Reinvention in progress at Weitzman Hall and across the University.
By President J. Larry Jameson
Throughout our nearly 300 years, Penn has navigated many periods of societal and technological change. In such moments, our University has repeatedly recognized an opportunity—and an obligation—to innovate in our teaching, research, and engagement with the world.
We are once again in a period of historic change. The headwinds Penn and higher education face are fierce. These include a rapidly shifting funding landscape, virtual learning and exponential advances in artificial intelligence, new research tools, rising public skepticism about higher education’s value, and an imperative to serve learners across more stages of life and more parts of the world.
To meet today’s extraordinary challenges and opportunities, Provost John L. Jackson Jr., Executive Vice President Mark Dingfield, and I recently announced the launch of Penn Forward, a University-wide strategic planning initiative meant to advance the key pillars of In Principle and Practice while positioning Penn to lead for the future.
Penn Forward focuses on six domains of bold, necessary action:
Undergraduate Education and Innovation: We must ensure that our students are prepared for lives situated in complexity, successful in personal fulfillment, and assuring societal contribution.
Graduate and Professional Training: We must get people into emerging and evolving fields or careers faster and less expensively, create more flexible pathways toward their goals, and support professional readiness across a wider spectrum of opportunities.
Research Strategy and Financing: We must secure new forms of support for our research ambitions and reimagine approaches to innovation, while protecting the freedom and creativity essential for progress.
Global Strategy and New Markets: We must think across place and time—broadening Penn’s reach geographically and serving learners, alumni, and partners throughout their lives.
Access, Affordability, and Value: We must make Penn even more approachable to those who can benefit from what we have to offer, clarify the cost and value of a Penn education, and more powerfully communicate its purpose and impact.
Operational Transformation: We must redesign Penn’s administrative and operational architecture to support agile and entrepreneurial approaches to the opportunities ahead.
Working groups in each area, comprising faculty, staff, and students, will begin their work this semester, and some have already begun. The charge to each working group is straightforward. They will question our legacy assumptions, propose bold, implementable strategies, and stay grounded in Penn’s values while making those values visible in our structures and operations.
Success will be measured by producing strategic clarity and executable choices that reflect Penn’s distinctive strengths and rise to the scale of our moment. But success also means something harder to measure: fostering trust that the institution will act wisely, move with purpose, and adapt without losing the primacy of its values.
As I think about what this moment in history means for Penn, I think about a historic building on campus, currently being reborn just a stone’s throw from my College Hall office. This handsome red brick structure on 34th Street, opposite the Fisher Fine Arts Library, has been renamed Stuart Weitzman Hall for the once-in-a-generation philanthropy of leading alumnus and design maven Stuart Weitzman W’63. But it has had many past lives.
It was originally an orphanage for the daughters of soldiers and firemen, designed by the Philadelphia firm Cope & Stewardson (the masterminds behind the Quadrangle). Penn then acquired the structure in 1900 for the Physics Department. The laboratory would later be headed by nuclear physicist and future Penn president, Gaylord Harnwell Hon’53. For a time, it also housed one of the nation’s largest Van de Graaff generators, used for atomic research. The building was repurposed again in the mid-1950s for Penn Nursing and yet again in the 1970s for Fine Arts.
In this latest chapter, Stuart Weitzman Hall will serve as headquarters for the Department of Fine Arts and an interdisciplinary hub for a range of endeavors, from energy research to exhibitions. This transformation keeps intact the soul of the place while equipping it to best serve future generations of students and scholars in a rapidly changing world.
In all that scaffolding and construction, guided by principles of careful preservation and creative reimagining, I see parallels to this moment for our University.
We will uphold our missions and values even as Penn, once again, responds to challenge with change. We will reinvent for this era and prepare our graduates and our institution for a future that we can scarcely imagine today. We will rebuild public trust, restore confidence in our value and integrity, and reimagine Penn for a new century of service and relevance, as Benjamin Franklin charged us to do.
We have a powerful opportunity and a real obligation. Together, we must choose to lean into our challenges and, as a united University, move Penn forward.
