The University community celebrated the inauguration of Liz Magill, Penn’s ninth president, inside Irvine Auditorium on Oct. 21. “We welcome a challenge here and we thrive on it,” Magill said during her speech. “To answer the great challenges of our time, opportunity and truth will be our conductors, our kite and key, our means to draw down the lightning … Today, the very nature of truth is contested and the means to opportunity are fragile. The University of Pennsylvania is called upon to redouble our historic and our forward-looking commitment to these twin principles.”
Penn President Liz Magill announced a University-wide collaborative effort, called “Tomorrow, Together,” to inform strategic next steps for Penn’s future. An advisory committee of faculty, students, and staff will guide the effort, chaired by Annenberg School for Communication Dean John L. Jackson Jr. “Penn’s next decades hold so much potential and to fully realize it we need to tap into the vision and passion of Penn’s people—faculty, staff, students, alumni, friends, and community members,” said Magill. “That’s why it is so important for this work to be as inclusive and forward-looking as possible.”
Homecoming weekend this year proved to be extra festive, between Penn President Liz Magill’s Inauguration, the 87th annual Alumni Award of Merit Gala at the Penn Museum, a special walk with Magill’s goldendoodle Olive, Quakerfest, and, of course, the Homecoming football game. Penn Today captured the weekend of spirit in photos.
At a gala event, the University honored eight alumni with Awards of Merit and the Creative Spirit Award. In addition, Laura Perna of the Graduate School of Education accepted the Faculty Award of Merit and six classes accepted the David N. Tyre Award for Excellence in Class Communications.
President Liz Magill sat down for an inauguration day chat with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, discussing topics ranging from Kagan’s clerkship with Thurgood Marshall to hunting trips with Antonin Scalia to the importance of the current court finding “common ground” to better address the cases before them.
Stuart Weitzman was joined by Liz Magill, Weitzman School of Design Dean Fritz Steiner, and fine arts Professor Sharon Hayes in speaking at a ceremonial groundbreaking of Stuart Weitzman Hall, an expansion of what was formerly known as Morgan Hall. The existing space will double in size to 38,500 square feet and will be a central space for design students.
The Quakers clinched a 20-13 Homecoming win over Yale at Franklin Field, scoring a touchdown with 20 seconds left in the game. The win added to the football team’s undefeated streak.
Ahead of Penn President Liz Magill’s Inauguration, Penn Today provided an overview of inaugural traditions at Penn, ranging from the three solid brass keys handed over during the ceremony to the silver University badge that signifies the authority of the chief executive.
The 2023 Penn’s Way campaign kicked off with a luncheon at Houston Hall, attended by Penn President Liz Magill and Penn’s Way co-chairs Maureen Rush and Patricia Sullivan. This year’s theme is “Going the Distance for Our Community.”
Senior Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli spoke about Penn’s plans to address the affordable housing crisis that has taken Philadelphia and other cities by storm. He noted that, in addition to other actions, the Penn Institute for Urban Research will, in partnership with a nonprofit organization that helps senior citizens with modest incomes age in their own homes, develop strategic recommendations for the University. “We want to leverage [Penn IUR’s] expertise to learn how urban universities can best engage on the topic of affordable housing in a city, and we want to look at different, tested models to help inform Penn’s own strategy going forward.”
The McDonough Fellowships, supported by a 10-year, $3 million donation from an anonymous donor, establish the world’s first graduate-level queer art history fellowship. An inaugural cohort of three students began their studies this fall. “[The fellowships] provide a wonderful opportunity for students to pursue research into dimensions of art history which have historically been underrepresented, invisible, if not outright suppressed by conventional academic scholarship,” says Interim History of Art Graduate Chair David Young Kim. “I'm very excited about the directions of research the three McDonough Scholars are going to undertake. Penn is really pioneering a path forward in this field.”
The Center for Stewardship Agriculture and Food Security, part of the School of Veterinary Medicine, is taking on what Thomas Parsons, a professor of animal welfare and ethics, calls a “generational challenge” to make farms more environmentally friendly. “There is a tension between two pressures that agriculture faces,” he says. “One is to be more environmentally friendly. Two is to go and feed the world. Our Center will be one of the few that is focusing on both of these directives at the same time.”
The Netter Center for Community Partnerships celebrated its 30th anniversary with a fall celebration at Andrew Hamilton School in West Philadelphia. Magill met with the school’s principal, K-8 teachers, as well as Penn students, faculty members, and staff at the Netter Center. “I think partnerships—that is to say working together for a common cause, learning from one another, hearing each other for the greater good, to improve something—that’s the key to success for everybody, always, and this school and this effort is really a wonderful illustration of that,” Magill remarked at the event.
Penn neuroscientist Anna Schapiro and colleagues found that as the body moves between REM and slow-wave sleep cycles, the hippocampus and neocortex interact in ways that are key to memory formation. “This is not just a model of learning in local circuits in the brain. It’s how one brain region can teach another brain region during sleep, a time when there is no guidance from the external world,” says Schapiro, an assistant professor in Penn’s Department of Psychology. “It’s also a proposal for how we learn gracefully over time as our environment changes.”
The 133-year-old Mask and Wig musical comedy troupe went gender-inclusive in September. Fourteen of 20 new members are female-identifying, making up a third of the club’s current members. “It’s incredibly exciting to join a group that has such a rich history and traditions and be a part of the first year of acknowledging those old traditions but also creating new ones,” says Lauren Cho, a first-year in the College of Arts and Sciences. “And it’s really exciting to see how the group will evolve.”
