West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rough Road to Revival and Cooperation

West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rough Road to Revival and Cooperation

For many reasons, the West Philadelphia/University of Pennsylvania case is one of the most notable examples of university-driven revitalization and university-community collaboration. In the mid-1960s, Penn began to develop strategies for improving campus life. This required expansion into previously residential and commercial strips, which led to a continuing need for negotiating a new relationship with surrounding communities. To that end, in the 1990s Penn developed both an infrastructure for community engagement and service learning and a parallel and somewhat complementary real estate development agenda. Together, these systems created one of the most celebrated examples of university-driven urban change and redevelopment. This chapter reviews the history of the university's efforts of the 1990s and early twenty-first century in order to place them in their proper context.

On Halloween Night in nineteen ninety-six, a purse snatcher fatally stabbed a University of Pennsylvania researcher, Vladimir Sled, on a West Philadelphia sidewalk. In the weeks before Sled's murder, the university had been victimized by a rash of crimes, including the shooting of a student near campus. Although crime was nothing new to West Philadelphia by nineteen ninety-six, Sled's stabbing, in plain view of his girlfriend and twelve-year-old son, struck a painful chord with many West Philadelphia residents and Penn students, faculty, and staff. It exposed long-standing tensions and anxieties about the urban crime that many West Philadelphians had come to accept as their way of life.

At a meeting with concerned parents during the university's homecoming weekend a few weeks later, then Penn president Judith Rodin and then Philadelphia mayor Edward G. Rendell were booed off the stage as they tried to assuage the crowd's fears about crime in the area. Long before this meeting, Rodin and Rendell had known of West Philadelphia's problems and were developing a plan to improve public safety in the area. Nevertheless, they were given their marching orders to clean up the crime or lose students.

Several university staff and administrators interviewed for this study recalled how important that experience was for Rodin and the university. More than any other event, the stabbing served as a major turning point in Penn's resolve to seek solutions to the "West Philadelphia problem." A few days after the parent meeting, a group of area residents held a candlelight vigil in nearby Clark Park to commemorate the life of the slain researcher and to draw attention to the problem of neighborhood crime. The parent meeting and the vigil sparked the emergence of a new wave of activity collectively known now as the West Philadelphia Initiatives.

As a program for neighborhood revitalization, the West Philadelphia Initiatives were not intended to be a comprehensive plan for the area. Their focus was on five main areas of activity: the fortification of public education, increased housing availability and quality, clean and safe streets, improved economic opportunity for residents, and increased and improved retail options.

According to study participants and other commentators on the Penn/West Philadelphia case, many of the improvements in University City and West Philadelphia were, in some manner, because of the university's efforts. What follows is a history of both Penn and its university-community relations. Placing the West Philadelphia Initiatives in a longer trajectory of tensions and relations between university and community reveals how activity since nineteen ninety-six represents the apex of work begun by

Penn president Gaylord Harnwell in the nineteen fifties and how that work has been touched by every president of the university since.

Perhaps more than that of any other urban university, the work of the University of Pennsylvania has been well documented at both a local and a national level. However, much of this documentation has been initiated by the university itself. Many in the Penn community would regard Rodin's tenure as president as one of the most successful and distinguished because of her leadership of the West Philadelphia Initiatives and the growth of the institution's prestige and standing. Additionally, Penn's Netter Center for Community Partnerships is internationally known as a model of university-urban engagement and service-learning curricula. To date, much of the writing about Penn's urban engagement and revitalization efforts has been by those closest to the work itself, with other accounts by admirers.

This chapter describes components of the West Philadelphia Initiatives, the greatest impacts of which, according to informants, have been improved conditions in University City and West Philadelphia. There is agreement on a certain amount of improvement, but informants were mixed on the methods, the types of improvements, and the impacts those improvements have had on their lives. The final section of this chapter presents informants' views of the university and the West Philadelphia Initiatives.

An Abbreviated "Urban" History of the University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania holds a special place in the history of American higher education. Chartered in seventeen forty-nine by Benjamin Franklin, it was the brainchild of Franklin along with civic, social, and commercial leaders who felt that Philadelphia needed a university in order to join the ranks of other world-class cities. In the mid-eighteenth century, Franklin authored a treatise on the need to train the territory's youth for practical arts. His famous essay, "A Proposal for the Education of the Youth of Pennsilvania" laid the groundwork not just for the University of Pennsylvania but for secular higher education in the United States. Franklin's essay led to the founding of an academy that would later become the University of Pennsylvania in seventeen ninety-one. Unlike its colonial peers, Franklin's academy would focus on preparing men not for the clergy but for commerce and public service. Today, Penn's programs in business, medicine, nursing, dentistry, and law are considered some of the best in the nation and are among the oldest. While debate continues as to which U.S. college first made the move to a research orientation, Penn often claims this honor because of the age and prestige of its various professional schools. For most of its history, however, it remained a teaching college, graduating fewer than five hundred students in nineteen twenty.

Despite its long history, Penn has not always been regarded as a true rival to schools such as Harvard and Yale. Its admittance into the Ivy League athletic conference was a topic of great debate among the other universities in the league, based on its reputation as a "football school with lacking academics." Penn differed from many universities in that its various parts, until very recently, operated virtually autonomously, with only a loose affiliation to the larger institution. Moreover, its administration lacked structure and recognizable leadership. Penn did not have a university president until the inauguration of Thomas Sovereign Gates in nineteen thirty. Until then, for the most part, the board of trustees governed the affairs of the university and arguably failed to control the units that sought to assert their independence when necessary. John Terino describes the process by which the University of Pennsylvania pursued the status of research powerhouse equivalent to that of its respected peers and thereby became a greater beneficiary of the federal government's Cold War spending on science and technology. Its disorganized and divided engineering and science schools were in need not only of facilities and faculty but also of direction and mission. Finally, the institution found both with President Gaylord Harnwell, who led the university between nineteen fifty-three and nineteen seventy. Under his leadership, Penn began working with city groups and leaders to construct the University City Science Center, an independent center of innovation that would provide Philadelphia and the universities located in West Philadelphia with a foothold in the new military-industrial complex. Harnwell is also credited with diversifying the university and dramatically expanding its size, constructing ninety-three buildings during his tenure.

In the late nineteenth century, confronted with Philadelphia's dominance as an industrial power, Penn made the transition from a teaching college to a Humboldtian-model research institution. This identity was not an enormous leap given Penn's mission for and orientation toward its already prestigious professional schools. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Penn was known as the "University of the State of Pennsylvania." Because it was regarded in the eighteenth century as a haven for Tory sympathizers, it was renamed and rechartered by the city fathers as a state affiliate, further indebting its graduates and faculty toward a mission that favored the city and the state.

Since its founding, the University of Pennsylvania has operated at three distinct sites. The first location was at Fourth and Chestnut Streets, in what is now known as "Society Hill" and is the oldest part of the city. Franklin himself worked, lived, and was buried a few short blocks away. The university moved to its second location at Ninth and Chestnut in nineteen o one. Finding itself again surrounded by teeming urban life, the university moved for a third and last time to the Almshouse Farm on the western banks of the Schuylkill River, then suburban farmland. This move represented a major shift in university life. Penn was now somewhat divorced from the ills of the city, although in a few short decades, the city would come to surround the West Philadelphia campus as it had in central Philadelphia.

Until nineteen thirty, Penn's board of trustees was the primary decision-making body of the university, with the deans of the respective colleges and the provost acting as day-to-day managers and chiefs of their respective units. Because it was not until the nineteen forties that Penn had a strong senior administration, its academic structure did not become fully integrated until Judith Rodin's tenure in the late nineteen nineties.

Although Penn's professional schools flourished during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its undergraduate curriculum proved disconnected at best. For the better part of its history, Penn's academic reputation was largely regional. As previously mentioned, its admission into the Ivy League was highly contested by the already admitted universities, whose argument was that Penn was more an athletic than an academic school. After agreeing to dismantle its nationally renowned athletic programs, Penn was admitted to the league.

As Philadelphia continued its industrialization into the twentieth century, a growing population of African Americans from the American South found their way into West Philadelphia. The deindustrialization that followed World War Two set the city on a path toward population loss and urban poverty for the next sixty years. During that time, urban blight and decline found its way to the gates of the Penn campus. Immigration forever transformed the character of West Philadelphia's neighborhoods, which changed so fast and so dramatically that a plan, never carried out, was developed by the university trustees to relocate the campus to university-owned property in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. At virtually the same time, Penn saw itself develop into a true research university comparable to some of the nation's most elite and wealthy institutions. The philanthropy of the city's Protestant industrial elite proved to be one of its best assets as it sought to compete in a marketplace for university research.

Immediately following the decision to remain in West Philadelphia (rather than move to Valley Forge), the end of World War Two, and the onset of the Cold War, a race began among the nation's elite research universities to garner a significant share of the federal government's largesse. Largely, Penn succeeded in leveraging its medical school and strengths in information technology and life sciences to spawn the University City Science Center and what has become the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania complex-consistently one of the nation's leading receivers of funding from the National Institutes of Health.