Leaf for leaf, the iviest campus in the Ivy League may well be the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. For decades, this ivy masked a nagging inferiority complex. Outsiders mistook Penn for a state university; insiders yearned to rename it Franklin after Ben, its patron. Though blessed with great graduate schools, Penn was cursed with inert trustees, inept presidents and indolent rejects from Yale and Harvard. "The plaything of the Main Line," Penn dreamed of past glory while dying of the slums that choked its campus and strangled its spirit.
All this is changing fast under President Gaylord P. Harnwell, a high-energy physicist of national renown. When he succeeded the feckless Harold Stassen in 1953, Harnwell launched a fiveyear, $750,000 self-study, the most exhaustive ever attempted by a U.S. university. As a result of the study—and, as one dean puts it, of the fact that "the right people died"—Penn has been reborn.
The "Harnwell Climate." Long dominated by its graduate schools, the University of Pennsylvania has upgraded its undergraduate liberal arts college, loosed a freshet of liberal learning throughout its technical schools, and started pruning its 2,000 courses, which still include such "guts" as business-letter writing. For the first time, coed Penn's 18,347 (10,354 fulltime) students are griping about a "grind school." For the first time, grand old Penn is reaching briskly for clarity and corporate purpose.
In ten years of the "Harnwell climate," Penn has nearly doubled faculty salaries, tripled scholarship aid, and boosted research contracts to $26 million. The operating budget has almost tripled, to $75 million; endowment has more than doubled, to $86 million. In Harnwell's reign, Penn has completed 45 major construction projects, jumping its plant value from $56 million to $111 million. In the next ten years it aims to spend another $120 million, eventually expanding its 145-acre campus by more than 80% .
Penn remains a city campus with too little housing: one-fourth of its fulltime students are commuters. But it no longer talks of moving to the suburbs; instead, it made the city its new frontier. Aroused by the street-corner murder of a Korean student in 1957, Penn mobilized four other institutions (Drexel Institute of Technology, Presbyterian Hospital, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, and Philadelphia College of Osteopathy) in renewing West Philadelphia from a slum to a sprightly University City. By aiding the public schools with advice and scholarships, Penn stemmed a white flight—without driving Negroes away. Some house prices have doubled, and so has the number of faculty men living in the area.