Dean's Column
by Dean Samuel H. Preston
Our Urban World
In the late 70s, I headed the Population Trends and Structure Section of the United Nations. One of my impossible tasks was to project the size of each of the world's cities larger than 250,000 inhabitants. Fortunately, large aggregates often behave more predictably than their components. We projected a world that would be 50 percent urban at the turn of the century, a figure that was achieved this year. Seventy-five percent of the United States' population now live in urban areas.
The lives of nearly all our graduates will be intricately connected with cities in the coming century. Penn's urban setting is an important part of the education we offer in the School of Arts and Sciences. The City of Philadelphia is a vast cultural and intellectual resource for our students and faculty. The city's great assets as well as its pressing problems are laboratories for learning in any of the arts and sciences. The School is engaging them in ways both traditional and innovative.
Our Sociology Department has one of the strongest faculties in the country, particularly in the area of race and ethnic relations. Many of its professors use Philadelphia as a laboratory for their research and teaching. And Penn has perhaps the nation's finest collection of urban historians. I recently had the pleasure of watching one of them, Tom Sugrue, receive the Bancroft Prize in American History on C-SPAN. This group of scholars is at the core of our Urban Studies Program, an interdisciplinary and interschool program and a popular undergraduate major. Urban studies prepares students for careers in fields such as urban economic development, low-income housing development, community services, journalism, education, arts and culture, policy research, and government. In addition to Penn faculty, the program draws heavily on practitioners–from members of Philadelphia Mayor Rendell's administration to city planners working in private firms downtown. The synergy generated by academicians and practitioners helps the School build a strong educational experience that unites the theoretical with the practical.
This fall, we announced the establishment of the Penn Humanities Forum, a new center housed in SAS that will explore important issues from the perspective of the humanities. Besides providing a forum for on-campus intellectual exchange and education, the Penn Humanities Forum will create links with Philadelphia's cultural and historical community through special events and work with the city's libraries, museums, galleries, theaters, and music and film festivals.
Together with the Graduate School of Education, SAS is offering a new interdisciplinary minor in Urban Education. The minor explores the crisis in public education in course work, in field research, and in hands-on study that uses the network of neighborhood schools the University has developed. SAS has been closely involved with the West Philadelphia community through Penn's Center for Community Partnerships. A number of our faculty focus their research on Philadelphia communities and regularly teach courses that put our students in touch with students at local schools. Penn students join with students from the surrounding neighborhoods to gather data, conduct interviews, and explore community problems such as inadequate nutrition or the presence of lead and other toxins in homes. These service learning courses are one way that Penn mobilizes its academic resources in mutually beneficial partnerships with its neighbors. Surveys have shown that students are enthusiastic about how community service experiences enrich their Penn undergraduate education. Arts and Sciences aims to develop more of these service learning approaches to education because of their value to students and their benefits to the community.