Fran McCaffery W’82 has a lot of admirers, to match the lofty expectations being placed on him to restore Penn’s men’s basketball team to its rightful prominence in the Ivy League after a generally lackluster couple of decades. (Case in point: a single appearance in the NCAA tournament since 2007 versus 22 in the period from 1970 up to then.)
In “Full Circle,” associate editor Dave Zeitlin C’03 follows McCaffery’s journey from catching Big 5 doubleheaders with his brother Jack at the Palestra, where their police-officer father worked security; to his playing days as a “crafty Quaker point guard” in one of the peak eras for men’s basketball; to his highly successful coaching career at several schools and his return to Penn last March following the firing of Steve Donahue after nine seasons.
The portrait that emerges of McCaffery is energetic (roaming the sidelines and favoring a fast-paced game style), at times emotional (he’s been known to mix it up verbally with referees), and open. “He’s fiery, but at the same time he’s clear about what he wants from you,” one player said. “He’ll never let someone guess what they’re supposed to be doing out there.”
There’s a fair amount of nostalgia baked in, but the article and McCaffery also engage with the changed landscape of college sports brought about by Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules that have led to many top college players jumping from school to school for better financial opportunities, making it hard to build team camaraderie. McCaffery is confident that the lifelong advantages Penn offers will mostly win out, but if “somebody throws a bag of money at them, and they want to go, then go. We’ll get somebody else.”
I was a little surprised to find a connection in senior editor Trey Popp’s eye-opening interview with law professor Jennifer Rothman, a leading expert in “the ways intellectual property law is employed to turn people into a form of property,” but she cites student-athletes as particularly vulnerable to exploitation in terms of selling away digital rights to their identities.
“Who Will Own Your Digital Twin?” delves into the complexities of regulating the burgeoning AI technologies that can create convincing replicas of, well, anything, with special emphasis on the NO FAKES Act being considered in Congress. Rothman offers her thoughts on how to craft protections allowing individuals famous and not to keep control of their digital identities, without unduly compromising First Amendment principles.
Also in this issue, in “Historian of the ‘Taken-for-Granted,’” Julia M. Klein profiles Annenberg Professor of History Sophia Rosenfeld on the occasion of her recent book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. The book draws on an eclectic variety of sources—auction catalogs, dance cards, restaurant menus, election ballots, as well as fictional works—to look at how the idea of choice developed as a central, much-touted feature of modern democracy and capitalism, and whether that has always been such a good thing. Not that she thinks it’s for her to decide: “My entire goal is to challenge all sets of ideas,” she told Julia.
And this is the issue where we mark Homecoming with our annual photo essay and share this year’s Alumni Award of Merit citations. Congratulations to all the winners!
—John Prendergast C’80
Editor
