Seoul at night. (wikipedia)

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s editorial staff has expressly forbidden any sort of reflective, last-post-of-the-semester in which we would reminisce over everything we learned in our semester-long foray into the thick of armchair journalism. Fortunately for them, I have learned absolutely nothing this semester (a side-effect of already being perfect) and as such have no reflection to share with you other than on how great it is to be me.

I’m not really one to dwell on the past anyway. Ever the visionary, I prefer to look forward, and forward I see finals hell and Adderall summer!

Needless to say, no properly ambitious and overly competitive Quaker spends even their freshman summer at home doing, well, summer things. No, the students of dear old Penn all trade in their swim trunks (and souls) for suits as we embark on our annual mass exodus to New York, DC, LA, or other glowing hubs of finance, commerce, and shameless self-promotion. But while crushing the competing interns from NYU is both fun and easy, it is not the only way to spend a summer.

The summer after my freshman year I threw caution to the wind and accepted an offer from a private school in Seoul, South Korea to teach SAT prep classes to frighteningly ambitious Korean students. Speaking absolutely no Korean, it seems, was not an impediment to being hired in Korea.

There in Seoul, far away from America’s i-banking hives, I had a wild summer that changed my life. I made a great bundle of money, started learning a language that the State Department says is in “critical” need, added an eyebrow-raising line onto my résumé, and discovered a world vastly different from the West that I had left behind. I also met another American who became one of my very best friends.

I didn’t learn much about finance that summer, but I sure did learn a lot about the world.

Oh, and that best friend I met in Korea? Now we’re forming a startup company.

Dare to tread off the beaten path, this and every summer.

Pileup on Spruce Street (Ryan Townsend/DP)

A: Their job…finally.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (or off campus…under a rock), you have heard about yesterday’s incident in which the Penn Police shot and killed a suspected carjacker who had wielded a gun.

Meanwhile, in the comments-land of the DP website (which you can find by starting in reality and veering sharply left), in between the choruses of cheering students and parents was a contingent of whiny grad students (who apparently moonlight as expert criminologists) are already engaging in Monday-morning quarterbacking of the Penn Police, wagging their fingers at the officers who had the temerity to — horror of horrors — use a gun against a gun-wielding criminal..

Unlike the peanut gallery of malcontents in the DP comments section, the Penn Police had neither the benefit of perfect information, clear hindsight, or limitless time in which to make a judgment call. They made their decision, and as a result one less criminal is roaming the streets of University City — and others may be thinking twice about wreaking havoc on campus. Successful police work is by its very a nature a difficult business full of decisions that are neither easy nor simple.

Dramatization

It is really too bad we can’t separate University City into two districts — one district for people who are concerned over whether police action is “appropriate” and sufficiently “sensitive” to their own moral vanities, and the other district for people whose only concern over the police is whether they are busting enough criminals to keep the rest of us safe. Like most Penn students, I’d rather live in the latter.

In light of the tragedy in Virginia and Philadelphias own skyrocketing homicide rate, Penn’s police deserve all the more praise for their quick and decisive response. For the sake of our own future safety, the Penn Police deserve our support — unless we want them so afraid to go after criminals that they simply will retreat to Dunkin’ Donuts and leave the rest of us out there with nothing but our own indulgent self-righteousness (and some SpectaGuards) to defend us.

Don’t go, Jonny! Don’t go!

For months I have poured my heart, my soul, and no small amount of my impotent rage into the Daily Pennsylvanian. I have tirelessly worked to bring to light some of the worst injustices we face as a university and as a people.

I knew going into it that this was going to be a thankless endeavor. But nothing could have prepared me for the brutal onslaught of criticism of my work and even of me as a person.

I submit exhibit A:
You’re lame
- Everyone

Can you even begin to understand the amount of pain I feel when no less than Everyone tells me that I am in fact lame?

And who could forget (or ever expect me to recover from) this comment to my article arguing for a vote on public art installations?

Why can’t there be a vote against the DP taking shitty articles from John Kneeland that try to be witty and facetious but fail miserably?
-Let’s vote!

The quick one-two punch of so cleverly turning my own argument against me in a fiendishly clever act of rhetorical jujitsu followed by merciless use of SAT vocabulary is simply too much to bear.

How could I possibly hope to survive a rhetorical joust with such searing wit as that? Your comments, so small and short, seemed like a small needle–but it was one that was driven right through my heart, leaving me mired in doubt and despair.

I shall take what little sense of dignity and self-worth I have left and leave the savage world of journalism for those with a thicker hide.

You won’t have Kneeland to kick around anymore.

A debacle of public art. (philart.net)

Now they’ve gone too far.

If only The Plateau had lived up to its name and indeed set a high point of garishness past which no “public art” would go.

Unfortunately, such hopes were crushed under the massive weight of the latest mountain of mediocrity masquerading as art. The new Bells structure erected in front of the new DOMUS building on 34th & Chestnut has not only ruined the appearance of a perfectly handsome new building, but taken up an abundance of perfectly good space in the process.

Highways have hearings when they get built. SEPTA has a hearing when they announce that they are broke, yet again. One would think that, we the people could be consulted and involved in the process of picking public art, at least on some superficial level.

Such is not the case with Bells, or the Plateau, or the dueling tampons, or any of the other aesthetic disasters dotting our campus. They were placed in the name of some elusive public good that is served by employing unremarkable artists to build ugly masses of metal. These designs were foisted upon the unwashed masses whether they found it remotely appealing in their community or not.

We have hearings for liquor stores that offend the sensibilities of Philadelphia’s Muslims. There is no reason we cannot have a hearing for works of “art” that offend the sensibilities of anybody with eyes.

If one were to hold a campus-wide vote on the future of these works of “art,” all these eyesores would surely be marked for swift and unceremonious dismantling. Until that day in which we live up to the democratic goals espoused in Amy Gutmann’s political tomes, perhaps the powers that be can at least introduce some form of democratic input to limit future works of public art from offending…well, the public.

Ah, the exuberant blossoming of spring. The days grow longer, the temperature grows rises, the flowers blossom, and the oppressive layers of thick clothing that have kept men’s eyes off women’s bodies melt away (those of you who prefer it the other way around need look no farther than ATO where the brothers love playing volleyball as much as they hate wearing shirts).

But there is something else that springs to life this time of year: hordes of student groups flyering on Locust Walk, clogging the central artery of campus like the thick layer of trans-fats in Milton Street’s heart.

I myself don’t really mind the barrage of flyers. Who knows, they may even be advertising something I like. Plus,They’re free, and they kill trees (my hatred of which is matched only by Steven Colbert’s hatred of bears):

But running this veritable gauntlet is not without its problems.

From start to finish, every flyer experience begins with an internal dialogue: What group is this? Will people think that I hate women if I don’t take a flyer for an anti-domestic violence event? (I do). Am I insufficiently sensitive to the plight of minorities if I brush aside their flyer? (I am). If I take the flyer from Penn-for-Life, do I get a thrill from aborting fetuses? (like you would not believe). If I make eye contact am I obligated to take a flyer? Those full-color glossy flyers are probably expensive–aren’t I just wasting it if I take one?

With all these risks inherent in taking a flyer, the easiest solution, of course, is to avoid taking any flyers whatsoever. But those flyering folk are a hardy and determined bunch and it will not be easy to resist their attempts.

Sure you could mope down Locust Walk staring at the ground and pretending not to hear anything, but then you look like you’re trying way too hard to avoid just a flyer! (You are also at risk of getting run over by the blue KosherMobile). You need to keep your dignity and face your fear. Of course, you try to be a hero like that and you will quickly be brought to your knees with an entire rainforest’s worth of paper. Instead, should you reach for your iPod headphones, tune in to iHappiness to tune out the harshness of reality? Or perhaps the ever-popular “I’m on the phone” excuse? Alas, both of these leave your eyes vulnerable to making inadvertent contact with a flyer-wielding nut.

The best solution may simply be to take path of the coward and walk down Walnut.

Well, the price of a Penn education is getting even pricier. Two semesters of red and blue madness will now cost you[r parents] $46,124–a 4.9 percent increase since last year.

Will my education really be 4.9 percent more spectacular than it was last year? I doubt it (I’d say 3.6 percent more awesome, tops). The price-raising madness must end somewhere. Since Penn doesn’t face the same incentives to cut costs as the private sector, all sorts of wacky ways of spending money are devised, but rarely revised to see if they are being anywhere close to cost-effective. Here are some ways Penn can raise revenues, cut costs, and stop the endless upward spiral of tuition.

• Revert to powering Penn with dead dinosaurs: Sure, we get a warm and fuzzy feeling from windmills and press releases heralding a “carbon-neutral campus” (massive amounts of official hot air not notwithstanding) But the marginal difference Penn’s energy consumption makes when compared to, say, China, pales in comparison to the marginal difference in our cost.
• Fire whoever bought
  designer chairs for the High Rises.
• Then, sell the chairs.
• Put toll booths on Walnut and Spruce Streets. Man them with work-study students.
• Dump Microsoft everything and switch to Macs and Linux. It would take 50 percent fewer IT staff to manage (and 100 percent fewer antivirus subscriptions to pay for) (Disclaimer: I shill for Apple).
• Would anybody notice if, say, the School of Social Work Social Policy & Practice was replaced with a Starbucks?
• How many free condoms does the university buy every year? Let’s see some competitive bidding between Lifestyles and the Trojan Man.
• Facilities & Conference Services should join the rest of the university in stealing silverware from 1920 Commons.
• Corporate sponsorship. Nike University sounds nice. So does iPenn.
• “Diversity” groups should be funded by their members and alumni, not me. Hillel pays its own way (and how!)
• Speaking of which, why does an avowedly secular institution pay for a University Chaplain?
• Start a record label for all of Penn’s crappy singing groups. Penn parents would buy CDs of their precious babies farting and call it art (and buy 50 copies for relatives).
• Cut Penn transit. Penn’s fatties could stand the extra exercise. And then we could cut Pottruck funding, too! That’s two flabby birds with one stone.
• Replace SpectaGuards with a student militia. “Fight on, Pennsylvania,” indeed.
• This Penn People’s Army could also take a jaunt up to Princeton and pillage it, bringing home billions in endowment booty. Our battle-hardened ghetto warriors would make quick work of the pampered pansies of Princeton (to be renamed Vichy University).
• Rent the campus to Drexel during Spring break. We’re not using it, and they may as well have a real school for two weeks.
• Open up a University-owned liquor store.
• Ask Harvard’s new President Drew Gilpin Faust (Penn GS ‘75) to slip a few billion our away. Harvard probably won’t notice.
• As Penn is already essentially a sovereign campus-state in Philadelphia, we should secede from and declare war on the United States, get liberated, get $87 billion in quagmire reconstruction funding.
• The last time I checked, we had a well-respected business school. If my ideas are simply too forward-looking, let’s just put the wizards at Wharton in charge of cost-cutting and see what happens!

After four years of witnessing the acrimony that follows the selection of any commencement speaker at Penn, I have come to realize that the ordeal is as cyclical and reliable as clockwork:

First, the speaker is announced to the unsuspecting student body, beginning the gradual process of enlightenment. As a rule of thumb, the speaker’s name recognition among Penn students is inversely proportional to the number of things he or she (but typically he) has actually accomplished. We are told just who this person is in one or two articles in The Daily Pennsylvanian, which are usually accompanied by an explanations of this year’s selection process (”last year we used a dartboard, but THIS year we used student input in dart throwing”). Next, The DP publishes several articles detailing the first round of complaints about the speaker, which are then met immediately with retaliating complaints from the speaker’s supporters. Then, as inevitably as the sun sets and the budget deficit rises, someone takes note of the complaining that has gripped the campus, and — you guessed it — starts complaining about the complaining.

One week and several hundred dead trees worth of newsprint later, we predictably find ourselves right back where we started: with a commencement speaker that some students like, some hate and most have yet to notice.

With that, I offer a new chapter to this annual epic — supplementing acrimony with action, and submitting for public consideration a new, improved list of speakers for Penn’s commencement:
(ul)

Editor’s Note: for more alternative ideas for commencement speakers, check of “A Damn Good Man” on page 6 of the DP or online

Who ya gonna call? Mythbusters!

Surely you must have stumbled across the strange TV show Mythbusters in which two pyromaniacs of indeterminate sexual orientation put famous urban legends to the test and blow them to smithereens if at all possible. I caught a glimpse of it on The Discovery Channel, before the documentary on teenage conjoined twins getting their drivers license(s) and after a documentary titled “I eat 33,000 calories a day” starring people so fat that they make Louie Anderson look like Calista Flockhart (and make Calista Flockhart look like Amy Gutmann — jk Dr. G I <3 u lolz!).

Today I shall inaugurate my own Mythbusters: Penn Edition, and, though I lack the budget, mincing mannerisms, and unsettling handlebar mustaches of the original Mythbusters, I am confident I will get Penn on TLC (or at least the Animal Planet channel).

Today’s myth — Wharton students are good at math — gets put to the test in Wednesday’s DP article reporting on controversy surrounding the selection of James Baker as commencement speaker. A Wharton senior is quoted at saying “this school is liberal,” and by picking a Republican, “immediately, you are pissing off half the student body.”

Let’s back up the tape and see how this puts to rest the notion that Whartonites are quantitative demigods:

• If “half the student body” is pissed off, then you still have the other 50 percent which is not pissed off (and either way is 49 percent more non-pissed off people than Jodie Foster)




• Wait, the student body is only half liberal?




• “My initial reaction was…who is James Baker?” Okay this has nothing to do with math, but it’s still sad.

Goldman Sachs is surely tripping over itself to get to this guy.

James Baker’s greatest sin is not that he may have been insensitive to our only ally in the Middle East. I’d consider Kofi Annan’s fecklessness, incompetence, and corruption to be more worthy of protest. No, Baker’s unforgivable crime against humanity is that he went to Princeton (though that would go a long way towards explaining his love affair with Jews). I’d protest that.

Dear _______:

Congratulations on your excellent academic performance last semester. We both know how challenging your academic work is, and are proud and delighted that you are doing so well…You’re one of Penn’s finest–keep up the good work!

Needless to say, this letter not addressed to me (the only letters I get from Penn are those demanding large sums of money). No, this student, is, in the eyes of Penn, is far more deserving of institutional praise than I am.

You see, this person, has a 4.0 GPA.

Of course, pats on the back written on Penn stationery aren’t the only benefit accrued from a high GPA. Those much sought-after companies that send OCR users’ hearts aflutter also make a beeline for the kids with great GPAs, regardless of how undistinguished, or even boring the rest of their college experience is.

For you see, my friend with the 4.0 GPA has 3 classes, 0 extracurriculars, and no job.

Do I have a 4.00? Not even close. I do however, have the experience of living on my own in foreign countries every summer since I was a freshman, leading a human rights group on campus, joining a student group for an ethnicity that isn’t even my own (and rising to become vice president in it), participating in not one but two Penn singing groups, holding a part-time job, and of course, writing these lovely and lawsuit-prone biweekly rants for the DP.

Oh, and I’m enrolled in 6 classes, but hey, who’s counting?

Unfortunately, for the University of Pennsylvania (and really for the higher education-OCR-industrial complex as a whole) these endeavors that have been of immeasurable importance in my collegiate career and life thus far do not even register as a blip on the achievement radar.

Now, all of this may sound like a bit like an angry “me too” rant, but my point is larger than my own case. The fact is that students who choose to go out there and make a difference in the community or enrich student life at Penn are effectively penalized for it. At Penn, the complete student is a second-class citizen with fewer job opportunities and less institutional recognition. Does the University want us all to be soulless academic automatons that live and die by our GPAs? It sure seems like it.

Perhaps Penn should start doing something about this by including extracurricular activities and summer activities on our transcripts. Then I too can see my tuition dollars going to good use– mailing me congratulatory letters.

Don’t let the byline fool you, this article comes not from the mind of John Kneeland.

No, John Kneeland’s mind, much like yours, has long since checked out for spring break, leaving his body behind with the unfortunate task of finishing up the week’s schoolwork and writing the rant du jour in the traditional Kneelandian fashion. Without the aforementioned brain, all John’s fingers can do is regurgitate spring break advice learned through years of experience in pushing the envelope of irresponsibility:

• Make sure you’ve been working out for weeks to look good for all the shallow beautiful people you’ll meet. Oops, too late.
  If your group rents a van and you have more passengers than seats, using a lawn chair as an extra seat is a very poor idea.
  

• Don’t worry about giving locals a bad impression of Americans. Chances are they already hate Americans anyway.
  

• When renting a moped, do not crash it, especially when far, far away from the rental places
  

• In some countries, the laws for obtaining prescription drugs are lax, to say the least. Make sure your friends have not bought Viagra and put it in your drink
  

• As it turns out, taking the inflatable life jacket stowed beneath your airline seat is a violation of international law. If you appropriate it, be sure to use it before getting your bags scanned for the return flight.
  

• If you forget to do so, put it in your friend’s bag and hilarity will ensue.
  

• Bringing $300 sunglasses on vacation is a bad idea. Bringing them into the water and then wrestling is an even worse idea
  

• The delight and mute horror of running into Penn students is unavoidable unless you’re on spring break North Korea. Whatever you just did will come back to haunt you
  

• Hooking up with a friend on spring break is no guarantee of a repeat upon return to Penn (for better or for worse).
  

• There are two substances to soothe the pain of sunburn. One is available at CVS, and one is available with those little paper umbrellas stuck on the top
  

• Trading your shoes for a cool pair of sunglasses is a bad idea, especially in an area surrounded by sun-baked sand and jagged rocks
  

• Your cell phone may get a signal in whatever country you are in, but drunk dials back home are expensive and not recommended.
  

• All-inclusive specials, oddly, do not include hospital bills for alcohol poisoning
  

• Gay bars have great drink specials.