It’s a running joke among the entire student body that Penn hates holidays. Even though entire halls become vacant during the Jewish High Holidays and the weekend of Good Friday, classes remain in session. Professors try their best to cope with half-full classrooms, and are careful to be politically correct in their e-mails informing us that “despite the religious holiday,” lecture will still be held that day.

President Gutmann dressed as Willy Wonka in 2005 (Gustavo Centeno)

The academic calendar’s overt political correctness is a little annoying, but we all get used to it. I’ve gotten used to the fact that the only holidays Penn acknowledges are (insert your favorite December gift-giving holiday here), Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Thanksgiving and, as I started to realize in my classes on Monday, Halloween.

The same professors that sent e-mails a month ago about doing all they could for any student that had to miss class for the “religious holiday” (heaven forbid they should just call it “Yom Kippur”) were suddenly showering us with candy and spending a few minutes of class time talking about the holiday. One even showed us a picture of his dog dressed up as Rocky for the occasion.

It’s pretty cool that while professors have to hide from religious holidays to avoid even the slightest appearance of political incorrectness, they don’t mind having a little fun with the secular ones. Even University President Amy Gutmann gets in on the fun every year by holding a party at her house for Halloween.

Every once in a while, it’s good for us to look past our stuffy Ivy League roots and not take ourselves so seriously. It’s nice when professors, students and even our President can share a few moments of non-academic fun. And even if you think it’s a little weird for holidays to be acknowledged on a college campus, you have to at least admit that nothing makes a lecture go by faster than free candy.

Even though Penn could probably stand to have a looser policy regarding religious holidays, we’ve managed to get the fun ones right. Now all that remains to be seen is: How will President Gutmann manage to top last year’s Willy Wonka costume?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.