University administrators should pay student leaders

GUEST COLUMN | Pay Penn student leaders for their service to the

University and the West Philadelphia community

Trustees we are attempting to sway to approve necessary policy changes only seek to impress and surpass their rivals at peer institutions.

Not only is there a serious problem with continuing to take away from the local community, as shouted continuously by the UC Townhomes Coalition, but nearly every impactful effort made towards reversing all of this damage has been done by the students themselves.

Those who have engaged with this work long enough know that the progress that the University's leadership tends to claim as its own often comes as a result of underpaid and underappreciated essential student labor. The most obvious examples of essential student labor are Penn’s Undergraduate Assembly and the 7B Minority Coalition.

These students are expected to lead initiatives that the University should already have the resources and expertise to implement. Throughout the summer, a group of these student leaders were even asked to attend hours-long weekly evening meetings where they were called the ARCH Steering Committee.

This crucial work was done to help students further minority inclusion and connection on campus. But unlike the administrators they worked with, they received no pay for this work. This situation can be quite damaging to the students themselves, especially if you consider prior studies that describe the negative impact this form of labor has on students from minority backgrounds.

As long as we continue to debate the merits of unpaid internships, the conversation should extend to positions of leadership and activism that require students to serve as administrators just as much as they are expected to be as students. Students should have the opportunity to advocate for their peers, make a positive impact in the local community, and gain valuable leadership experiences.

I first arrived at Penn as a transfer student in August 2021. I was one of the lucky students admitted into a pre-orientation program. I participated in PennCORP, a program designed to introduce students to social justice and community service both in West Philadelphia and on campus.

PennCORP completely changed the way that I viewed student activism and leadership. It revealed to me the injustices that Penn, Drexel, and other local universities are capable of, like the removal of Black Bottom residents and continuous "Penntricification". Furthermore, it showed me that much of the education and efforts towards revealing and reversing Penn’s injustices were spearheaded by students. Penn and similar institutions have their students performing tasks that the universities themselves should perform, and then take credit for the fruits of their labor instead of completely serving them. Although Penn’s administrative leadership tends to present their responsibility to the student body as a reason for not involving itself directly in community affairs, the student leaders they claim to serve are not properly compensated. Social justice has been my strongest passion for as long as I can remember. Like many other student activists, the pursuit of social change is strongly tied to my own identity. I wish to move through society with the same amount of resources and support as my peers, and I want others in similar positions to have that right as well.

To reach this goal, and to connect with more students with the same goal, we are willing to go the extra mile. That in and of itself is an amazing gift — one that institutions of power are likely to try and exploit.

These institutions describe their intentions as enriching the lives of the student body and the local community — they present themselves as a unique gift to the world. In reality, many of the

But, the University administrative leadership must give its student leaders the pay and credit that they deserve. This is the least that they can do, seeing as it appears that they do not intend to take responsibility for the harm they have caused and reverse the damage done to West Philadelphia on their own.

In other words, if we are going to do the work for this institution, then they should pay us what we are worth.

TIMETHIUS J. TERRELL is a College junior from middle Georgia studying psychology. His email is timet@sas.upenn.edu.

Students like Charlie Javice want Penn. Penn wants students like Charlie Javice.

MCAVOY-BICKFORD’S MUSINGS | Charlie Javice sought prestige and riches from her Wharton education, and Penn was happy to provide that

If you’ve already forgotten who 2013 Wharton graduate Charlie Javice is, you shouldn’t worry too much. The college microfinance pioneer, turned FAFSA entrepreneur, turned managing director of JPMorgan, had quite the fall from grace last month. However, she can hardly bring more infamy upon her alma mater, Penn, than household-name alumni like 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump and 1997 College and Wharton graduate Elon Musk.

Plus, poor Javice has to compete for the title of most outrageous act of deception with all the schmucks who tried lying their way into Penn. Saying your product is used by students at an impossibly large number of colleges is blatant, but it faces some stiff competition from the case of the Choi sisters, who allegedly plagiarized their way into the Penn dental program. And that’s not to mention Penn’s own fraudulent athletic-recruiting case.

It’s no surprise that Penn keeps ending up in scandals like this. Javice and her ilk want a quick ticket to millions, with a side of something to brag about to their Wall Street acquaintances. Penn gives them that; in return, it gets a handful of these wrongdoers among more garden-variety braggarts, prestige hounds, and dollar-obsessed dealers.

Penn’s admissions website, thankfully, avoids talking too much about students’ pecuniary motives for seeking out Locust Walk. But students have still inherited the idea, passed around by parents and peers, that certain industries (finance, consulting, medicine) and certain universities (mostly the Ivy League) combine to form a ticket to the 1%. It’s not entirely clear that going to an Ivy League increases earnings for the average student, but Penn’s top-ranked undergraduate business school and a generally highly rated undergraduate education make it a magnet for the Javices of the world.

While Penn manages to avoid screaming about the salaries of their alumni from every rooftop, it has none of that shame when it comes to touting their prestige. Its Ivy League association is everywhere from its Instagram bio to the salad place in Houston Market. It enthusiastically cozies up to President JoeBiden. And alumni who have experienced career success, typically financial, are praised and rewarded with a spot on the Board of Trustees. Still, even if Penn stopped talking itself up, the idea of a Penn education as a stamp of quality would endure in the boardrooms of investment banks. This signal and the promise of financial benefits result in students with more monetary drive than ethics eagerly writing their "Why Penn" essays.

Meanwhile, Penn has reached a state of coexistence with the immoral behavior of its students and alumni, whether it realizes it or not. Like every institution, Penn is proud when people associated with it do impressive things. Pennassociated endeavors boosted Javice uncritically. Her seemingly inactive microfinance startup PoverUP gave her supposed credentials in the language of social impact that Penn dutifully mentioned in their quest to gain more prestige.

Combine this with a college admissions process that discourages modesty and lets people with less moral inhibitions get ahead, and Penn has a great recipe for accepting students who will later prove to embarrass it. Until college admissions aren’t vulnerable to essays written by others or journals that legitimize plagiarized work, students who would rather cheat their way to success than earn it will continue to have joyous Ivy Days.

Luckily, most students at Penn aren’t morally twisted; Javice is an outlier, albeit an impactful one, among the denizens of this campus. Even those who prize joining the über-rich tend to also have at least a little care for those who do not enjoy that exalted status. But what’s more common is that students become acclimated to seeking riches over following their moral compass, seeing people like Javice treat social impact like a smokescreen covering their desire for cushy corporate jobs.

The evidence for this on campus is clear. Almost 50% of Penn grads who were quickly in full-time employment went into finance or consulting. Penn does not release the number of students who apply to transfer to Wharton, but it’s clear that the movement is in the direction of the business school. That’s good if they discovered a passion for business, but not if they feel pressured to keep up with the future McKinseyites of this campus. Worse yet, when students see others — such as Javice until recently —cheat and get away with it, that makes them more likely to cheat.

It’s too late to reverse the actions of Javice, but Penn has the power to prevent unjust behavior. Dramatic changes, such as having first years complete a year at Penn before applying into a specific school here, would make a difference, but more doable solutions are at hand. For example, Penn could stop creating unwarranted prestige by dropping out of the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings, reducing the Ivy League branding, and

DESIGN BY COLLIN WANG owning up to their role in boosting the career of Javice and similar fraudsters through its alumni network. Penn could also increase the punishments for students found to have committed fraud in their college application or classes.

All in all, the fall of Javice holds a mirror up to the problems with a Penn education. Every member of the Penn community, myself very much included, is complicit in the environment here, where whether you will rake in millions matters more than whether you will help others. While most of us aren’t building companies out of pure deception, the entire Ivy League prestige machine relies on people like you and me buying into the pursuit of Wall Street’s mammon.

BENJAMIN McAVOY-BICKFORD is a College first year from Chapel Hill, N.C. His e-mail is bmcavoyb@sas.upenn.edu..edu.