THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSIT Y OF PENNSYLVANIA
MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2014
College graduation speaker had an ‘anti-plan’ for success
Laura Alber is now William-Sonoma President and CEO BY LAURA ANTHONY Deputy News Editor College graduate Laura Alber finished Penn in 1990 with an “anti-plan.” She’s now the president and chief executive officer of Williams-Sonoma, Inc. Alber, the president of Williams-Sonoma, and College senior Dau Jok will be speaking at this year’s graduation ceremony for the College of Arts and Sciences. Alber has been president of the large home furnishing retailer since 2006 and CEO since 2010, making her the head of the
22nd largest internet retailer in America. Despite her success, Alber’s post-Penn plan started off small. “I got in my car, and I drove with my friends to California with no job and no idea what was going to happen,” she remembered. After taking a series of odd jobs, she started looking for more stability, so she applied to an entry-level position at the Gap. She later took a job at Pottery Barn as a senior buyer for their catalog, one of the many brands under Williams-Sonoma, which also includes Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn brands, Mark and Graham, West Elm and Rejuvenation. She was drawn to the tangible but still creative nature of
the job, and she loved understanding the changing trends and global influences on the home. “From an intellectual curiosity perspective, it’s a very rich career,” she said. Alber had an interest in fashion and retail that she started feeding as an undergraduate. After studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh, she returned to Penn with the idea to start making and selling the floppy, velvet hats that were so popular in the United Kingdom. She even got a few local boutiques to carry her product. Alber was a psychology major at Penn and took a wide range of classes that aligned with her interests rather than an overarching life plan. And since most high-level business
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Mental health task force meeting with student groups BY SARAH SMITH Senior Writer
jobs are general positions, she said, the range of experiences that she got at Penn has served her well in her career. “My job is everything from math to business to art design, history of furniture, understanding different influences that affect how people SEE GRADUATION PAGE 2
PRAYING FOR LOST SEWOL PASSENGERS
Two months after the University administration convened a mental health task force in response to a string of student suicides, the task force is still in its organizational phase. The task force, which is co-chaired by Director of Education for the Department of Psychiatry Anthony Rostain and former School of Arts and Sciences Dean Re-
becca Bushnell, plans to announce two working groups within a week. One working group will focus on intervention and treatment — looking at potential problems with Counseling and Psychological Services, among other concerns — and the other working group will be oriented toward educaSEE TASK FORCE PAGE 3
Volunteers fight for elementary school libraries Budget cuts shuttered many school libraries, which volunteers say are vital to student success BY LAUREN FEINER Staff Writer
Nathaniel Chan/Associate Photo Editor
On the fifth day since the South Korean ferry Sewol tragically capsized, a group of students gathered at the LOVE statue on campus and prayed for the survival of the missing passengers at a candelight vigil organized by.Wharton junior James An. There are currently over 200 passengers missing, many of them high school students.
While Penn students might dread their weekend visits to Van Pelt Library, it is clear from the crowded cubicles and GSRs that the University would lose a valuable resource if its doors were closed. This is exactly the situation in which Philadelphia elementary school students find themselves. Because of extensive budget cuts, students are locked out of their school libraries without access to books or trained librarians. The School Reform Com-
mission passed a “Doomsday Budget” in late May last year, in which $304 million was cut from Philadelphia schools for the 2013-14 fiscal year. As a result, about 3,800 school employees were laid off, 24 schools were closed and money to extracurricular programs was eliminated. Libraries, however, have been seeing cuts for over a generation, WePAC Volunteer Recruitment Coordinator Morgan Rogers Burns said. SEE LIBRARIES PAGE 7
After more than a year, plans for empty Skulls house unclear Phi Kappa Sigma leadership say Skulls plans to return to Penn BY MELISSA LAWFORD Staff Writer Over a year af ter Phi K appa Sig ma, more commonly known as Skulls, was kicked off campus, discussions are slowly beginning about future plans for Skull’s chapter house at 3539 Locust Walk. Skulls is planning to come back to campus, Executive Director of PKS International Fraternity Doug Maden said, but conversations with the University will not take place until fall 2015. Skulls’ “long-term plan” is to move back into the chapter house, Maden added, but the specific time when the fraternity would move back in after colonization will be “up for discussion.” The Skulls house, which is owned by a corporation of PKS alumni, has been empty since the Skulls moved out in late November 2012. Decisions are still not being made to use the vacant prime real estate 16 months later. Skulls was forced to leave
campus in September 2012, after John Carroll University student Matthew Crozier fell to his death at an u n reg istered New Yea r ’s Eve party at the house in December 2010. T her e is cu r r ent ly “no firm agreement” about plans for the property, said Penn’s Facilities and Real Estate Services Executive Director of Real Estate Ed Datz in an emailed statement, but F R ES has “discussed po tential interest” in relation to leasing or developing the property. Datz declined to further outline these discussions as “it is premature to discuss plans without a firm agreement.” FRES also “cannot commit to a timing of the agreement,” Datz added. If Sk ulls recolonizes, it would not move back into the house immediately, as the national organization does not “want to burden a new colony with managing a house,” Maden said. There is no normal time period for when a fraternity is deemed ready to take on this “additional burden,” he added, but he would expect the fraternity to move back into its chapter house between one and five years after recolo-
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nization. T he t i m e o f t he m o v e would also depend on factors such as whether or not the house was being leased out at the time of recolonization, Maden said. Scott Reikofski, director of the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life, estimated the average time period before a fraternity moves back to campus as four to six years. Time is sometimes needed for bad reputations to dissipate and old brothers to graduate, he added, not talking about Skulls specifically. A s Sk u l ls was fou nded here, “there’s always going to be a draw to retur n to Penn,” Maden said, but at this point “initial discussions have not begun.” D e v e l o p m e nt s r e g a r d ing the house in the space of time before a fraternity is brought back to campus would most likely be “ultimately temporary,” Reikofski said in an interview in February. Decisions are “really up to the owners of the property,” Reikofski added. John Wobensmith, a 1960 College graduate and representative from the alumni corporation that owns the
property, said in an emailed statement, “We have been doing some renovations and those continue.” He declined to give more details about what these renovations are. B o t h Wo b e n s m it h a n d 1959 Wharton graduate Bart Barre, a spokesperson for the PKS corporation which o w n s t he f o r m e r S k u l l s c h apt e r hou s e , d e c l i ne d to comment about current plans surrounding the property. Many Penn buildings are for mer f rater n it y houses which were converted after fraternities left campus. Often when fraternities leave campus, the University finds “alternative use[s]” for the chapter houses, and they are sometimes even “completely repurposed,” Reikofski said. T he G r adu at e S t ud e nt Center at 3615 Locust Walk, for example, used to be the chapter house of Phi Sigma Kappa, which left campus in the 2006-07 academic year. The fraternity re-colonized this year but did not return to its original chapter house. The Penn Women’s Center at 3643 Locust Walk was also the former chapter house of Theta Xi. The building was SEE SKULLS PAGE 5
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The future of the Skulls chapter house at 3539 Locust Walk is currently unclear after the fraternity was kicked off campus in November 2012.
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