If I were young again and thinking of going to Penn, this would dissuade me. I can only hope that it isn’t quite as bleak and venal as it is portrayed.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
That’s the way the Ivy League has always been.
Yet another reason why Wall St. is so corrupt. An undergrad business degree is only slightly more difficult than one in “communications” and may turn out even less well-rounded students.
Penn was one of my safe schools.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
I played a concert…w/ a great band that included Elvin Jones’s’ favorite bass player and a number of great other NYC jazz musicians…at a theater in the town where Penn State suppurates several years ago during so-called ‘Homecoming Week.” I have never witnessed such base stupidity in my life, and I have been in some really dumb places. It is indeed as “bleak and venal as it is portrayed.”
Bet on it.
AG
Penn or Penn St.?
Different schools.
I stand corrected. Penn State. Thank you.
AG
Interesting. I think that it probably can’t be as bad as the article implies, but then I had a wildly different view of and experience in college.
I didn’t go to college because I thought it could make me into something, I went because I knew I was something but knew I needed refinement.
I didn’t join a fraternity because I thought it would score me connections, or because I wanted to be around people of ‘a similar caliber’ (JFC WTF does that even mean?!?), but because I found a bunch of guys I loved being around and shared similar interests with, and figured why the hell not join this odd club and see where it takes me?
Fuck. I’m getting old.
Megan McArdle is a University of Pennsylvania grad.
One of the many things that turned off Navy Son on his aborted plan to go to school on the GI Bill. The engineering school at OU had a program they called “Fluid Dynamics”. Sounds interesting, right? Not so much.
They idea was that, at various times during the semester, students were expected/required to make the rounds of a list of bars in the Norman area. They were supposed to collect autographs/business cards from people who could help them advance their careers. The unwritten subtext being that boozing, schmoozing, and sucking up to the right people was at least as important as the STEM curricula that he thought was the whole purpose of an engineering degree.
That is wrong on so many levels.
Sad, but true. That is the way to get ahead in the engineering world as the MIT recruiter told me in 1963.
You know, a pox on articles like this. Penn Is What it Is, which to many is frats and business school. Maybe the fact it has it’s own undergraduate business school has something to do with this.
To me Penn was a school with one of the best Arabic language programs in the country. Outstanding professors, best Arabic book collection in the country at Van Pelt Library. THE places to be at the time for Arabic were Cal, Michigan, and Penn. Not Harvard. Not Princeton. Princeton had that dickhead Bernard Lewis anyway.
Penn is a big place, with lots of outstanding non-business or engineering concentrations and departments. Like, best in the country outstanding. A lot of the undergraduate programs get a big lift by having great graduate programs. Overall the student body is much more heavily tilted towards graduate students than the other Ivies. And Philly is a great city to live in.
I see that there are e.g. Urban Studies and Psych majors who are annoyed by the frat scene these days. Well, greek lifers are annoying. They were annoying in the 80’s and they’re still annoying. Ride your bike down Chestnut instead of walking down Locust, and ignore them. Your teachers will be happy to see your shiny and well-rested face in the morning.
Go Penn!