The Love Issue: February 13, 2019
Essay Contest Winner: Learning to Feel Beautiful
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Essay Contest Winner: Learning to Feel Beautiful
“Ban Chiang Project!” That day in July 2005, the voice on the other end of the phone caused her to do a double–take: “This is the Department of Homeland Security looking for Joyce White.”
The day before the government shutdown, Louis Lin (C ‘20) updated his voicemail:
Barry Grossbach likens Philadelphia today to the “wild, wild west.” A lot has changed since he moved in 1970 to Spruce Hill, a neighborhood of 19th–century mansions just west of Penn’s campus.
Three days after Penn Alum Steve Wynn (C ’63) was accused of sexual assault, his name was defaced on campus. An anonymous hand streaked black paint across the letters that denominated the Commons near Irvine Auditorium. Then the name was boarded up with bricks. University officials removed it from the scholarship he had established and rescinded his honorary degree. Just like that, every visible trace of Wynn’s connection to Penn was erased.
Anna Schmitt (C, W’19) recounts an instance from Management 104 during a lecture about the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh that killed over a thousand workers in 2013. A student raised their hand and said something to the effect of: “it’s okay to have these working conditions abroad because people there need employment and we’re increasing shareholder value here.” Anna says that students accepted that comment without question.
On the face of the Allegheny SEPTA station is a mural of a woman pinching a palette in her left hand and a brush in the other. Behind her, a festival of tents and people and clowns and bagpipe music crowds the underside of the track, but she is intent on introducing the magic of color theory to the children who crouch beside her.
Chase, who requested her last name be withheld, entered Penn knowing she had ADHD. Later, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Still, she was excited to be at a school that she had worked so hard to get into and confident that she would be able to get through college okay.
In 1968, Penn students protesting the war in Vietnam staged rallies outside the on–campus recruiting sessions of Dow Chemical Company, which supplied napalm to the Department of Defense. The demonstrations forced Dow to cancel recruitment events at Penn two years in a row. Anti–war activism only escalated—between February and March 1969, there had already been a six–day College Hall sit–in, a faculty research strike, and numerous student protests against the university’s involvement in biological and chemical warfare research.
Penn’s indifference to its autistic students was apparent before I even applied.
During finals season, the offices at 3701 Chestnut Street fill with students looking to get their visa documents signed. Without a signature, they will be turned away at the border next semester. When they return to the U.S., they will explain to immigration officers that they are in the country to pursue a degree at the University of Pennsylvania, provide all ten fingerprints, and be waved off.
Fallen leaves press themselves into exposed brick as students rush to class on Locust Walk. In Penn lore, Locust is shorthand for everything that’s idyllic and collegiate about campus—academic buildings, community, coming together. But look a little closer and you’ll notice something: the center of campus reads like a litany of Greek letters.
Of Penn’s Class of 2022 early admission applicants, 25 percent benefitted from preferential admission. These students had better access to Penn’s campus, contact with admissions officers, and a better understanding of the college application process. Their parents and grandparents call Penn their alma mater, and often their siblings do too.
“First, a soothing word.”
It all started with men’s lightweight rowing.
Need help catching up after a few missed classes? Want to talk about that bad paper grade? Having trouble with class concepts? Often, it’s not your professor who will help with these problems, it’s your TA.
“The deck is really stacked against you when you’re not running as an incumbent,” Lauren Lareau said. Her opponent has a tenure as entrenched in suburban Pennsylvania as a Girl Scout’s cookie–selling route.
In an article entitled “Here’s How Higher Education Dies,” education reporter for The Atlantic Adam Harris describes the decline of higher education. As Harris notes, the schools that will be safe from the eventual bursting of the academic bubble will be “the major players and media darlings such as Ivy League institutions and major public institutions like the University of Texas at Austin”—schools like Penn. With vicious marketing strategies and airtight branding techniques, these institutions transform themselves into “media darlings," corporate megaliths insured against the whims of the higher education landscape. With a $12.2 billion endowment as of 2017, the University of Pennsylvania functions more and more like a business with a mission to stay on top.
Beneath a dropped ceiling crumbling tile by tile, on a floor sticky with week–old alcohol, between walls tattooed with anthems and illustrations of classes past, 3914 Spruce Street tells a story decades deep. Since the early 1970s, the four–story dwelling nestled between Pi Kappa Alpha and Sigma Alpha Epsilon has served as home to Penn’s chapter of Pi Lambda Phi, better known as Pilam. But under the weight of debt, this has all come to an end.
Years ago all of the shelves in Penn’s Barnes and Noble store were consistently filled to the brim with books—spines out. Now, employees stack the shelves with the covers out to make the shelves look less empty. If one book is bought, employees will come back later and shuffle the books into a more appealing configuration. Only a handful of books span each shelf in the Art History & Criticism section. In Photography, one shelf has only four books on it. Two shelves in U.S. Travel don't have any books at all.
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