Graduate and realize: Penn’s like a friendly panhandler. You don’t know if he needs the money, but he hits you up so nicely (and so often), eventually you just give in.

OK — nothing like an exaggerated metaphor to start my Spin blogging career. In truth, I only get a monthly Penn fund reminder, and projects like the Postal Lands or a new Hill Field College House are worthy investments.

But as a potential donor, I’ve got to be honest — reading the paper makes me put the checkbook away. Any given day last year, I’d hit up The DP front page and see a student arrested for theft. For cybercrime. For panty stealing.

Living in D.C., it seemed like The DP added a rotating “Student arrested for ____” Mad Libs feature, filling the blank with a new and more exotic crime every few weeks.

I’m not expecting miracles. Surrounded by a concrete jungle, Penn will never be crime-free, and when I applied in 1997, the school was facing its own mini-crisis. Thefts were up and a student had been shot on campus.

A decade later, there’s just as much crime (comparing the numbers from 1997 to 2006 shows major growth across most reported categories, from thefts to violent crimes), except Penn students are now doing the shooting too. This isn’t progress; while Quakers should be trying new things, Wharton students should only re-enact “Catch Me If You Can” at the Follies.

Maureen Rush says the crime streak is bad luck and let’s hope so. But as Penn attracts an ever-more-competitive student body every year, is there some mercenary element somehow being introduced? Was that the real admissions scandal being overlooked, in favor of unending Stetson speculation?

The DP will spend plenty of time deconstructing the decisions of Amy Gutmann and other administrators, and rightfully so. But on a practical level, how much influence does any administrator have on your years in University City? Sure, they create the surroundings, but it’s your fellow students who make your Penn experience. And donors aren’t thrilled to help fund classes with a thrice-tried murder suspect.

In the big picture, the stories of the moment — bad basketball, low admit rates, and controversial departures — don’t resonate. The crime wave does.

Tags: crime

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Penn, Philadelphia. 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.