Smart Alec | Not all about the Benjamin

I despise Ben Franklin. Not, as D. H. Lawrence did, because “Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes,” but because at Penn, the distant descendent of the school that he played a role in founding, he’s everywhere. And he doesn’t deserve to be.

Let me begin with the obvious. When you start to pay attention to the omnipresence of Ben Franklin at this institution, walking through campus begins to take on the tenor of a dream — or nightmare. I see him as I walk from the Palestra, locked in a purposeful stride just in front of the field named for him. Not one block west, I see him again, this time perched in a chair. Staggering on to Locust Walk and reaching the Compass (phew, no sightings for a full 50 feet!), I turn to discover with horror that not only has he caught up to me, reclining on a bench, but that the very stones themselves are inscribed with a collection of his trite sayings.

Buildings offer no shelter from Franklin. The University’s consolidated web holdings contain almost 60,000 instances of the Great Name, adorning everything from the Library’s cataloguing system to the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program to not one but three special alumni societies. He even appears on the University’s bicentennial collection of Wedgwood china. Will this madness never end?

All this exposure would be nothing more than a mild irritation if Ben Franklin were, as advertised by our public relations departments, the sole, sublime and supreme Founder of Penn. While this may fit more easily on an Admissions brochure, the truth is more complex.

According to the University Archives, it is certainly true that Franklin founded the College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia in 1749, but his vision of an education unencumbered by classical languages was swiftly thwarted by Provost William Smith, the school’s first chief executive. Indeed, Franklin was dethroned from his position as President of Penn’s Board of Trustees six years later. The anti-Franklin curriculum stayed at Penn until 1923, more than 100 years after Ben left.

Franklin was certainly a founder of the University. But he was only one actor in a large cast — and Smith, to cite just one name, deserves as much credit as Franklin for how the school turned out. But where are the credits to Smith? Just a little statue and one section of the Quadrangle. Franklin, of course, has the nicer rooms across the Quad lawn.

So why all the focus on Franklin? Let me suggest the most important reason: Because Penn is not confident enough in its own achievements to leave his shadow. Penn’s timidity is all the more shameful because it is unwarranted. The University should be proud of much more than its affiliation with the inventor of bifocals.

Penn affiliates have won 23 Nobel Prizes (including eight in medicine), created Magic cards (which alone made my early adolescence worthwhile), built ENIAC — the first computer — and founded the Free Library of Philadelphia. These are Penn’s achievements, not the achievements of the people who led to our existence, and they ought to be far more central to our appeal than our linkage to a Framer of the Constitution. We must throw off our reliance on Dear Old Ben and replace it with acknowledgements of the extraordinary people we educate and the exceptional research we foster.

So Trustees, next time you come to repave a section of Locust Walk, install flagstones with quotes from our alums, not from Poor Richard’s Almanac. Replace Ben on the Bench with a bronze of ENIAC (advantage: more difficult to urinate upon). Rename the Ben Franklin Scholars program after Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan (a 1928 Wharton alumnus). Let’s celebrate what Penn is today, rather than what one person contributed to it in the 1700s.

Alec Webley is a College senior from Melbourne, Australia. He is the former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears on Thursdays.

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