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MONTH, from FRONT PAGE

dinner and career talk with 2014 College graduate Kalyne Coleman, a performance by Step Afrika!, a Makuu x Penn Fund philanthropy event, and a Black music conversation with Guy Ramsey.

According to Makuu Associate Director S. Craig, following a theme of "past, present, and future,” Makuu will also highlight members of Black Penn on social media platforms.

“We will be touching on different elements of the Black diaspora related to Penn. One thing that’s important to note is that Blackness is not a monolith,” Craig said. “There are multiple ways of expressing and embodying Blackness as a Black person at Penn.”

Makuu is located in the ARCH building, where a new mural was recently installed for Black History Month. The mural features influential members of the Black Penn community and showcases an illustration by a Black alumnus of the University alongside photographs highlighting the history and activism of Black Penn.

Craig added that they further call upon Penn to recognize its history and origins in Philadelphia, specifically in Black Philadelphia.

“[I would love to see] more uplifting and acknowledgment of Black Philadelphia as the backbone for the University. And we are doing that from our center’s perspective, but it would be nice to see that even more so from a University-central aspect,” Craig said.

In addition to its own programming, Makuu is highlighting events planned by student groups, such as UMOJA, which is part of the 7B.

The 7B is Penn's minority coalition.

"During this time we prioritize highlighting the work of our student organizations and collaborating with different groups to promote community between us, Makuu, the Black student groups and the other Black centers on campus,” College juniors and co-chairs of UMOJA Tarah Paul and Taussia Boadi wrote in a statement to the DP.

W.E.B. DuBois College House, University Life, Penn Libraries, Kelly Writers House and the Department of Sociology are other groups hosting events in celebration of Black History Month.

Earlier this month, a panel discussion with the AARC and the Division of Public Safety took place, which focused on inequities in police treatment regarding the Black community. AARC has also hosted its second and final installment of its "King the Preacher" series, which highlighted the role of faith in social justice and Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism.

Looking ahead, AARC’s Alliance for Understanding program begins during Black History Month, taking place over the course of five weeks and culminating in a trip to Alabama to visit the sites important to the Civil Rights Movement. The Alliance and Understanding course is a collaboration with the Greenfield Intercultural Center and Penn Hillel.

“We really take a lot of pride in being able to partner with the other cultural centers,” said Darin Toliver, AARC's associate director.

AARC will inaugurate its Harold J. Haskins Lecture Series on Feb. 23 with speaker Joanne Bland, a community activist who was present on Bloody Sunday during the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. Toliver hopes to see participation from the Penn community in all of AARC’s programming, but particularly in the lecture series.

“I think it’ll be very powerful, very impactful, having her talk to the Penn community and giving us a valuable piece of Black history,” Toliver said. “Black history is also American history.”

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Across some of the most famous paintings in the history of American art, Johns and Rauschenberg conducted a very public love affair that was also, by design, very private. In this talk Katz, a founding figure in queer art history, decodes their pictorial language and reveals their complex relationship.

Penn Arts & Sciences’ long-running Knowledge by the Slice lunchtime series offers educational talks led by our insightful faculty experts. Did we mention there’s pizza? So come for the discussion and have a slice on us.

Georg Hegel wrote in his famous text, “The Philosophy of History,” that Africa is “no historical part of the world; it has no movement of development to exhibit … What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” More disturbing than Hegel’s ideations about Africa is the esteem to which we hold him today. I’ve read about this guy in sociology classes. When discussing W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness, we used a passage from Hegel’s "Phenomenology of Spirit" to better understand the African-American struggle during the Civil Rights era. I’m horrified now thinking that I’ve learned about "The Souls of Black Folk" through the eyes of someone who didn’t consider Africa, our ancestral home, a worthy subject of study in the first place.

But the position of Hegel is not so uncommon. Even today, African scholars fight for our histories to be accepted by the academic world. It wasn’t until the late 1950s and 1960s, when several African countries broke their colonial shackles to become independent nations, that Afrocentric histories were taught in universities. This global push to decolonize the continent at a political and intellectual level gave birth to the African Studies Association, one of the first scholarly bodies to disseminate African knowledge in American universities. Though the organization has made great strides since its conception, the legitimacy of Africanist scholarship is still under heavy contention today.

In fact, at many universities, students can satisfy liberal arts requirements without taking a single non-Western humanities course. Within academia, Eurocentric perspectives are so highly prioritized that the UNESCO World Social Science Report 2010 reported that social science in Western countries had the most “global influence.”

But the world is becoming increasingly internationalized, and the time to engage in a comprehensive university curriculum is now. If we hope to survive the multitude of moral dilemmas which face modern society, we must have a thorough understanding of the civilizations that came before us. No such understanding of humanity is complete without an exploration of its first people; one cannot construct an accurate history of mankind without first examining its foundations. If universities are institutions that aim to shape young people into global citizens, then we have done these young minds a great injustice by excluding histories from the cultural and evolutionary bedrock of humanity.

More urgently, young people benefit from seeing their experiences — their pasts — represented in the classroom. Including African history in university curricula allows students from the African diaspora to become visible in a world that has long excluded them. Highlighting the contributions Africans have made to the global community can even function as an antiracist practice. When we read about ourselves and our ancestors in textbooks and learn about the complexities of our precolonial pasts, we affirm our value within the modern polity.

Still, it is not enough to simply include

African history in university curricula. We must ensure that this history is as authentic and complete as possible — that it does not misrepresent the immense diversity of the continent; that it does not center itself around the arrival of Westerners in the fifteenth century, a mere pittance in the vast timeline of the African story. To share the continent’s truths, we must focalize the work of African scholars. As many African societies relied on oral traditions to mark the past, language barriers make it difficult for foreigners to correctly interpret our complex histories.

Furthermore, it’s important to remember that the portrayal of an ethnic group is often biased in a way that benefits the portrayers. Early European scholars heavily focused on representing Africa as a primitive and static continent — a mindset that was used to justify colonial exploitation of the land and its people. To this day, it benefits outsiders to portray Africa as a place in need of saving. As foreign governments wage their stakes on vast plots of arable land on the continent, nonAfrican governments reap agricultural investments that exclude African economies from their own resources. Global citizens must understand that Africans are capable of controlling their own markets. It has already been done before; with greater emphasis on deimperialization, the world’s fastest-growing continental economy can stake its claim as an international force.

Still, the question of how to incorporate non-Western stories into university curricula remains. At Columbia University, a peer institution of the Penn, students must take "Contemporary Civilizations" as a requirement of the Core Curriculum. Courses like these would be further enriched by including V.Y. Mudimbe’s "The Invention of Africa" or Achille Mbembe’s "On the Postcolony" — texts that center around the African experience when telling African stories. the class.

“makes not doing your work easier. Just like you could have asked your friend for their homework, you can now ask AI to do it with a similar or worse result.” He added, “ChatGPT is basically a really good calculator. We didn’t stop teaching addition because of the invention of the calculator, did we?” He makes a good point. Should we really change what’s being taught just because it can now be done with AI?

I certainly think so. I don’t want to learn things that you can generate for free from a website, and I don’t think that the students at Penn that pay $85,000 a year want to learn skills that are already obsolete or will be in five years. AI is simply our generation’s calculator.

Here at Penn, students should take "Africa Before 1800" with Cheikh Babou. I am taking this course this semester to fulfill the History and Tradition requirement, and in turn, am receiving an immense and exciting introduction to the African continent — a place with a rich, complex, and gorgeous past, a past that has been foundational in the historical development of the human spirit.

At the end of the day, we must recognize that dynasties have a stake in retelling history. Power is only legitimized when a group has proven themselves “worthy” over the course of time. If we want to establish the value of the non-Western world within the global community, then we must teach African history and we must teach it right.

JULU NWAEZEAPU is a College sophomore studying behavioral and computational neuroscience from Chicago. Her email is julunwae@sas. upenn.edu.

In the humanities, for example, learning how to use ChatGPT to write a more effective first draft of your essay would be really helpful in improving your writing speed and quality of your piece. Or, to get a bit more in the weeds, learning how to use the GPT-3 API to fine-tune your own model for a specific type of paper you are writing, can drastically improve outcomes.

ChatGPT reached 100,000,000 users in two months. This is a new world record that took TikTok about 9 months to reach. Its fast adoption and seemingly endless use cases have prompted stories saying it will destroy the world, save the world, and … make beer? However, among the millions of takes, I couldn’t find anything about how the Ivy League plans to change its curriculum in light of AI’s abilities. That’s a problem.

Higher education needs to rethink curriculums to prepare students for the future they are already living in. Penn needs to stop teaching useless skills, and should instead introduce model-prompting in relevant coursework and embrace an AIassisted education system.

Education systems are responding to AI in one of two ways. The first and loudest of these responses is the “Get Off My Lawn,” Homer Simpson type. This group’s response has been to ban ChatGPT generated text with the argument that it eliminates the need for critical thinking skills, dilutes public discourse, and devalues human-centered experiences.

The second is the counterculture, “Make Love, Not War” response, which stresses the value that ChatGPT can provide in the classroom, while minimizing its impact on academic integrity. Both of the Penn professors that I spoke to about AI fell into this category; it also has many public proponents.

The first school of thought is a deadend; just as Socrates once argued against writing because it damaged memorization abilities, so too do AI’s naysayers fear human cognition will be damaged to the point of a Simpson-like existence. The second, while more open to the use of AI, is minimizing the long-term impacts of it on our society, and consequently, is not adequately responding to prepare the next generation for the future.

Itamar Drechsler, a professor of finance at the Wharton School, said that ChatGPT

So why don’t all elementary schools stop teaching addition now that we have calculators? Addition is still a critical skill to have because it’s instrumental for doing difficult math that cannot be so easily performed by a calculator. Thus, Penn doesn’t need to stop teaching everything that can be done by AI; rather, the University could refrain from providing instruction on skills that are ends themselves and not means to acquire other skills.

I call these skills intrinsic skills, or skills that are not necessary to support future learning. An example is building a Discounted Cash Flow model, which helps analysts value a company but is not necessarily instrumental in future learning (Goldman Sachs, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry … please give me a summer internship).

Adjusting to the new market and society that AI has created will help Penn stay ahead of the curve in preparing its students for the future. Important skills for the 21st century will be less organized around execution (or being able to do things), and more about knowing what you want to do and being able to prompt a machine to do it for you. Therefore, I suggest adding a prompting chapter to every course at Penn that runs students through effective use of AI for content related to

Chris Callison-Burch, an associate professor of computer and information science who teaches artificial intelligence at Penn, agrees, and thinks AI could and should be used in all areas of the classroom. He has used AI to help him summarize his lectures and even come up with multiple choice questions about the material he covers in class. CallisonBurch thinks that prompt engineering "is useful for people to understand how models behave and to have a basic familiarity with how AI can support the work you are doing.”

Penn professors and administrators need to rethink curricula that can be displaced by artificial intelligence and replace it with instrumental skill teaching, prompting, or anything that could become more valuable in the context of artificial intelligence.

Today, we lead the Ivy League and global education system in preparing students with marketable skills, and have never genuflected to a humanities curriculum the way many other elite institutions have. We have never hesitated to adopt new curricula that are critical to the markets our students have gone on to participate in. We should not hesitate to do so again.

Falk employees need fair wages and benefits

GUEST COLUMN | The hidden costs of contracted labor are too much to bear

A day on Penn’s campus is remiss without visiting one of its most coveted eating-spots for students: the renowned Falk Dining Hall. Each visit, students enter the welcoming, familial environment and are met with compassion and kindness from the staff.

However, behind their smiles, Falk Dining workers — a marginalized group within the broader Penn Dining, already rife with inequality — face a much darker reality: poor benefits and no promotions after decades of service.

The culprit of their marginalization? Bon Appétit Management Company. Its accomplice? Penn.

Bon Appétit, a subsidiary of the multinational company Compass Group, provides contracted labor to Penn Dining. While workers in residential dining halls, such as Hill House and 1920 Commons, are employed by Penn, Falk workers are not. As a result, the small team of nine receives less benefits and compensation under Bon Appétit.

After 23 years of service to Hillel and Falk, Elijah Wingate and Troy Harris, two Kosher chefs, have shared their story with the hope of changing the way Falk Dining employees are contracted.

As avid Falk-goers, members of Black Wharton, and constituents of the broader Penn student body, we stand with the workers of Falk Dining and second their cries for equality and fair treatment. Most importantly, we condemn the University for its complicity in labor issues occurring on its own campus.

We believe that progress for the Black community at Penn is stalled by the injustices experienced by Falk staff. The University must make amends. The first step lies in converting Falk staff from contractors to employees of the University.

Falk is more than a meal swipe. It is an environment that fosters community and belonging, demonstrated by the interpersonal relationships fostered between Falk workers, like Harris and

Wingate, and the student body. Despite being an integral part of the Penn community, Falk is the black sheep of Penn Dining.

We believe the current system of contracting labor disregards the commitment and contributions of Falk staff and subjects them to greater systemic injustices under Bon Appétit. At one point, Harris was forced to come back to work only one week after his son was shot. Another worker had a stroke while on the job and was left unemployed without health care or income after more than 20 years. The small team even risked their lives to keep Falk open during COVID-19, but did not receive essential pay.

The experiences of Falk staff point to larger labor issues and racialized systems of injustice.

The discrepancies between the treatment of Penn and privately contracted employees exemplify a broader University-wide focus on profits that consequently result in a disregard for the welfare of its workers. Despite increased support of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and underrepresented student groups and faculty, the University neglects the dilemmas and well-being of Black Falk workers.

Injustices against the nine workers are a threat to progress made to further advance the Black Penn community. These advancements may be in vain if Penn continuously fails to address and adhere to the needs of all Black people on this campus.

While these experiences occurred under the employment of Bon Appétit, we believe it is the responsibility of the University to ensure that the workers who wear Penn Dining across their chest and feed hundreds of Penn students each day are treated fairly. In light of Penn’s history of urban upheaval and gentrification, which has made it increasingly difficult for Falk workers to afford rent and high costs of living, there is also a moral imperative on the University to take responsibility for providing adequate wages and benefits.

The small team of nine is more than chefs, cashiers, and servers. They are catalysts for change and voices of inspiration within their communities. They do not seek disruption. Rather, they are working to overcome recurring cycles of financial and emotional hardship through social mobilization. Their drive for change does not stem from personal incentives, but a desire to transform the narrative for their families and future generations of Falk workers.

The wrongs perpetrated by the current Penn Dining system must be rectified. A thank you card does not suffice.

MASON MORIAL is a College junior studying philosophy, politics, and economics from South Orange, N.J.

MATTIAS HANCHARD is a College junior studying philosophy, politics, and economics from Baltimore.

SHELBY DUGAS is a Wharton senior studying finance and management from Dallas.

Power-tripping professors deny students the respect they deserve

EMILY’S EYE | Viral videos from Columbia and Harvard point to the broader conversation of unequal student-professor power dynamics in a learning environment, especially since they pay — sometimes exorbitant amounts of money, like at Columbia — to be there. According to the Columbia Daily Spectator, Capra later released an apology and Dean Gillian Lester also condemned such behavior.

However, there have been other instances in higher education, particularly among the Ivy League, where accountability fails to materialize and unequal power dynamics continue to prevail.

For example, Harvard University was recently placed under the microscope with another viral video that circulated the Internet. According to The Harvard Crimson, over 100 students staged a class walk-out last month, protesting Professor John Comaroff’s “continued presence on campus after he was placed on leave last year for violating the University’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies.”

This relates to a 2022 lawsuit alleging that Harvard not only ignored years of sexual harassment accusations against Comaroff, but they were also aware of his misconduct prior to hiring him. Despite this, he returned to campus last fall.

When it comes to higher education, professors are often held in the highest regard. And rightfully so — they possess years of experience and expertise, so we must acknowledge and appreciate the wealth of knowledge that they supply to younger generations of scholars.

And while there is no doubt about the respect we must provide our professors, it is only fair to expect that students receive respect in return.

Many have seen the viral video of a Columbia Law School professor flinging expletives at a student. Such behavior demonstrates the power trip that professors perpetually hold over students’ heads.

In the video, a student explains how it would

DESIGN BY COLLIN WANG

be beneficial if the professor, Daniel Capra, spoke a bit slower, especially on behalf of the international students in the class. The professor denied her request and proceeded to curse her out with an audible “f**k you” that was caught on the lecture recording.

As a professor, Capra has every right to run his classroom the way he intends. He sets the pace and the syllabus, so the speed of his lecture is his prerogative. Yes, it is inconsiderate that he refused to accommodate this student as he certainly could have offered alternate solutions. But he is in charge, so his decision is justified. What’s not justified is the vulgar profanity that followed.

No student deserves to feel unsafe or targeted

Once again, this illustrates the need for action and accountability in regards to professor misdemeanors. The fact that Comaroff was cleared to teach despite such serious claims is appalling, and quite frankly, offensive. Not only is this severely agonizing for current students, it also completely invalidates the trauma of those who bravely spoke up about the assault they endured.

While this demonstrates the protection that tenured professors unfairly receive, it is also important to point out the unequal power dynamic that continues to plague the classroom. The Crimson reported that Comaroff allegedly “retaliated against students who warned of his misbehavior by threatening their careers.” Using fear and intimidation, Comaroff asserted his power and resources in an attempt to silence his vulnerable

An open letter to my seventh graders

GUEST

I see a light in each of you. I hope you know that.

I took a leap to become your teacher; after four years as an undergrad at Penn, I thought I would be ready to instruct middle schoolers. I declared a major in English very early on, but I grew a passion for serving students and schools upon joining an after-school outreach program on campus, GEAR UP. I found it more gratifying to spend several hours per week mentoring in the halls of West Philadelphia High School than to talk in small discussion groups about 18th-century British literature. Everything I thought I knew about myself was slowly unraveling.

Penn doesn’t offer an education major to undergraduate students, but there are plentiful opportunities to take classes within the Graduate School of Education — I took enough to declare a minor in urban education. As my academic interests shifted, I spent more and more time at local middle and high schools participating in University-assisted programming and supporting classrooms. I also learned more about Philadelphia and recognized major issues in our system of Universitycommunity partnerships. Rates of tutor turnover were high, college students often lacked consistency and experience, and our bias and trauma training were largely superficial. I was vocal about these problems as the student coordinator for GEAR UP and as the chair of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships Student Advisory Board. All the while, I still saw opportunities for growth.

I believed in the volunteer work I did through the Netter Center, in the classes that pushed me to think about equity and child psychology, and in the popular rhetoric supporting alternative teaching certifications, like Teach for America. I look back now and laugh at how naive I was to consider myself any sort of expert, or even prepared to teach you influence students and their futures in the real world. I also wonder how much of this weight should be resting on my own shoulders, as well as on Penn as a pre-professional institution. This is all on my mind because of the impact it has on you every single time you step into the classroom. No day is ever perfect, of course, but our time spent together is always an honor — laughing, learning, and making mistakes. I love it when you make mistakes. You show me that you’re trying and pushing yourself through difficult material. I hold high expectations for you all. Yet, you never give up, and you make your strides — big ones, too. Those moments remind me of why I come to school each day.

The mistakes that I make are another story. I’m always curious about how you’ll reflect on those mistakes at the end of the school year, or when you’re applying to high schools, or when you’re approaching your final graduation. Will you think about me at all? Will it matter what I did in your seventh grade English language arts classroom for nine months?

I find myself in a constant state of resentment, and I don’t know if it’s directed toward Penn or myself. I worry about how unprepared I am to be the teacher that I should be, and that I want to be. I want you all to feel seen and heard in the classroom, challenged and supported at the same time. I want you all to feel joy and confidence when you read and write. All of these things are possible, but on some days, I convince myself that I’m not good enough. I scrap my lesson plans and lose my voice.

I was a 21-year-old in front of 31 sixth graders — I thought everything would be fine. When you asked questions, I improvised. When you broke down and cried, I improvised. When you lost a friend, I improvised. My experiences through GEAR UP and the Netter Center gave me the confidence to not give up on you, but none of it could compare to living and growing with you for nine hours a day, for 185 days a year. I thought I knew so much, but I knew absolutely nothing about how your brains work and absorb new information, how your peer relationships would influence your class participation, how my feedback would bolster or inhibit your growth. A lot of people at Penn told me that I could figure it out and get better along the way.

And now, many of you have grown with me, and sit in those seventh-grade seats. I’m still your unconventional cheerleader, but I have not stopped improvising or failing. Teaching you felt like experimenting on you, and I wish that I was pushed to be better before stepping into the classroom. I wish that Penn held us to a higher standard, by investing in sustainable community outreach students. programs, by prioritizing teacher education and offering method classes for undergraduate students, and by illuminating critical dialogue about the state of the teaching career.

Furthermore, Comaroff apparently “broke into a smile and nodded at the protestors” during the walk-out. Such mockery is blatantly disrespectful to the students who are attempting to voice their concerns, and this is a clear example of how one professor is more formidable than hundreds of students.

Here at Penn, professor misconduct is omnipresent when it comes to Amy Wax. By now, we are all aware of Wax’s “racist, xenophobic, and homophobic” commentary and her continued ability to teach at Penn. Her bigoted, prejudiced statements create hostility and hatred within the classroom. How can any student feel safe and respected when their professor is blatantly discriminating against them?

Capra, Comaroff, and Wax may be under scrutiny for different reasons, but these instances all demonstrate the power that professors have over students. Being a distinguished professor means you have expertise and authority, but that shouldn’t grant automatic immunity.

There is a difference between authority and power, and professors must realize that their position does not warrant the latter. It is not difficult for meaningful respect to occur on both ends of the student-professor relationship in order to facilitate a positive learning experience. Students pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition in order to learn, not to get mistreated.

At the end of the day, status and prestige cannot excuse immoral and inappropriate behavior. Professors deserve respect, but students certainly do too.

EMILY CHANG is a College junior studying communication and law & society from Holmdel, N.J. Her email address is changem@sas.upenn.edu.

You see me at my weakest. We’re honest to one another about it. I love it when you beg me not to stress myself out, because you remind me that I still have potential. You don’t see the end of the road for me, even though I sometimes think I do. You are what keeps me going.

Thank you for always meeting me halfway, even when it’s hard.