Welcome Back From the President |
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September 4, 2012,
Volume 59, No. 02 |
Vibrant Beginnings, An Extraordinary Year
Mid-August marks the last of a quiet College Green outside my office window. Within days, Locust Walk once again teems with energized young women and men. Suddenly, there are no empty seats in Van Pelt, but a line at every food truck. Franklin Field and our beautiful Penn Park come alive with a Quaker roar. These are among the vibrant beginnings of another extraordinary year at Penn.
We are ready for it. We have been putting the finishing touches on a new green space that joins our campus together like never before. Shoemaker Green, fronting the Palestra and Franklin Field, provides nearly three acres of grass and tree-lined walkways for the University community to enjoy. It links College Green to our eastern gateway—the Palestra and Hutchinson Gym, the Weiss Pavilion with our new Education Commons, and to our focal point of community activity and sustainable natural beauty, Penn Park. Integrating campus life along with knowledge: this is the vision of our Penn Compact made vivid and tangible in this new space.
I invite you to see for yourself: Please join me for the grand opening of Shoemaker Green on September 20th at noon. Celebrate with your Penn family—good food, entertainment, and great company await you.
We also celebrate the arrival of the newest members of the Penn family: the Class of 2016. This is the most academically accomplished class in our history, and its 2,464 members represent the greatest diversity Penn has seen yet. Like our upperclassmen, all aid-eligible freshmen receive all-grant no-loan financial aid packages, enabling them to graduate debt free. Here’s another important point of pride for Penn: our fundamental commitment to affordability has decreased the average out-of-pocket cost for our financial aid students since 2004. That’s a stunning achievement that has people across the country pointing to Penn as a model of expanding access for the most talented students regardless of socioeconomic background.
To further this Penn priority, we recently named Joel Carstens as the new University Director of Financial Aid. He comes to us with over 20 years of financial aid experience and shares our passionate commitment to making a Penn education accessible for every qualified student.
Among the superb faculty and leaders joining us this year, we are most fortunate to welcome Dorothy Roberts—an eminent scholar of civil rights, reproductive rights, poverty, child welfare, and family law—as the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. Professor Roberts brings her award-winning teaching and scholarship to a dual appointment in Penn Law and SAS, as the George A. Weiss University Professor and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights.
Two of Penn’s signature cultural institutions have new leaders at their helm. Julian Siggers is the new Williams Director for the Penn Museum. Julian’s extensive experience and dedication to Penn Museum’s three-fold mission of research, teaching, and public engagement make him an exceptional choice to direct our nation’s finest university archaeological museum. Amy Sadao has been appointed the Daniel Dietrich II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. Amy’s expertise in forging collaboration across diverse disciplines and communities perfectly matches Penn’s priorities and will drive the next phase of ICA’s impressive eminence in the arts.
One of the most exciting University transformations in recent years has been implementation of our award-winning Penn Connects master campus plan. In the first phase, we redefined how an urban university can contribute to the community through sustainable, innovative, and beautiful development (Penn Park being the most prominent example). Now comes Penn Connects 2.0, in which we will advance our campus even further. The Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology—a hub for scientists, engineers, and students in this burgeoning field—is taking great shape on Walnut Street. We are eagerly looking forward to breaking ground on a Neuro-Behavioral Science building for SAS, and a state-of-the-art college house, which will house 350 students and create a beautiful new quad on Hill Field. At the same time, major renovations of existing spaces including the ARCH building and Hutch Gym are underway.
Yes, all is quiet on College Green now, but excitement and discovery are just ahead. For the ‘Year of Proof’ at Penn, freshmen are reading the play Doubt, and students, faculty, and staff are exploring evidence and certainty across disciplines. As the year unfolds, proof of Penn’s commitment to eminence is all around. From Penn Park, our Education Commons in Weiss Pavilion and Shoemaker Green, to new opportunities for integrating knowledge across campus life, Penn is more welcoming and intellectually dynamic than ever before. Our achievements are only possible through the unrivaled excellence of our faculty, students, alumni, staff, and friends. I wish you the very best and welcome you to another vibrant Red and Blue academic year.
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