simply can't output research with the same volume as the top few universities.

There has also been difficulty in stimulating interest among undergraduates. Penn has not placed among the top five schools in the annual Putnam exam - the premier undergraduate mathematics exam - in over 40 years. A strong showing can raise the profile of a math department for the most-promising prospective undergraduates.

That said, the University has made some strides as of late. It's hired younger faculty with varied research interests, and the most recent Penn Integrates Knowledge professor is Robert Ghrist, a joint appointee between SEAS and the Math Department. And while interest in the Putnam exam is still tepid, the reintroduction of honors calculus classes and the creation of an undergraduate mathematics colloquium have met with resounding success.

But there's still a lot of work to be done. While DeTurck feels that Penn Math is close to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and MIT on an actual level, it is still much further away in people's perceptions. Among the moves that the University could make to close that gap, he agreed, would be to hire a few star professors and upgrade the faculty's digs.

"To do all that, though - to break into those schools' circle - would be prohibitively expensive and come at the cost of too many other things that make Penn, Penn," he concluded.

There is some precedent. In the 1980s, the University of Texas received a large donation and chose to endow several chairs in mathematics that greatly improved its standing in the field. And Penn itself has done a tremendous job in raising the institution's profile over the last 20 or 30 years.

It's not likely the University is going to make that push for its Math Department, and even if $40 million fell into its lap, it probably wouldn't spend it on hiring math professors and building a DRL 2.0. Maybe that wouldn't be the prudent thing to do, and maybe it is better to spread the wealth -- after all, our strong humanities, science, social science and business programs are part of what make Penn, Penn.

But if I ever have $40 million to give to the University, I know right where it's going.

Brandon Moyse is a College junior from Montreal. He is the former senior sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. What Aboot It, Eh? appears on Thursdays. His email address is moyse@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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