Last November, President Gutmann herself contributed .03 percent of this year’s fundraising totals ($150,000). (Mike Ellis/DP)

Cha-ching.

The numbers are in for university fundraising in 2006. The envelope, please:

1. Stanford: $911 million (Dad [Stanford '74], if you contributed to this, I hate you)
2. Harvard: $595 million
3. Yale: $433 million
4. Penn: $409 million
5. Cornell: $406 million
6. USC: $406 million
7. Johns Hopkins: $377 million
8. Columbia: $377 million
9. Duke: $332 million
10. UWisconsin: $326 million

Ivies not cracking the top 10 include Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, in part because they’re comparatively teeny tiny schools, and in part because they suck (mostly the latter). And while we may no longer hold the coveted 4th place spot in the US News, we still have something to shout “we’re number four! We’re number four!” about.

Props to Amy Gutmann, who, despite embarrassing photo gaffes, a wave of crime (this time committed by the Penn community instead of against it…ah, progress!), and public speaking skills straight out of the George W. Bush School of Oratory, has continued to rake in buckets of delicious money for Penn, $409 million being a four percent increase over 2005’s take of $395 million. And of course, thank you to all the alumni who so generously gave to Penn, or did so thinking it was Penn State.

All the money raised by the big league makes you wonder how our country’s less absurdly wealthy schools are ever going to catch up to the big boys who only increase their lead with every passing year.

But I have a solution to America’s higher-education injustice.

The Harvard, Yale, and Stanford supposedly “progressive,” so how about they exercise some real “social justice” and share their massive piles of wealth with the schools in need? Surely they would understand and be willing to enact the same wealth redistribution policies on themselves that they so earnestly advocate for the rest of America.

24’s Counter-Terrorist Unit Headquarters…errr…the Department of Facilities and Real Estate Services.

Sometimes this campus quite literally stinks.

Built on top of a city grid, Penn’s campus is naturally peppered with sewer grates. Being sewer grates, they often release a most foul odor that wafts into our nostrils and ruins the splendidly bucolic feeling of our urban oasis (as do the homeless people and muggings, but that’s for another day).

I wanted to put a stop to this olfactory offense, and then write about my heroic achievement in the DP. I had contrived a brilliant plan to solve this problem–I was going to cover these gamy grates with that great gray panacea of problem-solving: duct tape. Unfortunately, such vigilante acts of maintenance were nixed by my legal team.

Well if I can’t go in and solve the problem without really knowing what it was (hey, it worked great in Iraq, right?), then I was going to at least get to the bottom of this. I trekked down to the office of Mike Coleman, director of Operations for Penn Facilities under the Left Bank. If you haven’t been there, you should go. The place bears a striking resemblance to the fictional ministry of ass-kicking that is 24’s Counter-Terrorist Unit. An oddly-placed freestanding elevator alongside Walnut Street descends to the an extremely stylish center replete with fields of cubicles, maps everywhere, and giant view screens that would have looked more at home projecting incoming enemy ICBMs than Penn’s kilowatt-hour usage (by the way, feel free to leave your lights on, Penn’s electrical use is already well-below the targeted consumption level).

Sadly, there was no Jack Bauer. Though I suppose the flip side of this is that the office will have less of a tendency to get bombed, hacked, attacked with nerve gas, infiltrated by terrorists…oh Jack and his silly hi-jinx!

There was, however, Mike Coleman, who was kind enough to explain to me that the sewage-smell was caused by sewage (surprise!), and that the grates could not be blocked off as they were needed to provide air pressure to aid the gravity-based sewage in moving. According to Coleman, blocking the grates would be akin to putting your finger on top of a straw.

Oh.

Kind of anticlimactic, really.

Were it not for those vents, he said the sewage would not drain and build up in the pipes. I asked if this could be used to build up enough pressure under Huntsman Hall to blow it up.

“No.”

Damn!

Academia, meet Earth. Earth, academia. It would seem you two have been estranged for quite some time. What has puzzled me most recently is the bizarre disconnect between what goes on in the Middle East and the larger world and what we are told is going on in endless symposiums, teach-ins, awareness initiatives ad nauseam by our omniscient tenured overlords.

The latest example comes from our Ivy-encrusted comrades over at Columbia University. Columbia professor Joseph Massad spoke at a discussion on just how apartheid Israel is (presuming black South Africans could vote, speak freely, and even hold office, the parallels are indeed striking) as part of “Israeli Apartheid Week,” in New York City. Beyond the usual litany of Israel killing babies etc., one comment stood out as particularly ludicrous in its nature. According to Israeli linguist Tanya Reinhart, Israel is a “rogue state” because of — wait for it — “lack of health care and hospitals for Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

Um. What?

Let’s see here.

This is one for the kindergarteners: Which of these is not like the others?

The scary thing is that this carnival of the unhinged was described as merely the “penultimate” event in “Israeli Apartheid Week” Those of you who have read Orwell might know it better as “Hate Week”. What, pray tell, is the ultimate event in this week of unbalanced criticism of the Jewish state? Kristallnacht? Newsflash, New York — that’s in November.

It is times like this when I am the most glad I go to Penn. I don’t know whether it is our pre-professional apathy, the benevolent presence of our jew-normous Hillel, or the long capitalist shadow cast by Huntsman Hall scaring the radical left away, but whatever the cause, I am most grateful that Penn has maintained at least a surface impression of sanity when it comes to Israel.

I was trapped in Hamilton Court. Literally.

The day started innocuously enough. I woke up in my Hamilton Court bed in between two Brazilian supermodels late for Chinese class. I threw on my clothes and sprinted down the stairs to the main entrance of Hamilton Court on 39th street. I charged into the door &mdash whump. Ow.

Unlike the previous 400 or so times I had opened the door running out of Hamilton Court, the door decided not to budge, instead channeling all my door-opening kinetic energy into my outstretched and now-probably sprained wrist. Upon further inspection, I saw that the handle on the door was broken. You know, the handle that makes the door open.

I was trapped in Hamilton Court.

Of course this wasn’t the first maintenance problem I’ve had in my stay in HamCo. Why, just a week prior to the door’s failing to open, it would not close. And who could forget the time my bathroom ceiling started leaking and ultimately collapsed. With urine. Or the time our shower stopped draining. At this rate of disasters I may as well be living in the High Rises.

Last time HamCo was renovated color photography had not yet been invented (Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project )

Why does maintenance suck so very much in this decrepit building? Why do they not put in the far-reaching repairs that this building so badly needs? It’s certainly not because they don’t charge enough.

The real problem is that they don’t spend money to repair it because they don’t have to. They know we Penn students are going to pay an arm and a leg for a spot in this dilapidated edifice because there just isn’t enough housing close to campus. Anything short of the building burning down is acceptable. (Hamilton Court Fun Fact: The fire-escape stairs are made of wood. Discuss). The housing oligopoly in University City holds all the cards.

Fortunately, a solution is in the works. Penn is stripping the housing overlords of their power by building more student-oriented housing and giving us more choices. A 15-story apartment complex is going up on the 3900 Walnut Block. A new dorm is being built on Hill Field. More housing may even be built in the Postal Lands.

The Penn population isn’t changing, and you can bet Penn students would rather live in new buildings than a run-down dump like Hamilton Court. As the occupancy in HamCo dwindles, they will either have to lower the price or actually invest in such luxuries as doors that open up and ceilings that don’t.

For the most part, I cannot help but applaud the efforts of Philadelphia mayoral candidate (and Penn alum) Chakah Fattah for his innovative program of getting guns off the streets. He led an initiative that offered $200 in FroGro vouchers and two Sixers tickets (and no questions asked) in exchange for a gun. The theory is that fewer guns on the street would yield less violent crime. Anything that can stem Philadelphia’s soaring murder rate is worth a try.

Fattah’s program was quite the success,. 267 firearms were surrendered on a single wintry day. Fattah should be commended for his program that unwittingly uses a market mechanism and incentives to get people to surrender their guns This is not only far more constitutional than far-reaching government bans on the things, but far more effective too (to quote the old cliché, “if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” Everybody wins.

A gunman fatally shot three people before turning the gun on himself in an office building at the old Philadelphia Navy Yard on Monday night, police said. Violent crime continues to be a huge problem in Philadelphia.(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The only problem is that the program announces that it will be destroying all collected guns–including the ones that are collector’s items, worth potentially thousands of dollars.

Take, for example, the Imperial Japanese rifle. Fattah & Co. can either turn this into a few thousand dollars, or a lump of molten metal. Given that there is no shortage of noble causes that can use a few thousand dollars–the Boys & Girls Club, The Red Cross, The Penn Fund, The Buy-John-Kneeland-an-iPhone fund–the idea that Fattah would literally send this opportunity up in smoke is baffling.

Would this collectors’ item wind up back “on the streets?” Doubtful. I’ve never seen any Penn crime report that said, “the assailant pulled out a giant vintage WWII rifle…” The dangerous weapons are those that are concealable, and “is that an Imperial Japanese rifle in your pants or are you just happy to see me?” seems just a tad implausible.

Furthermore, presumably people close enough to the economic margins to sell guns for $200 of food wouldn’t be interested in a $3000 collector’s firearm far too huge to be concealed anyway.

If this were any more fiscally irresponsible, it would have been conjured up by Penn’s College Housing (zing!) or the Bush Administration (double-zing!). If Fattah is going to run for mayor, let’s hope he has more fiscal sense than he is displaying with this unfortunate waste of money.

Objects in mirror may be smaller than they appear. (http://jmvidal.ece.sc.edu/)

When we last left our hero, he was en route to the Ivy Leadership Summit at Columbia University and had not yet taken to referring to himself in the third person. He was wondering just what this mysterious summit had in store, and perhaps more importantly, where his beloved cell phone charger was.

On the subway ride from Pennsylvania Station (which, logically, is in New York), I noticed that NYC’s MTA uses swipe cards that are vastly more convenient than SEPTA’s coins. This, of course, is because SEPTA is the worst public transit company in the universe.

Once at Columbia, I was struck by the beauty of its campus. Rather than going for yet-another-gothic-Yale-knockoff (which is in itself a counterfeit 20th century imitation of Oxford and Cambridge), Columbia’s campus was built in a majestic neoclassical style reflecting the Classical aesthetic ideals of beauty and through unity, symmetry, and rational perfection. Their 32-acre campus simply felt bigger than Penn’s 269-acre (not including the postal lands) sprawling hodgepodge of randomly interspersed buildings. Not that I don’t like Penn’s campus–I just like Columbia’s more.

But let the record state that Columbia sucks at partying, at least near campus.

Am I forgetting something? Oh right, the conference itself.

Actually, I was actually pleasantly surprised that this conference about the environment didn’t turn into an orgy of unshaven granola-eating elitists. The various panelists and speakers were engaging, the debate over fossil fuels in the present and future was lively but cordial, and much to my pleasant surprise in academia, the topics and responses were all…rational. The topic was not “let’s blame George W. Bush for global warming/Iraq/eating babies” or calls to abandon industrial civilization and live in trees, but rather discussions on how to make things better within our world: Ethanol. CO2 capturing. A possible return to nuclear. Hybrids. Fuel cells. And homage to the concept that is music to my ears and the ears of every Wharton student…”the market.”

Perhaps the best sign that the discussion was worthwhile occurred when I overheard the Brown students (who by and large perpetuated their stereotype of unreconstructed hippies) complaining that the panelists just weren’t hippie enough. Sorry, Comrade Brunonian, but when you ask stupid hippie questions, you get the Ivy League smackdown. Of course, in the end it is probably best that you didn’t like Columbia, because odds are you ain’t getting in for grad school.

A few weeks ago, I received one of the thousands of emails sent daily from Penn’s spamming superstar that is Peggy Curchack, the matron of career services emails for Penn’s illustrious class of 2007. It invited me to apply for the “Ivy Leadership Summit.” According to their web site, the summit is

“to cultivate the active discussion of one of today’s most recognized issues while promoting the ideals of a social conscience and the responsibility that comes with it. The ILS Steering Committee is focused on attracting eminent professionals from various fields as well as the most driven and motivated students in the Ivy League.”

Ever the cynic ambitious student, I interpreted this as “to blahblahblahblah networking” and thus felt compelled to apply. After some quick personal statements pontificating on the summit’s topic of fossil fuels (”global warming bad! Energy independence good!”), I shot it off.

I received a congratulatory email heralding my acceptance, and on a frigid Friday afternoon, armed with a business casual change of clothe and a Hemo sandwich, I embarked on my journey to the Big Apple, where host school Columbia University and the Ivy Leadership Summit 2007 awaited. As the NJ Transit train rumbled to Manhattan, I began to wonder–What would I find up there in Harlem? What did the summit hold in store for me? What is undergraduate life at Columbia like? Might I get mugged or blown up by terrorists? And where is my cell phone charger?

Stay tuned for travelogue and commentary later this week.

Amy Gutmann’s master plan. (http://media.stanfordhospital.com)

I doubt the DP’s “staff editorial” would ever list itself in the end of semester “Cheers & Jeers” compendium as a member of the latter category, but it certainly deserves it when it publishes a farce like yesterday’s editorial bemoaning that the five faculty chosen thus far for the University’s Penn Integrates Knowledge initiative have all been men.

Le sigh. Where to begin?

let’s start with assertion that 5 PIK professors + 5 Y chromosomes = patriarchal male oppression. This just doesn’t fly. Even as someone who struggled to eke out a B- in STAT-111, I can say with confidence that 5 is usually not considered a statistically significant number with which to make any sort of guesses. The DP staff editorial is jumping to conclusions with insufficient evidence. It is the statistical equivalent of Nigerian yellowcake (I wonder, if I say “DP lied, thousands died!” does the DP then sue itself for libel?)

No, what it means is that Penn is using their scarce resources to get the maximum benefit in innovative research and teaching, regardless of their gender. If anyone wants to tell Penn’s donors that the school should hire less qualified people because satisfying already well-satisfied feelings of gender equality, I’d love to watch you try, and then laugh at you for being stupid. “Satisfies feminist non-issues” is not a category measured in the US News Rankings. Quality of faculty, on the other hand, is.

Perhaps when Penn has money coming out of its ears (like Princeton), we can afford to buy $2400 designer chairs hire faculty that spend more time making rap CDs than doing research but make us feel good for being diverse (like Princeton).

This is all much ado about nothing. Even the editorial admits in its opening line “it’s safe to say that Penn actively supports gender equity in academia.” So why do they then spend the rest of the article seeming to argue to the contrary? I can think of dozens of University shortcomings more worthy of the staff’s attention than this.

The headline’s not hyperbole — if you are studying French, stop. Studying that venerable old tongue may be costing you a job.

sacre bleu! A knee-jerk prognosis? Perhaps — but not by much. You see, inherent in studying French at Penn (or at any school) lay a two-fold problem: You are learning a language that is next to useless in the job market, and forfeiting your opportunity to learn one that is.

Is knowing French really going to get you a job? Well, when even French college graduates are fleeing to England simply to find a job, what is the chance you can succeed in France where the French themselves have failed?

Even in the French stronghold that is the EU, France cannot make its language matter. The de facto language of the EU is English (in one particularly embarrassing/hilarious incident, President Chirac stormed out of a press conference when his own French ministers used English). If French isn’t even necessary in France’s backyard, what are the odds that it is going to matter in New York? Sao Paolo? Tehran? Shanghai?

Penn has one of the most comprehensive foreign language centers in the United States. When you opt to take French, you are not only studying a language that is ornamental at best, but squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a language that is relevant and useful in the 21st century (like Chinese) or genuinely unique (like Pashto).

Even if you don’t feel like learning languages that enhance your attractiveness to an employer, your global competition does–and is. In our wonderful era of quanjiuhua (Chinese for “globalization,” expect to hear more and more of that in the future), you are not merely competing for that Goldman Sachs job with kids from Harvard and Stanford, you are competing with the best and brightest from Seoul National University, Peking University, Oxford University — students every bit as smart as you, and for whom studying two or three languages is the norm.

To those of you with an open mind and desire to succeed, don’t study French. For the sake of your own career, as well as the international competitiveness of America in a world that has long since ceased revolving around Europe, take a language, any language, just not French.

Last October, at Campus Philly’s College Day on the Parkway, I was out pimping iPods and other Apple schwag for my fruity employer. The amount of Penn students there was rather lacking — with the exception of Penn students who were actually managing the event. Missy Eliot said it best, “we run this s**t.” What can I say, Penn owns.

I bring this up not to extol the virtues of Pennbut rather to prove, once again, the stupidity of Princeton kids. You see, in the course of my day pimping iPods, untold amounts of college students asked if they could have it for free. At first I wanted to respond to such a potent mix of banality and stupidity with one of the 8 ways to kill someone with an iPod (at Penn, murder is in vogue this season). After another few hundred times hearing “can I have it for free omg lololz,” I became desensitized and achieved a sense of zen-like calm. I calmly told them “yes you can have it for free—but there will be a $249 freeness fee” (what is frightening is that this almost worked).

Now take the same bad joke and multiply it by a factor of a thousand or so, and you have Princeton’s latest act of benevolence to its unfortunate denizens. Awash with cash (a virtue of starting off with more money to serve a smaller student body and not spending said funds on $2400 chairs), Princeton has moved to halt the inexorable upward spiral of tuition costs by announcing they would not be raising tuition for the next academic year. Bravo, Princeton!

Unfortunately, with this 0% increase in housing costs comes a jolting 19% increase for room and board (outrageous, Princetonians should move off campus! Oh, wait, they’re trapped in suburbia!). Needless to say, this “freeness fee” pretty much negates the whole point of trying to stem college costs. (it’s the stemming costs fee!) But it will earn Princeton some headlines anyway…