Alexey Komissarouk | Penn discourse review

Last week, an English professor decided he did not like the new Penn Course Review redesign that I spearheaded. He emailed every undergraduate in the English Department, as well as the dean of the College, to demand that the new site “MUST be taken off-line immediately” and not made public again until it was perfect.

Professor, you and I agree: any inaccuracies in PCR data are unacceptable and must be dealt with as swiftly as possible. The PennApps Labs team in charge of the redesign spent most of Monday (working well into the night) to release a half-dozen updates to the site. You were one of nearly a dozen students and faculty who gave feedback or reported issues to us on the first day of the launch.

You were, however, the only one who used your position to call us incompetent or a “true embarrassment to the College and the University.” You were the only one who felt that emailing all English undergraduates immediately was a fair first step. You were the only one who responded to our request for clarification with, “How dare you suggest that faculty members are responsible for correcting the errors and misinformation PCR has generated?” You were the only one who threatened to contact the University ombudsman if the site was not down by 9 a.m. the next day.

Professor, I’d like to personally and publicly apologize for the nearly 24 hours during which the courses you and several others taught were mislabeled. Though none of the course review data itself was inaccurate, I can understand and sympathize with your frustration.

However, your actions were ultimately not productive. The bug you noted would not have been fixed any slower had you simply let us know about it. Instead, Amalia Hawkins — the operations and marketing lead for PennApps Labs — ended up spending most of Monday evening and night glued to her phone and email instead of using that time to help improve the site.

I would love nothing more than to have every product I ever release be completely perfect the first time it becomes publicly available; sadly, this is neither a realistic nor attainable goal. The PCR redesign had a week-long external testing period before the launch, but bugs can and will happen. And when they do, I promise that we can and will continue to address them as swiftly as students with a full Engineering course load are able.

I have recruited some of Penn’s top Computer Science undergraduates to work on PennApps Labs projects. We are paying far less than market rates for their fantastic work. Amalia and I work for free. We are able to do this because we are passionate about improving the state of student-run technology on campus and desire to make the University better.

All I ask for in return is a basic level of respect and civility. If you notice any issues, drop us a note in the feedback form like many others have done before resorting to public shaming.

Reading the national news every day fills us with stories of deadlock and politicians bickering in Washington, D.C. Let’s not emulate them. Crises and fiascoes are certainly fun to both start and to watch. But the only way that we can actually make progress on any of the things that need to be done is by working together and having a minimum standard for civility in our discourse.

We are at Penn. We have the opportunity to set a better example. We should.

Alexey Komissarouk is an Engineering senior from Kfar Shmaryahu, Israel. His email address is alexeym@seas.upenn.edu. 33rd Street appears every other Thursday.

SEE ALSO

Penn Course Review launches new website

English prof attacks new Penn Course Review

Your Voice | PennApps made it “public,” not Cavitch

Editorial | A resource worth improving

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