THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSIT Y OF PENNSYLVANIA
THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2014
Hasta la vista, Barcelona The Penn Semester in Barcelona was canceled this spring, program’s future will be decided in February BY LAURA ANTHONY Deputy News Editor
Group of profs argues for tobacco divestment Gutmann argued against divestment as a ‘political tool’ unless there is consensus
You might not see as many tagged photographs of your friends abroad in Barcelona this spring. The Penn Semester in Barcelona program is not taking place this semester, and the future of the program will be announced in February. Director of Penn Abroad Barbara Gorka said in an email that the program is “on hold,” but they “are working diligently to secure a Barcelona option for fall 2014 … hope to know more by the end of the first week of February.” Last summer, changes in the leadership of Penn Semester in Barcelona, which is run by the University, made it necessary for the 16 students who had signed up for the program in the fall to join the Consortium for Advanced Studies in Barcelona instead. A week before they were set to leave for Spain in August, the students received an email from Danielle Scugoza, an associate director of Penn Abroad and the adviser for the programs in Spain and Cuba. The email informed them that the resident director for the program would no longer hold that position, according to College junior Becky Sokolow, who studied abroad in Barcelona last semester. “We didn’t know any circumstances, and we didn’t find out anything more when we got there,” she said. College junior Mike Keramidas, who also studied in Barcelona last semester, said that he was extremely surprised to receive the email from Scugoza in
BY FOLA ONIFADE Staff Writer A group of faculty are pushing for the University to cut financial ties with the tobacco industry. The focus of Wednesday night’s University Council meeting in Houston Hall’s Bodek Lounge was a proposal for Penn to divest from tobacco companies. The resounding question was how to balance a moral social responsibility with financial responsibilities. Four faculty members from across several different schools brought the proposal for divestment before the Council. Philosophy professor Michael Weisberg began the discussion with a presentation on the background of tobacco companies, citing that tobacco use remains the leading cause of death around the world. He argued that Penn’s investment in tobacco companies is “antithetical to Penn’s mission of education, research and health.” Tobacco companies’ practices of marketing to young children in developing countries are a moral evil, Weisberg said. He used the Hospital of the University Pennsylvania’s new policy of not hiring smokers and the 2014-2015 academic year theme — the Year of Health — as examples of campus-wide consensus. According to the divestment guidelines put forth by the Board of Trustees, divestment proposals must meet certain criteria: There must be an identified moral evil that creates substantial social injury, the companies targeted for divestment must have clear and undeniable links to the social injury and the divestment proposal must have the broad support of the campus community at large. Penn President Amy Gutmann acknowledged the importance of distinguishing a moral evil from something that is simply “bad” and argued that the University cannot divest from a company based on personal preferences. Divestments that would financially constrain Penn’s portfolio would not live up to the University’s fiduciary responsibilities to its donors, she added.
SEE BARCELONA PAGE 8
Photo Courtesy of Creative Commons Photo Illustration by Yolanda Chen
A sit down with New York Mets GM Sandy Alderson Alderson spoke about his time in Vietnam, advanced statistics and the upcoming season for the Mets BY STEVEN TYDINGS Senior Sports Editor New York Mets general manager Sandy Alderson came to Penn on Wednesday to speak as part of the Wharton Leadership Lectures series and sat down with the DP beforehand. He discussed a wide range of topics, ranging from his time as a Marine, to his work with sabermetrics, to the business of baseball. Daily Pennsylvanian: You were at Dartmouth as an undergrad and proceeded to go to Harvard Law School, but in between, you served as a marine in Vietnam. How did your experience as a Marine shape you, both then and now? Sandy Alderson: It was definitely a formative experience, not just in Vietnam but the training. What it provided me with then and over time was a structured way of looking at things without being constrained by that structure. The Marine Corps is one of those things where you get a lot of training and indoctrination but you also get a lot of opportunity and responsibility. DP: You are well-known for your work with advanced statistics and sabermetrics. When you became the Oakland Athletics’
general manager in 1983, how did you handle the balance of stats and traditional scouting? SA: It was difficult to approach it as a balance because I had virtually no experience in the game. I hadn’t been a player. I wasn’t a coach. I had never scouted. So I really didn’t have access to that kind of decision making … It’s tough to evaluate information to which you’ve never been exposed. So almost by default, the analytics became an alternative and a curiosity. And ultimately through that curiosity, the analytics could be demonstrated [to be valid] through mathematics. So to that point forward, I incorporated it into our thinking. We kept it quiet because, to the extent that it was valid, we didn’t want to disclose it to anyone else. Of course, all that stuff was blown away by the book “Moneyball.” But we were doing “Moneyball” things back in the mid-’80s. DP: With spring training coming up, what do you think about your team this year? SA: I like our team for a couple of reasons. The last three years, the strategy I have tried to articulate is threefold: acquire talent and develop talent, create more payroll flexibility … and win as many games as you can without compromising one and two. Now, we’ve turned a corner, and I’d say that now we want to win as many games as we can while being mindful of one and two but not letting those control our decision making.
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SEE TOBACCO PAGE 5
Discovery: the key to prof’s award for teaching Biology professor Philip Rea sees ‘discovery’ as important to teaching his students the course materials BY LAUREN FEINER Staff Writer
Yolanda Chen/News Photo Editor
New York Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson spoke to the DP about his experiences that led him to baseball and the ever-changing economics of Major League Baseball.
Go to theDP.com to find out more about Sandy Alderson and read the rest of this interview.
Professor Philip Rea recently won a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his innovative teaching style and research. However, “teaching,” is not the word that Rea would use to describe his profession. “The art of teaching is sharing your passion for an area,” he said. He emphasized the importance of giving students “the opportunity to discover something for themselves.” Rea, who is also the director of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, employs this philosophy in the classroom by teaching concepts and methods rather than having students memorize rote facts. In BIOL 402, a biochemistr y course, a major portion of the grade is based on a take-home test. The theory behind this assignment is that it simulates the research setSEE BIO PAGE 2
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