THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA • FOUNDED 1885
PHILADELPHIA, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
VOL. CXLII
NO. 25
Renowned civil rights attorney sues Penn over wrongful death The Oct. 19 complaint alleges that 52-year-old Ronald Harmon died after being tased by a Penn Police officer in November 2024 LAVANYA MANI Senior Reporter
ALEX NAGLER | SENIOR DESIGNER
Revised speech guidelines narrow administrative oversight, clarify protest rules The latest proposal incorporates feedback from community listening sessions and input from the Offices of the President and the Provost ANANYA KARTHIK Senior Reporter
Penn’s Committee on Open Expression released a revised draft of the University’s Guidelines on Open Expression on Tuesday. The proposal revisits provisions on administrative authority, spontaneous demonstrations, online speech, and identification checks in the March draft — all issues raised during the spring feedback period. The Oct. 20 revisions would give the
Here’s how Penn undergraduates rate their courses The Daily Pennsylvanian analyzed more than 1,500 courses using Penn Course Review ratings, which are sourced from end-of-semester surveys ARIEL ZHANG Staff Reporter
Want to coast through spring semester? Avoid LSMP 4210B. Maybe steer clear of FNCE 2570, too. As Penn students prepare to select classes for the spring semester, The Daily Pennsylvanian analyzed more than 1,500 undergraduate-level courses using Penn Course Review student ratings — which are sourced from end-of-semester surveys — to find which classes students consider to be the hardest, the easiest, and everything in between. Courses are rated on a scale of zero to four in areas such as difficulty, workload, amount learned, and overall quality. The figures are based on aggregate ratings across all semesters with available data. With a 3.83 out of four, LSMP 4210B — a capstone course for students in the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management — has the highest difficulty rating of any course. FNCE 2570: “Foundations of Asset Pricing” follows at 3.82, and STAT 4760: “Applied Probability Models in Marketing” comes in third at 3.70. The easiest-rated non-language class was EAS 2420: “Energy Education in Philadelphia Schools,” with a 0.58 difficulty. EAS 2420 only ranks behind SPAN 0800: “Spanish Conversation,” a half-credit course. Among the 1,271 courses with available ratings in both categories, difficulty and workload show a strong positive correlation. Three courses rank in the top 10 for both most difficult and most work-intensive: LSMP 4210B, CIS 4550, and ESE 4730. LSMP 4210B was rated the most work-intensive class, at 3.95 out of 4, followed by CIS 4550: “Internet & Web Systems” at 3.85. In ratings for first-year writing seminars, difficulty often deviated from course workload. On the whole, Critical Writing Seminars had the fifth-highest average workload among all departments, at 2.98, but an average difficulty of just 2.08. Writing seminar instructors also received notably high ratings, averaging 3.30 — significantly above the average rating students gave the courses themselves. Leadership and Communication courses, or LEAD, had the highest average course difficulty rating, at 2.96, followed by Mathematics courses at 2.95 and Chemistry courses at 2.91. LEAD courses also had the heaviest average workload at 3.17, with Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Computer and Information Science close behind. Theatre Arts courses had the lowest average course difficulty at 1.47, with Cinema and Media Studies See COURSES, page 3
NEWS Seven Penn faculty members were elected to the National Academy of Medicine in its 2026 cohort
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committee greater oversight of a proposed executive director of open expression while retaining the director’s authority to initiate disciplinary referrals. A request for comment was left with a University spokesperson. “By embedding layered checks and balances, shared governance, and strict viewpoint neutrality
into event facilitation and guideline oversight, the guidelines aim to strike a careful balance between preserving robust internal disagreement and protecting the University’s academic environment from institutional censorship and undue external pressure,” the committee wrote in its announcement of the revisions. See GUIDELINES, page 6
Rebranded World Cafe Live to close amid financial challenges The venue’s management could not agree on terms with Penn, which owns the 3025 Walnut St. building where the business operates
Ben Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney, is representing a family in a lawsuit alleging Penn Police deployed a taser on a man that resulted in his wrongful death. The Oct. 19 complaint claimed that a Penn Police officer used unnecessary force on Ronald Harmon in November 2024, causing a “blunt impact head injury” that led to his death several months later. Crump previously represented the families of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, alongside other high-profile cases. The suit, filed in federal court, names Penn and the Penn Police Department as defendants, as well as officers James Squadroni, James Schwartz, and over a dozen unnamed Penn Police officers and supervisors. A University spokesperson wrote in a statement that Penn “extends its deepest condolences to the family, friends, and loved ones of Ronald Harmon.” “The University and the Division of Public Safety take any use of force and loss of life with the utmost seriousness,” the spokesperson added. “Because this matter is now the subject of active federal litigation, the University cannot discuss the specific factual allegations or legal claims outside of the judicial process.” A request for comment was left with Crump. “We know that Ronald Harmon was not a threat to police at the time,” Crump said at a Monday press conference. “He was running away.” In its outline of the incident, the suit alleges that Squadroni and Schwartz had seen 52-year-old Harmon take a package from the foyer of a building. The officers “should have known that Harmon may have committed a non-violent misdemeanor by taking the package,” the suit reads. The officers allegedly used a Penn Police vehicle to chase Harmon, who was on foot. According to the complaint, the officers had neither observed nor received any communication indicating that Harmon was armed. Both the pursuit of Harmon and the officers’ subsequent use of force violate Penn’s policies, the complaint contends. A Division of Public Safety directive on the use of weapons says a taser should not be used “Against an unarmed suspect attempting to elude capture by fleeing, who is wanted for a non-violent misdemeanor, summary, or traffic offense.”
Students say Penn sexual consent World Stage, the music venue formerly known as 2025, social media posts revealed that Penn had World Cafe Live, will shut down at the end of the moved to evict World Cafe Live from its University training needs month after failing to secure a new lease with Penn. City location that July. According to a petition cirFacing millions of dollars in debt, the venue de- culated by current and former World Cafe Live staff clared bankruptcy and rebranded in March, hoping members, the venue allegedly owed the University more support JAMES WAN Senior Reporter
to continue programming. Instead, according to CEO J. Sean Diaz, World Stage could not agree on terms with the University, which owns the building at 3025 Walnut St. where the business operates. “It has proven near impossible to sustain an independent small to mid-sized live performance venue without institutional and philanthropic support,” Diaz, who graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1990, wrote in a statement. “This reality is further complicated by the market dominance and saturation of larger ticketing and live entertainment conglomerates.” A request for comment was left with a University spokesperson. Founded in 2004, World Stage shares its University City location with WXPN — a Penn-owned radio station — but operates as a separate nonprofit. In June 2025, World Cafe Live workers staged a walkout to protest the leadership of then-CEO Joseph Callahan, citing an “unacceptable level of hostility and mismanagement.” At the time, the venue had fired nearly a dozen employees and was $6 million in debt. Diaz stepped into the role in September of that year, expressing optimism for the venue’s future despite ongoing financial challenges. In December
“nearly $1.3 million in past due rent and other costs” at the time of Penn’s filing. In February, the City of Philadelphia ordered World Cafe Live to cease operations by March 11. Citing “serious tax violations,” the order revoked the venue’s Commercial Activity License. Just one day before the deadline, World Cafe Live announced its new name — World Stage — and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Ultimately, the efforts were not enough to save the venue. World Stage’s last event will be a closing party on Oct. 31. The venue will work to issue refunds and relocate shows and events that were scheduled after October. Currently, the World Stage website displays events scheduled through the remainder of this year and early 2027. In his statement, Diaz thanked World Stage’s corporate supporters, the University, and the venue’s staff, whom he said exhibited “dedication to showing up in the face of uncertainty” and announced that he will “continue the mission of supporting independent artists and creators” through partnerships with existing venues. “Thank you for your past, present, and continued support,” Diaz concluded. “Stay tuned.”
DP FILE PHOTO
The music venue formerly known as World Cafe Live will shut down at the end of October.
NEWS Penn’s graduate worker union has pushed to handle its contract dispute out of court
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OPINION The Daily Pennsylvanian Editorial Board reflects on Larry Jameson’s tenure as president
ONLINE AT THEDP.COM
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During NSO, trained student facilitators lead hourlong consent circles that discuss interpersonal violence and campus support resources AMY LIAO Senior Reporter
Every year, incoming Penn first years are required to complete online training and attend student-led discussions on sexual consent and campus safety. While these programs provide an educational starting point, students and facilitators say there is more the University could do to keep students informed about Title IX and campus sexual assault policies. During New Student Orientation, trained student facilitators lead hourlong Consent Circles on interpersonal violence and campus support resources. Prior to the in-person program, students are required to complete Thrive at Penn — a set of online Canvas modules that outline the University’s Title IX policies. For College sophomore Cyrus Nininger, who served as a Consent Circle student facilitator this August, the program is a “solid starting ground” for establishing a shared understanding of consent among first-year students. The program’s curriculum is adapted each year based on feedback, Nininger said, adding he hopes it continues to get “better and better year by year.” Facilitators, he explained, hosted a “debrief session” to discuss aspects of the program that could be adapted for future students. “Education is really important because it takes out people that would be accidental perpetrators,” Nininger said in an interview. “But there are people who aren’t listening. There are people who are not accidental perpetrators, and there are people who genuinely don’t care that much about other people.” “Consent Circles give all incoming Penn students a student-led conversational opportunity to explore concepts related to consent and resources for support with their peers prior to beginning their academic year,” Penn Violence Prevention Director Elise Scioscia wrote in a statement. Scioscia directed The Daily Pennsylvanian to See CONSENT, page 7
SPORTS Penn women’s rowing took home gold at the Head of the Charles in Boston
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2 NEWS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
THEDP.COM | THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN
NEWS 3
A decade later, Pennovation Works remains a hub for local entrepreneurship Startups backed by the program have gone on to generate roughly $1.1 billion in combined revenue IMANI GASKIN Staff Reporter
This month, Pennovation Works celebrated 10 years as the University’s primary center for startup innovation. Over the past decade, the program has helped shape Philadelphia’s entrepreneurial landscape, housing over 100 companies across its 23-acre campus. Pennovation Works-backed startups have gone on to generate nearly $1.1 billion in combined revenue. Denita Henderson, the managing director at Pennovation Works, explained that the program is distinct from other incubators because it works with startups “from their initial stages all through some very mature phases of growth.” The program, she added, is interdisciplinary and offers various resources — including lab spaces, commercial wet labs, and office areas — that play an integral role in benefiting companies across many industries. Startup founders gain access to the program’s “pro network,” a team of subjectmatter experts who provide targeted mentorship in their areas of expertise. Companies arrive at Pennovation Works in a variety of shapes and sizes. “We house startups that occupy as little as one bench or one desk, all the way up to mature enterprises that might occupy over 30,000 square feet,” Henderson, a 1995 College and Wharton
School graduate, explained. Pennovation Works, she added, brings together “the real estate, the resources, and the relationships to meet the company wherever they are in their journey.” For each of the program’s “members,” Pennovation Works takes “a deep dive into the company’s setup,” she said. The process includes analyzing each participant’s financial needs and assessing their human resources capabilities. Then, the team begins to tailor the process to the company’s individual growth. Pennovation Works also hosts an “award-winning accelerator program,” according to Henderson. The Pennovation Accelerator — established through the larger initiative in 2017 — allows selected local startups to participate in a six-week program that offers mentorship, networking opportunities, and educational sessions. Through the program, participants can develop a business strategy and cultivate their network. In a statement, Facilities and Real Estate Services Director of Communications Jennifer Rizzi wrote that the Pennovation Accelerator has raised $90 million in funding and helped 90 founders since it launched. Ron Kerbs, a 2020 Wharton MBA graduate, was one of those founders. He joined the Pennovation Accelerator in 2019 as CEO of Kidas, an acoustic
artificial intelligence company. For him, joining the Pennovation community in the primary stages of his business proved quite useful. According to Kerbs, the program helped his team decide what the “right things” to focus on were and what was “just a waste of time.” During that time, he was also directed toward “all of the grant options that are available through the University and outside of the University.” He added that his team’s time participating in the Pennovation Accelerator left them “much more focused” on what they wanted to pursue. Beyond cultivating a network of startup founders, Pennovation Works aims to create an interdisciplinary environment where specialized innovators can collaborate. To achieve this goal, it hosts programs such as the Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education, known as MindCORE, which aims to unite innovators across the University who are interested in human intelligence and behavior. MindCORE’s Neuroimaging Facility Director Brock Kirwan explained that rather than using Pennovation Works’ startup support, the center takes advantage of its various research offerings. “We’re a little bit of an odd duck over here, where we’re not really in the startup space,” he added.
Still, he “would love” for MindCORE to collaborate with the program’s biotech startups and help with clinical trials. Kirwan noted, however, that “nobody is doing sort of that stage of clinical trial right now.” In other fields, MindCORE has partnered with Pennovation’s startups to provide essential services. “We have a collaboration in the works with the Working Dog Center where we’re going to do MRI scans on dogs,” Kirwan said. “We would love to grow our user base of researchers both here at Penn and at partner institutions around Philadelphia.” Pennovation Works also hosts the Youth, Entrepreneurship, and STEAM initiative, which is tailored toward local students and aims to provide them with hands-on experience across a variety of disciplines. According to Rizzi, over 200 Philadelphiabased students have gone through the program in just the past year. Looking ahead, Henderson explained that Pennovation Works is focused on developing artificial intelligence-related projects. The center already delivers “the region’s largest and most recognized AI convenings,” she said, and will continue to produce “more of those signature programs throughout the upcoming year.”
CHENYAO LIU | SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
Pennovation Works on Sept. 6, 2025.
COURSES, from front page Studies next at 1.65. The language departments led in the lightest workload, with American Sign Language at 1.22, Korean at 1.30, and Chinese at 1.44. MATH 1070: Mathematics of change, Part I — an introductory calculus course — scored an outlying 1.00 in terms of quality, by far the lowest of any course. The Mathematics department had the lowest average course
Claudia Cohen Hall on Feb. 10.
quality of any department, at 2.30, followed by Chemistry at 2.47 and Economics at 2.61. Penn’s language departments also took home the majority of top spots in quality rankings, with Korean at 3.59, followed by Russian at 3.53 and Chinese at 3.51. Class size also appeared to shape how students perceive a course: average enrollment and quality rating were negatively correlated, meaning that as final enrollment rose, average course quality tended to fall. Courses with fewer than 15 students averaged a quality rating of 3.32, versus 3.06 for courses of 15 to 40 students and 2.74 for those with more than 40.
CONNIE ZHAO | SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
Members of the University community are invited to bring topics to
UNIVERSITY COUNCIL
OPEN FORUM Wednesday, November 18, 2026 4:00 p.m. Hall of Flags, Houston Hall
A PennCard is required to attend University Council meetings PennCard holders who want to be assured of speaking at Open Forum must submit a request to the Office of the University Secretary (ucouncil@pobox.upenn.edu) by 10:00 a.m. on Monday, November 9, 2026, briefly indicating the subject of the intended remarks. Speakers’ statements are limited to three minutes and should be framed to present topics of general University interest and be directed to University Council as a body through the moderator, and not to an individual. Those who have not submitted a timely request to the Office of the University Secretary will be permitted to speak if time remains after the registered speakers and at the discretion of the moderator. For the meeting format and guidelines for remarks, please consult the University Council website at https://secretary.upenn.edu/univ-council/open-forum. The Office of the University Secretary can be contacted at ucouncil@pobox.upenn.edu or 215-898-7005.
4 OPINION
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM
Opinion
142nd Year of Publication
THIS YEAR’S BOARD NEEMA BADDAM President JASMINE NI Executive Editor ETHAN YOUNG DP Editor-in-Chief ANDY MEI Design Editor KATE AHN Design Editor PRASHANT BHATTARAI Copy Editor JESSICA HUANG Copy Editor ISHA CHITIRALA News Editor FINN RYAN News Editor AYANA CHARI Assignments Editor INGRID HOLMQUIST Opinion Editor ELLIE CLARK Sports Editor EMILIE CHI Sports Editor KENNY CHEN Photo Editor UMA MUKHOPADHYAY Video Editor NIRA GOYAL Puzzles Editor RANVITH ADULLA Business Manager MAYA ECHAMBADI Corporate Relations Manager SHREYA SRINIVASAN Strategy & Promotions Manager
CATHERINE GARCIA | DESIGN ASSOCIATE
Editorial | What Jameson failed to accomplish
THIS ISSUE’S TEAM KIKI CHOI Deputy Design Editor ALEX NAGLER Deputy Design Editor ALENA RHOADES Deputy Copy Editor KAIA FEICHTINGER-ERHART Deputy Copy Editor RAYNA JOHNSON Deputy Copy Editor MARTY SIGNES Deputy Copy Editor AKSHITHA VEMULA Deputy Copy Editor EBUNOLUWA ADESIDA News Photo Editor CONNIE ZHAO News Photo Editor CATHERINE FAN Deputy Photo Editor LINDSAY MUNETON Deputy Opinion Editor CHARLOTTE PULICA Deputy Opinion Editor
In June, Larry Jameson will depart the Penn presidency after three years in office. His term — first as interim president and later as Penn’s 10th president — spanned an era of reckoning for universities nationwide. But while political debates and federal investigations have transformed the landscape of higher education, our University has remained stagnant. In December 2023, Jameson stepped into an office stricken by turmoil. After months in the national spotlight that culminated in former Penn President Liz Magill’s disastrous congressional testimony, Penn was begging for some semblance of stability. To his credit, Jameson provided that. But what did that stability cost us? Jameson’s presidency has been an exercise in appeasement. His administration champions empty gestures while minimizing failures, swiftly addressing conflict in an effort to turn the fewest heads. In negotiations with the Trump administration, Penn has evaded federal oversight just enough to feign resistance while bending to the pressure when convenient. The ultimate goal is never academic freedom but institutional preservation. This complicity extends to our campus culture, which has grown increasingly passive since the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and subsequent disciplinary actions taken against students in 2024. In response to the year of protest, Jameson’s administration published
a set of interim guidelines that severely limited campus speech. It was clear that any show of dissent would be considered a violation of conduct, and our community was forced into self-censorship. Almost two years later, the University published a draft of proposed guidelines that appeared little different from the restrictive interim requirements. This draft drew criticism from students and faculty alike for its unclear language, with many suggesting the vague regulations would be easily violated unknowingly. This fall, we entered the third academic year without a finalized open expression policy. Despite the previous semester spent soliciting feedback, the administration did not meet its self-imposed deadline of a revised policy on Sept. 9. Finally, on Tuesday, we received yet another draft, which will be further revised after a number of listening sessions next month. In this revised version, the most notable change is the clarification of ambiguous language through a list of vague definitions that require further clarification themselves. In the absence of a formal and permanent policy, campus expression has been stifled indefinitely. College Hall sit-ins and Convocation disruptions are relics of the past, poorly replaced by a few University-sanctioned demonstrations each year. Without fair and detailed guidelines that protect our right to free speech, student expression exists in a
liminal space — not outwardly forbidden, but far from protected. It is plainly unacceptable that the administration has done so little to move the needle on an issue of such importance. When will the period of drafted proposals and listening end? When will the era of change begin? Throughout the past few years, Penn’s administration has distracted from its failures to act with talk of “progress” and “innovation.” Jameson has defined his presidency around “Penn Forward,” an ambitious title for an initiative that has failed to produce any tangible change. Its framework aims to tackle a list of broad and unrelated objectives, from affordability to artificial intelligence to the University’s international presence. Their only common thread seems to be the administration’s inability to make any real headway on a single one. Since its announcement in September 2025, Penn Forward’s biggest achievement seems to have been an expansion of financial aid that, for 900 students, increased average grant aid by $4,000 — out of Penn’s $99,000 sticker price. Otherwise, Penn Forward’s effects have been felt more by its donors than by students, as the University continues to implement cost-cutting measures in its budget for fiscal year 2027 even as it operates on a surplus of more than $600 million. The Office of the President has remained largely silent about the issues that most affect
our community — and intentionally so. Perhaps Jameson summed up his tenure best in his own declaration of institutional neutrality: “It is not the role of the institution to render opinions.” This belief has guided his leadership of our University, fulfilling the mission to reduce Penn’s political and social commentary to a statement of detachment. But in questions of individual rights, neutrality does not exist. Silence is a position, and it is one of acceptance. Since December 2023, Penn has not moved forward, nor has it quite slipped backward. Under Jameson’s leadership, the University has remained hopelessly at a standstill. While claiming to be a leader in thought and research, Penn has resigned itself to a passive role in debates that deeply shape our campus. Even more troubling, this position of impartiality is being asked of our students and faculty — an expectation antithetical to the very mission of higher education. Editorials represent the majority view of members of The Daily Pennsylvanian Editorial Board who meet regularly to discuss issues relevant to the Penn community. This body is led by Opinion Editor Ingrid Holmquist and operates independently from the newsroom. Questions or comments should be directed to letters@thedp.com.
Philadelphia is more than a backdrop for your degree CONTRIBUTION | The integration of Penn students with Philadelphia benefits us all
LETTER SUBMISSION
Attending Penn means being located in one of the most historic, culturally diverse, and community-focused cities in the United States. So why do some Penn students remain inside the strict confines of campus? Penn exists as its own ecosystem: Students are able to fulfill all of their needs within the one-mile radius of campus. Penn has its own resources for everything from libraries to hospitals and more. This student-exclusive accessibility creates a clear-cut distinction between what is Penn and what is not. Consequently, many students never feel the desire to explore beyond University City, so they don’t. When I stopped 42 students on campus and asked about their involvement in Philadelphia, 39 of them said they explored the city beyond campus once a week or less. The city that supports the foundations of our University with its resources, space, and occupational opportunities has been reduced to a background for our degrees.
When asked why, many students told me that they felt unsafe exploring beyond campus. In fact, 36 of them stated that this city was not a safe place for students, despite 41 of them never experiencing a dangerous situation in the city. This stereotype surrounding Philadelphia comes from a place of natural caution, but it perpetuates notions that are simply no longer accurate. As of August, violent crime in Philadelphia was down 4.2% from the same period last year. The city’s homicide rate has also fallen significantly, with a year-to-date decline of 23.76%. Many fears related to city safety stem from racism. Following a shooting near campus last November, Penn’s Sidechat forum was flooded with an immense number of racist remarks, attributing crime to the presence of Black people in the neighborhood. These comments undermine everything Penn students should stand for in a situation like this. Rather than wishing
for the well-being of those involved or discussing how we can help improve safety protocols in our neighboring communities, students pounced on the opportunity to spew hate speech instead. This behavior illustrates the perspective many students have toward Philadelphia. As a result of this fear, students miss out on transformational experiences and opportunities that their location has to offer. Philadelphia is one of the most pluralistic cities in the nation, allowing people to fully discover and express their identities without feeling the necessity to conform. Walk off campus and you’ll pass by Italian market stalls, Ethiopian restaurants, the Gayborhood, and so many other hot spots for community. This freedom can give Penn students the space they need to grow into themselves and their interests, developing a deeper sense of self while being here. On top of the detriment to Penn students, Philadelphia is harmed by students’
Have your own opinion? Send your letter to the editor or guest column to letters@thedp.com. Editorials represent the majority view of members of The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. Editorial Board, which meets regularly to discuss issues relevant to Penn’s campus. Participants in these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on related topics.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The Land on which the office of The Daily Pennsylvanian stands is a part of the homeland and territory of the LenniLenape people, known to the original Indigenous people as “Lenapehoking.” We affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold The Daily Pennsylvanian and the University of Pennsylvania more accountable to the needs of Native American and Indigenous people.
ABHIRAM JUVVADI | DP FILE PHOTO
Contributor Pearl Johnson argues that fearmongering keeps Penn students trapped on campus, preventing personal growth and harming the Philadelphia community.
tendency to self-isolate, as well. When people remain in the bubble of campus, it furthers the divide between higher education institutions and neighboring residents. The city faces significant socioeconomic challenges, including housing instability, underfunded school districts, and struggling small businesses. When students do not engage with surrounding neighborhoods, they pass up opportunities to contribute time, skills, and resources that can directly benefit community-led initiatives. Passive student presence can instead lead to gentrification, driving up the cost of living without offering reciprocal value to long-term Philadelphians. This can ultimately create feelings of displacement, neglect, and strain on public infrastructure. Despite all of this, it’s difficult to move on from stereotypes that originate from fear. Many students come from smaller towns and have little to no experience with city living, so it’s understandable that their fears persuade them to remain within campus borders. However, part of transitioning into adulthood is experiencing new things, even when they are frightening. Penn thrives on involvement with our local community: Volunteering through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, taking Academically Based Community Service courses, and using work-study funding to engage with West Philadelphia are all opportunities for students to slowly immerse themselves in city living and break down the fearful attitudes surrounding it. Moving to Philadelphia doesn’t have to be a terrifying plunge into the deep end. It can start with small actions of engagement that carry long-term benefits for students themselves and the communities they interact with. You came to this city for a reason, so don’t be an isolated resident contributing to negative stigma and local economic struggles. Work through your fears, go outside, and do your part. PEARL JOHNSON is a College first year studying psychology from Philadelphia. Her email is pearlspj@sas. upenn.edu.
THEDP.COM | THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
OPINION 5
Penn students are educated but uninformed EDENLIGHTENED | When recruiting comes before being knowledgeable Penn is filled with extraordinarily educated students who are surprisingly uninformed about the world around them. I was reminded of this recently while playing “Jeopardy!” with friends, some of whom struggled to name the three branches of government, despite excelling in demanding majors and possessing expertise in fields I know little about. This apathy reflects a broader problem with the University’s preprofessional culture: We are encouraged to become experts in increasingly narrow fields while treating basic awareness of political, economic, and international developments as optional. That contradiction has grown to bother me. Penn prides itself on the interdisciplinary nature of its education. Yet from the moment we set foot on campus, its preprofessional culture pushes us toward specialization. Meanwhile, basic awareness of geopolitical developments is treated as optional. Between academics, extracurriculars, and career preparation, Penn students have little time to spare. We become adept at prioritizing activities that offer tangible academic or professional returns. Reading the news has none. It’s great to know what happened in Congress today, but that won’t get anyone an A. No recruiter will ask you to expand on your thoughts about the most recent headline in Brazil. And unless current events intersect with your Morgan Stanley interview, knowing about them can seem like something to do after everything else is finished. But at Penn, nothing is ever finished. This attitude results in a perverted kind of hyperspecialization. In essence, we become very good at gaining the knowledge that benefits us professionally, while ignoring the information that would benefit us intellectually.
Being educated should mean more than being professionally or academically competent. It should also mean understanding the political, economic, and social forces that shape our lives and the fields we hope to enter. Academia is often accused of living in an ivory tower, out of touch with the average individual. However, no discipline exists in a vacuum. Financial markets are influenced by every war, every election, and even the tie that the Federal Reserve chair wears. The computer scientist developing artificial intelligence works amid debates over regulation, labor displacement, and national security. Doctors practice medicine within a healthcare system shaped by politics and public policy. We constantly hear about the influence Penn students and graduates will have after leaving campus. Having a Penn degree tied to your name can automatically create an air of legitimacy that others spend years attaining, opening doors to influential positions in a variety of fields. We are given opportunities to make decisions, offer opinions, and occupy rooms where what we say carries weight. That privilege should come with some responsibility to understand the world we are being invited to shape. Expertise is indispensable, but without context, it has its limits. I’m not arguing that every Penn student needs to become a political junkie. Nor do I seek to impugn the expertise of those not in the social sciences. As someone who studies politics, I am much more likely to notice when someone cannot name the three branches of government than the three states of matter. I am the first person to acknowledge I do possess glaring blind spots of my own, including in subjects others would
consider basic knowledge. And, of course, nobody can keep up with everything. There is more happening in the world than any one person could reasonably follow. The expectation cannot be omniscience. But there is a difference between knowing everything and knowing only what is useful to you. With the midterm elections approaching, this distinction feels especially relevant. How many of us can name our local candidates, let alone explain their policies? How many are following the races themselves rather than simply waiting for the summary top sheet? We probably will have some grand explanation about the midterms’ implications for our respective sectors, but we aren’t tapped into the source of those implications. If we aspire to influence the institutions that govern our society, surely we should take an interest in who is running them. This is precisely the kind of intellectual curiosity I worry Penn’s preprofessional culture is eroding. We are encouraged to evaluate everything through a costbenefit lens. Penn will make us specialists. For many of us, it will give us the opportunity to shape decisions affecting people we will never meet. The least we can do is know something about the world those decisions will shape. We spend four years at Penn preparing to make our mark on the world. We should spend some of that time actually paying attention to it. EDEN LIU is a College junior studying philosophy, politics, and economics from Taipei, Taiwan. His email is edenliu@sas.upenn.edu.
CHENYAO LIU | SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
C o l u m n i s t E d e n L i u a r g u e s t h a t P e n n ’s preprofessional culture encourages students to become hyperspecialized at the expense of remaining informed about the world around them.
Higher education needs to get off-topic CONTRIBUTION | The value of distraction in an era of automated perfectionism In most lecture halls across Penn’s campus, education follows a mundane script. Syllabuses are designed to be rigid contracts, and lectures proceed down predictable tracks. We are conditioned to equate academic success with how accurately we anticipate exam prompts and execute assignments without deviating from the outline. At an elite institution like Penn, dominated by preprofessional anxiety and grade obsession, classes lose their spontaneity and get reduced to mindless repetition. We have built an academic culture that confuses mechanical efficiency with intellectualism. The assumption dominating many of our courses is that distraction is an enemy to be eliminated and that the shortest path between a prompt and an answer key is the only one worth taking. We learn to perceive classes as commodities, hours invested in exchange for a predictable grade, as opposed to open environments for collective thought. My own perspective on this dynamic shifted radically during my first few weeks in professor Al Filreis’ “Modern and Contemporary U.S. Poetry” course. Although it demands a heavy workload, it is by far the most engaging course on my schedule. Such engagement flourishes because the course opposes this rigidity that encompasses so much of academic life here. Filreis often reminds us of a simple,
seemingly counterintuitive truth: The poems on the syllabus are just an excuse. They are secondary to the collaborative intellectual stimulation that occurs when a group of people gathers in a room to think and engage with one another. Rather than forcing a rigid path onto every lesson, he instead leans into the distractions. When a student’s interpretation digresses or brings an unexpected personal or cultural perspective into the discussion, the class follows the distraction and allows the discussion to be derailed. This strengthens engagement since no one knows who will be called on next. In Filreis’ class, discussion becomes a game rather than a mundane lecture, ditching traditional cold-calling. The students are also allowed the freedom to vote for whichever poem they feel is most significant to talk about each week. In this representative and “gamified” manner, participating students are regarded as equal intellectuals in discussion rather than as passive participants waiting anxiously to recite just the answers their professors want to hear. Nevertheless, this open-ended, unscripted pedagogy may seem to be a luxury exclusive to the humanities. In literature, meaning is innately pluralistic, allowing for multiple valid interpretations. In STEM fields, however,
there is generally only one correct answer; everything operates according to precise and inarguable physical, chemical, or biological laws. From this perspective, a linear and highly structured lecture seems not only appropriate but also necessary to communicate foundational data. Yet this objection confuses the nature of the material with the method of instruction. Reducing STEM to passive note-taking hurts mastery of a subject far more than it helps. Educational science consistently disproves the idea that robotic lecturing, like reading from a set of Google Slides, is optimal for scientific training; a recent study found that nearly 80% of undergraduate students report significant improvement in academic performance, information retention, and engagement when courses begin to incorporate interactive learning as opposed to conventionally passive lecturing. Even in disciplines governed by objective facts, full comprehension requires an environment in which students are able to address ambiguity and test hypotheses without fear of making mistakes. Filreis’ class is by no means hard in the traditional sense. There are no trick questions or curved grading distributions designed to weed students out. Its rigor stems from the requirement of sustained engagement. There isn’t any opportunity to get locked out of
a conversation or remain a spectator. Positioning the material as an open and democratic arena enables students to articulate their own knowledge and opinions, whereas before they may have just been reproducing exactly what had been told to them. To encourage independent thought across all disciplines, Penn’s academic departments must begin to prioritize open-ended dialogue in their courses. Academic programs have to promote deeper thought through spontaneous discussion rather than the mechanical completion of a textbook syllabus. Encouraging faculty to embrace classroom digressions as well as interactive, democratic participation allows students to view intellectual tension as an essential component of scholarship. Penn’s primary initiative must center on developing minds equipped for ambiguity and debate so students can truly receive the prestigious and careerreadying education they signed up for. AUBREY POMRINK is a College first year studying English and neuroscience from Willow Grove, Pa. Her email is apomrink@sas. upenn.edu.
6 NEWS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
Penn hosts weekend dedicated to alumni careers in arts, media The Oct. 15-17 event featured a luncheon discussion with Vice Provost for the Arts Timothy Rommen CATHERINE L’HELIAS Staff Reporter
Penn Alumni hosted its triennial weekend of programming to celebrate careers in the arts and media. The Oct. 15-17 affair featured interactive events including a Platt Performing Arts panel and a luncheon discussion with Vice Provost for the Arts Timothy Rommen. Penn Spectrum Weekend was hosted across a variety of locations on campus and brought in over 225 attendees — including alumni, students, staff, and faculty. Every three years, Penn Spectrum’s alumni groups host the event to discuss matters important to them. This year’s theme was centered around the arts — a decision “conceived of and presented by alumni,” according to Director of Penn Spectrum Programs and Shared Interest Groups Daina Richie-Troy. In an opening luncheon on Friday, 1996 College graduate and former English professor Salamishah Tillet and 2005 College graduate Paul Farber discussed the current state of public art. In an interview, Tillet discussed the growing significance of activism and community service in her life — emphasizing a prevalence of racial tension and gender-based violence that has shaped her career. Tillet — who works as a critic for The New York Times — co-founded A Long Walk Home, an organization that uses art to empower young people and help put an end to gender-based violence. She discussed how art forms can help individuals understand their trauma while simultaneously enabling them to reconnect with themselves, heal, or even become activists themselves. She credited Penn for introducing her to the idea of pursuing a career in the arts and academia — recalling the “dynamic experience” she had in the English and Africana Studies departments at Penn, which helped forge her professional life. “I’m really grateful for my ability to grow and evolve with this institution over time,” Tillet added. On Friday evening, 1987 College graduate Sara Lomax discussed her journey as a black woman who became a media entrepreneur as president and CEO of Philadelphia’s only Black-owned talk radio station. During the event, she emphasized that “it’s really important, especially in a city like Philadelphia, for everyday, average, regular Black people to have access to information and resources that they might not know.” In an interview, Lomax attributed her ability to overcome the challenges she faced as a Black leader to her belief in herself. She expressed that Penn offered her the opportunity to explore different aspects of herself, adding that the University “built a level of confidence in” her.
On Saturday, a lunchtime panel featured Rommen in conversation with the founders of various Penn art organizations — including 1994 College graduate Raqiba Bourne, 1989 Engineering graduate Lolita Jackson, and 2004 College graduate Carlos Andrés Gómez. The panelists discussed their experiences with building art communities on campus and called for more institutional support for such organizations. “In order to receive funding and recognition, you have to have experience and exposure,” Bourne said during the event. There is a circular “conundrum,” however, because “in order to have experience and exposure, you need funding to receive recognition.” In an interview, Gómez — co-founder of the Excelano Project — described his connection to the performing arts community as “a really important anchor” during his time at Penn. He added that it directly contributed to how “meaningful” his experience with the University was. After initially facing rejection when attempting to create the club, Gómez reflected that he believed the project was “a very unlikely long shot.” He emphasized that “the spirit of challenge and constructive provocation” has always been at the center of the club. He expressed hope that “Excelano remains a foil in a world that is increasingly disconnected, lonely, divided, and where humanity is being outsourced to large language models,” referring to the dawning age of artificial intelligence. Bourne founded African Rhythms — a dance group that existed at Penn for 27 years but has not been active since 2021. She explained that she started the group to “foster a sense of belonging,” emphasizing the importance of individuals engaging with the arts. In a statement, Bourne added that she intended to “create an affirmative space and to celebrate the beauty and richness of African culture and people of African descent, even when it seemed like things were going terribly wrong or falling apart.” “Art is my oxygen,” she said during the panel. In an interview, she added that art “has a way of reaching your heart and your soul in ways that data sets can’t necessarily touch.” “We’re at a place where people don’t think it’s okay to be learning and making mistakes and growing, and art is one of the best places to do that,” Bourne explained. Attendees were required to purchase a ticket — priced at $75 for alumni or guests and $25 for current students.
Seven Penn faculty elected to National Academy of Medicine The faculty will join 117 existing University-affiliated academy members CYNTHIA NGA Staff Reporter
Seven Penn faculty members are among the 100person cohort newly elected to the National Academy of Medicine. According to an Oct. 19 announcement, six faculty members at the Perelman School of Medicine and one at the School of Veterinary Medicine will join a group of 117 existing Penn-affiliated members in the academy. The health organization recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the advancement of medical sciences, healthcare, and public health. The 2026 inductees include Marisa Bartolomei, Carsten Gerhart Bönnemann, Max Kelz, Meghan LaneFall, Nicola Mason, Kiran Musunuru, and Courtney Schreiber. Bartolomei is a professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Medical School. She was recognized for her research identifying one of the first imprinted genes and her insights into the clinical disorders associated with imprinted gene dysregulation. A professor of Neurology in the Medical School, Bönnemann also serves as chair of the Department of Genomic and Translational Neuroscience at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He was elected for developing targeted genetic treatments for neurogenetic disorders of childhood. His studies have also advanced precision medicine and produced new animal and cellbased models for translational research. Kelz, who serves as director for research education at the Medical School’s Department of Anesthesiology, was recognized for discovering that the “induction” and “emergence” of general anesthesia have different neural mechanisms. He also identified differences in anesthetic sensitivity across sexes. According to Penn Medicine, his
findings have improved clinical care and recovery for surgical patients. Lane-Fall is a professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care in the Medical School. She was recognized for combining the study of organizational behavior change with human factors engineering to maternal health research. Her work has led to “equity improvements” in maternal care across the United States, according to Penn Medicine. From Penn Vet, Mason is a professor of Medicine and Pathobiology. Through the OneHealth Initiative, her research studies client-owned pet dogs with naturally occurring disease to inform human medicine. Her work has led to treatment advancements — from vaccines to gene therapies — for both animals and humans. Musunuru is a professor of Translational Research at the Medical School and co-director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Orphan Disease Center. He was recognized for contributing to the creation and first use of therapeutic gene-editing in human patients. He also discovered multiple genes and mechanisms involved in cardiovascular disease. Schreiber is a professor of Human Behavior and Reproduction, Obstetrics, and Gynecology at the Medical School. She was recognized for improving miscarriage care and redesigning early pregnancy services. Her leadership in complex family planning helped establish a board certification pathway and a national subspecialist workforce for the Complex Family Planning Division of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. In 2024, six Penn faculty members were elected to the academy, and in the year prior, five Penn faculty members were elected.
THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM
GUIDELINES, from front page The changes incorporate feedback from listening sessions and written submissions, as well as input from the Offices of the President and the Provost. Feedback for further revisions will be accepted in additional listening sessions scheduled in November. Written comments will be accepted until Dec. 7. Once finalized, the revised guidelines will replace the 1993 rules, which have been clarified by interpretive guidelines over the years and partially replaced by temporary standards for demonstrations. Here are key changes in the new draft. Committee structure Compared with that initial draft, the revised structure moves authority away from the Provost’s Office. The provost’s expanded role had been a significant source of concern for previous committee members and others in the campus community. “The administration is taking over control,” Wharton School professor and former committee member Eric Orts said in an April interview. “It’s a purely advisory body to the administration.” The March draft proposed a committee of 13 members named or approved by the provost. After that draft was released, fifth-year physics Ph.D. candidate and former committee member Will Chan said the approval system had an “air of the provost reserving the right to swap out anyone that they don’t particularly want to have on the committee.” The revised draft returns to 17 voting members selected by their respective constituencies, made up of eight faculty members, three staff members, and six students — the same composition prescribed by the 1993 guidelines. The new proposal also identifies the Committee on Open Expression as a standing committee of the University Council and introduces a tri-chair structure. Committee members will select the chair-elect from among their faculty representatives. Currently, the Committee on Open Expression is an independent body of the Council. The March draft proposed having the committee jointly report to the provost and the Faculty Senate tri-chairs. Executive director of open expression The March draft introduced a new title: the executive director of open expression, who would be charged with maintaining the guidelines and making final decisions on disciplinary referrals. While the role remains similar in the most recent proposal, the Committee on Open Expression gains enhanced oversight of the executive director. The proposed executive director would work in an independent Office of Open Expression under the provost, with “primary operational oversight from COE,” according to the revised draft. Committee members would constitute a voting majority of the search committee for the position. In the first draft, the executive director would have reported to the provost and provided a “dotted line report” to the Faculty Senate trichairs. The provost would have selected the executive director in consultation with the Faculty Senate tri-chairs and the Committee on Open Expression chair. In a Sept. 22 statement, the University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors called for transferring authority over the guidelines to a “representative, democratically elected body.” Graduate Employees Together — University of Pennsylvania and Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn cosponsored the principles alongside the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 47 Locals 590 and 397. The Committee of Interns and Residents, affiliated with Service Employees International Union Local 1957, also signed onto the statement, which urged that the guidelines protect workers’ right to engage in concerted activity. The previously proposed Open Expression Observer program has been renamed the Campus Expression Facilitator program. In the new draft, individuals referred for disciplinary action can appeal to the committee’s tri-chairs, who can temporarily issue a stay of the referral pending review by a committee panel. Clarified language A central complaint in the previous draft was vague language. Many community members pointed to phrases such as “unreasonably disrupt,” “interfere unreasonably,” and “event” with concerns they could enable “unbridled interpretive discretion.” Ahead of a listening session in April, third-year Perelman School of Medicine Ph.D. candidate Maya English, a GET-UP member, called the guidelines “extremely vague” and argued that the University was attempting to “muddy the waters” of what “is and isn’t appropriate.” The new proposal features a section dedicated to defining key terms, including “event,” which is
described as “a planned undertaking for the purpose of expression.” The line that featured the phrases “interfere unreasonably with the regular activities of others” and “unreasonably disrupting the normal activity that takes place within the University” has been deleted. The remaining standards for determining whether an individual violated the guidelines now frequently feature the phrase “negligently, recklessly, or intentionally.” Scheduling events and spontaneous demonstrations The revised scheduling provisions also address a concern voiced during the spring feedback period: whether advance registration requirements would accommodate protests responding to unfolding events. At the first listening session this spring, multiple attendees questioned how expectations of advance notice for demonstrations would work in practice. “Protests happen organically,” one faculty member said. The general scheduling section no longer includes an earlier seven-business-day application requirement for specified campus spaces, which had included College Green and Locust Walk. It now states that “spontaneous expressive activities may occur in any outdoor, publicly accessible campus space, provided they do not violate any guidelines or conflict with previously-registered events in the same space.” A separate provision retains seven business days as the definition of a timely request for speaker venues and related services. Scheduling procedures continue to vary by venue, and some events may require security assessments. Currently, event scheduling is governed by the temporary standards, which call for all events to be registered at least 48 hours in advance. Those occurring in College Green, on Locust, and in certain other locations must be registered two weeks beforehand. Online speech and the guidelines’ scope The scope of online regulation was among the concerns raised about the March proposal. In a statement submitted during the spring feedback period, the chairs of the Penn Association for Gender Equity questioned whether the draft’s provisions could extend to personal accounts. “This lack of clarity could mean that students’ personal social media could be subject to University discipline,” the chairs wrote. The new draft removes a broad reference to “cyberspace” and specifies that the guidelines apply to circumstances involving University premises, affiliated groups, University resources, or representations of University affiliation. The draft expressly excludes “teaching or research activities or clinical care,” stating that those activities are governed by policies specific to their respective domains. Police and identification According to the compiled feedback, some community members raised the possibility of “police violence” and ID checks that “could potentially be used for criminal prosecution and deportation” under the March draft. Under the revisions, ID requests would remain possible through a process tied to perceived violations. Campus Expression Facilitators can ask to see Penn IDs if repeated de-escalation attempts fail to resolve a potential violation. If the violation persists after the request, they can record identifying information, provided they first notify those involved. The proposal separately permits facilitators or the executive director to contact the Division of Public Safety in extenuating circumstances. Such requests for assistance would be reported to the committee. “Obligations regarding ID requests from law enforcement officers such as Philadelphia Police and Penn Police are governed by statutes,” the proposal adds. Compared with the March draft, the new proposal prescribes greater limits on when ID requests can be made. Restrictions on protests and signage Restrictions on blocked access, disruptive sound, and unauthorized temporary structures broadly remain, though some details have been changed. Temporary structures — including tents — still require authorization, although the revised draft omits the word “encampments.” Projected images now need to be reviewed and approved by the executive director, with detailed written reasons explaining why submissions are rejected. The March draft referred projection requests to the vice provost for University Life or a relevant dean’s office. The new proposal clarifies that chalking is “permitted on sidewalks and outdoor stairways only” — in accordance with existing policies. The old draft placed rigid restrictions on time and location for amplified sound, but the most recent proposal specifically bans “continuous, recurring, or daily high-volume sound” only when it “systematically degrades surrounding living, study, or research environments.”
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
NEWS 7
Penn graduate worker union pushes to settle contract dispute out of court The motion is the latest in a months long dispute over whether certain doctoral students are eligible for union representation under federal labor law ISHA CHITIRALA News Editor
Penn’s graduate student union asked a federal court on Monday to dismiss a University filing that seeks a ruling on whether certain doctoral students are eligible for union representation. The motion is the latest in a months-long dispute over whether first- and second-year students in Penn’s Biomedical Graduate Studies program should be considered employees under federal labor law. Graduate Employees Together — University of Pennsylvania argued on Oct. 19 that a federal court lacks the jurisdiction to answer that question. In August, Penn filed for a declaratory judgment asking the court to decide whether those students are employees represented by the bargaining unit and whether GET-UP can pursue arbitration over the issue. A request for comment was left with a University spokesperson. “We filed a motion to dismiss because we believe the lawsuit filed by Penn is an attempt to circumvent our agreed-upon grievance and arbitration process,” immunology Ph.D. candidate and GET-UP Vice President Nicolai Apenes wrote in a statement. The union’s members were seeking to enforce their collective bargaining agreement with the University by utilizing an “agreed-upon process for resolving any disagreements,” Apenes added. The agreement — ratified in February as GETUP’s first contract — states that educational fellowship recipients who do not provide teaching or research services or who are in lab rotations and first- and second-year students in the BGS program are excluded from the union’s representation. According to the court filing, the union filed a grievance in April that the exclusion of educational fellowship recipients violates its contract. In July, after initial negotiations fell through, a GET-UP representative sent an arbitration request to the
CONSENT, from front page Penn’s Center for Civil Rights for additional information. According to a University spokesperson, PVP led more than 120 Consent Circles for over 2,400 incoming students this August. Nininger said the sessions were most helpful to incoming students who have received limited or abstinence-only education on sexual violence prevention in the past. However, there is still room for improvement, he said. “Later on in their college journey, a lot of students don’t revisit these conversations,” he added. “A lot of students have completely forgotten about their Consent Circle — what that looked like, what that room was, and the education that they got there. So I think that at some point, revisiting conversations with Penn students would be super helpful.” At a Wednesday University Council meeting, Penn President Larry Jameson pledged to increase education and awareness efforts on sexual violence prevention and expand the University’s Title IX capacity.
American Arbitration Association — prompting Penn to take legal action. A University spokesperson wrote at the time that Penn “maintains its firm position” that first- and second-year BGS students are “engaged in academic activities as they complete the foundational academic milestones of their doctoral program.” “These are not bargaining unit activities,” the spokesperson stated. “This distinction is important because it preserves students’ right to focus on their academic progress during this critical period, as well as the University’s right to make decisions in support of that academic progress.” Citing a “well-established federal labor policy favoring arbitration,” GET-UP argued on Monday that the court lacks “subject matter jurisdiction over this controversy” because both Penn and the union had agreed to arbitrate all disputes under the contract. The dispute was “clearly” and “unambiguously” made over the interpretation of the agreement. As a result, GET-UP argued, it must be resolved through arbitration, not litigation. In its August filing, Penn argued that GET-UP’s demand for arbitration was “predicated on the presumption” that first- and second-year BGS students were “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act and therefore belong in the contracted bargaining unit — an interpretation the University deemed inconsistent with federal labor law. Last month, a federal appeals court found that a similar dispute between Harvard’s graduate student union and the university fell within the NLRB’s jurisdiction and could be decided through arbitration. “The facts in Harvard College closely parallel the facts in this case,” GET-UP wrote in its motion to dismiss. The status of educational fellowship recipients has long been a point of contention between GET-UP and During his opening remarks, Jameson alluded to a civil lawsuit filed last month by a former Cornell University student alleging she was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024. The university’s response has drawn widespread criticism and accusation that campus administrators mishandled the case. After participating in the hourlong Consent Circle, College first year Sarah Pan said she still feels “very nebulous” about the process of reporting a sexual assault incident at Penn. Each session begins with introductions and a review of discussion guidelines. Facilitators then explain the FRIES acronym, which defines consent as freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. Students discuss four questions involving hypothetical scenarios, and the programming concludes with information about Penn’s confidential support and reporting resources. “If you were to quiz me right now, I would not be able to name the exact procedure in which someone is able to get help, what even happens, and what my rights are,” Pan said. According to a University spokesperson, 91% of students who completed participant evaluations indicated that after attending Consent Circles, they knew
WEINING DING | DP FILE PHOTO
Picket line at a GET-UP rally on Oct. 8, 2025.
the University. Both parties attended a November 2023 NLRB hearing in hopes of settling the matter, which delayed GET-UP’s unionization election. The union argued that many educational fellowship recipients arrived with prior research experience and meaningfully contributed to research, making them eligible for the bargaining unit. Penn contended that graduate students in lab rotations are engaged solely in training. In March 2024, the NLRB ruled that educational fellowship recipients should be excluded from voting in the unionization election. GET-UP won an appeal the following month, which allowed the recipients to
vote but left their status in the union’s bargaining unit up for future consideration. After the tentative agreement was reached in February, a University spokesperson wrote that the bargaining unit’s scope “was one of the many issues the University and GETUP-UAW resolved through negotiations.” At the time, GET-UP members said the issue remained disputed and that the union would continue advocating for the inclusion of “all workers.” GET-UP’s contract with Penn runs through June 1, 2028. The two parties must begin renewal negotiations no later than 60 days before expiration.
where to seek support at Penn related to sexual assault. While College first year Long Jiang thought a peerled format was more effective than a staff-directed alternative, he said the vast majority of participants appeared “tapped out.” The programming, he said, should focus on the “culture that allows for violations of consent,” rather than “teaching us what we already know.” “I don’t think these Consent Circles alone can actually bring about change in terms of the prevention aspect,” Pan added, stressing the need for administrators to communicate the consequences of sexual misconduct and enforce disciplinary measures. Pan said she felt the Canvas modules — which first years finish before arriving on campus — were simply “another mandatory thing” she had to complete. “I feel like most freshmen, when they’re going through the NSO modules, they’re just skimming through it,” she said. College first year Adrian Piwowarczyk, on the other hand, found the modules to be a helpful way to introduce students to Title IX and the support resources available on campus. Piwowarczyk also lauded the Consent Circles format, saying he felt students were encouraged to participate without being
forced to speak if they felt uncomfortable. While he didn’t think that the training necessarily “rewired anyone’s brain and completely flipped their thinking of consent,” Piwowarczyk said he appreciated that the Consent Circles programming encouraged students to think about consent beyond sexual relationships. “I definitely felt more equipped, and I didn’t feel that it was just a formality,” he said. “If it didn’t add to somebody’s knowledge, it definitely didn’t subtract.” College sophomore Emylee Perkins — another student facilitator — said she was trained to respond calmly to potentially harmful comments or “victimblaming” during her sessions by asking students to explain their reasoning rather than immediately correcting them. Perkins said that her students were “optimistic to share,” and that the information was likely more comfortable to “hear from another student than to have administrators talking at you.” PVP was “very intentional” about recruiting a diverse array of facilitators, according to student facilitator and College sophomore Tyrus Roney. “I’m a big dude, so consent talk coming out of me is very novel,” he said. “I think it’s helpful because it exposes a lot of the Penn students to the different types of people that we have here on campus.”
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8 SPORTS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026
THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM
Sports
Penn men’s soccer shuts down Brown, falls to Kansas City The Red and Blue recorded an Ivy League win and a nonconference loss in its two-game homestand DANIEL OBSTGARTEN Sports Associate
With three matches left in the regular season, Penn men’s soccer controls its own destiny. Penn defeated Brown in a dominating 3-0 win on Saturday afternoon, securing three points for conference play to tie for second place with Dartmouth in the Ivy League standings. On Tuesday, the Quakers fell to No. 7 Kansas City by a score of 2-1, with the lone Quaker goal coming off the left foot of junior midfielder Michael Howard. “We’ve done a nice job of representing ourselves at the best of our ability, which is a good standard,” coach Brian Gill said. “I’ll always applaud the players for the effort that they give and the qualities that they try to bring to it.” Quakers trap Brown en route to convincing victory They say if you see a bear in the woods, do not run, in case you startle the bear. But when the Bears came to Rhodes Field, full speed ahead worked just fine. Penn (6-3-3, 2-1-1 Ivy) beat Brown on Saturday afternoon at Rhodes Field 3-0 in a balanced, quick-starting victory over the Ivy League’s current bottom-ranked team. Three different scorers notched goals as the Quakers pitched a shutout for the second straight contest — and their fourth in five games. “The commitment to defending comes through the full team, and it’s also helpful when the offense is able to take some pressure off of the defending spells of the game,” Gill said. The Quakers got off to an aggressive start, quickly taking control of the ball and forcing it up the field. Five minutes into the game, junior forward Romeo Dahlen had a shot go wide, setting up a corner kick taken by senior midfielder Jack-Ryan Jeremiah. The feed into the box would land right on the foot of senior defender Connor Dawson, who punched it home for his first goal of the year to give the Quakers a very early 1-0 lead. The first half’s offensive production, beyond the opening 10 minutes, was rather limited for both sides — Penn and Brown each put up three shots. The biggest story of the half was the physicality, as is frequently the case in conference play. Brown was whistled for five fouls and two yellow cards in the first half alone. “We go into the games … at this stage knowing there’s a level of physicality that comes in, and we just have to deal with it,” Gill said. The second half opened with more trademark physicality, with each side tacking on a yellow card not long into the half. Penn controlled the ball for much of the half, but wasn’t able to generate much offense for a stretch of nearly 20 minutes. A shot past the far post in the 63rd minute forced a Brown goal kick, which was rapidly won back by the Quakers through a contested header. Penn quickly turned the play upfield and found themselves deep in Brown’s half of the field. A centering feed from senior defender Joaquin Niehenke arced into the box, where sophomore midfielder Adam Ambrus-Aikelin was set up to deliver a header to the back of the net, giving the Quakers a larger cushion. The Quakers, now up 2-0, weren’t content to let the clock tick away. Penn kept up the offensive pressure, and were rewarded for it in short order. Junior forward Marco Bottene split two defenders after receiving a long outlet pass, but got tripped up in the box by Brown goalkeeper Graham Kois. After a lengthy video review, Bottene was awarded his penalty kick. Bottene picked bottom right, but so did Kois. However, Kois couldn’t corral the ball, and the rebound fell back to Bottene, who took a touch and
NOAH JEONG | SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
Niehenke during a game against Monmouth on Sept. 1.
tapped it into the net to give the Quakers a final insurance goal. The Penn backline spent the rest of the game shutting down the Bears’ offensive attacks without putting senior goalkeeper Phillip Falcon III in too much danger. As the final whistle blew, the Quakers celebrated securing their second Ivy League win and a massive three points in the conference’s standings. “Different narratives start to evolve, and one of those is that you want to try and make postseason,” Gill said following the match. “The only way to be able to do that is to have positive performances and get good results in games that matter in conference.” Penn can’t survive Kansas City As fate would have it, the third goal in both
THREADS
H C P S R E H S
O L Y G I A S A
S R E R N T E S N G O B R M O R E D O R Y H O G
S E O R O C L L
ROYAL WINNERS ACROSS
10/14/26, 8:34 PM
Theme: What’s your favorite scary movie?
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE
Instructions: To play Threads, search the grid for hidden words related to the provided theme. Each letter can only be used exactly once. Each game includes a “spangram,” which is a challenge word that connects two sides of the board and hints at the remaining words in the puzzle. This is not your ordinary word search: letters may be found horizontally, vertically, and diagonally for a single word! Play hundreds of more DP puzzles created at www.thedp.com/section/crosswords. Editor: Nira Goyal
10/21/26, 6:02 PM
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games would come via a reviewed penalty kick. This time, however, it wouldn’t go Penn’s way. The Quakers hung tight with No. 7 Kansas City (10-2-2, 3-0 Summit), but a late penalty kick goal was just enough for Kansas City to squeeze by on Tuesday evening at Rhodes Field. In the first-ever meeting between the two collegiate programs, the Roos emerged victorious in the Quakers’ first home defeat of the season. “They’re a good team, and their better attributes were coming out early,” Gill said of Kansas City. “I think our players did fight back, and they were able to bring the game back to a level term.” The first half nearly started in much the same way as the prior game. The Quakers rushed up the field after KCM took the kickoff, and a forward pass was blocked off the shin of Dahlen, setting up a quick shot. Penn wouldn’t have decisive control of the ball for nearly 15 minutes, as nearly every throw-in, goal kick, and header was won by the visitors. “They’re a team that’s really good on the ball, so we knew that there were going to be spells where we were up against it, in our own half,” Howard said following the game. “I think we need to do a better job of getting on the front foot in some of these games.” The Roos were ultimately rewarded for their pressure, as a 32nd-minute shot from KCM’s Mathias Baucher changed direction after bouncing off of a few Quakers in front of the net and ultimately past Falcon. The Penn goalkeeper would finish the game with one save on three shots. The Quakers would go into halftime still trailing by a goal. Coming out of the half, the Quakers were determined to get on the board, and managed to wrest control of the game out of the hands of KCM. Yet even with more control, Penn was struggling to get themselves set up; three straight free kicks from the middle of the field were cleared away by
the Roos with relative ease. “We need to take more advantage of those opportunities because we’re a good set piece team. We just have to work on our service and make sure we’re getting balls into good areas,” Howard said. Howard would take his own advice in the 78th minute. Dribbling up the field and running into a defensive wall proved to be no obstacle for him, as he spun and cut back into the middle of the pitch, unleashing a left-foot dagger to the top-left corner and tying the game. “I was trying to get it out to Kalani [Kunimura], but [Kansas City] was flowing out wide, so I … just looked for an opening to shoot. I got to a spot. Probably haven’t hit it with my left foot that good in a while,” Howard said. The exuberance of the Quakers and their home crowd was short-lived, however. Just five minutes later, a renewed Kansas City offensive push led to a video confirmed penalty kick for the Roos. KCM’s Raphael Kistmann made no mistake, putting the ball into the opposite corner on Falcon and putting Penn into a hole that they would not be able to climb out of. Two late shots from the Quakers gave them a chance, but the final whistle ended in disappointment for the Quakers in their penultimate home game. “I did feel like we took a breath, started to play, and I thought we got a great response from the group in the second half, all the way across,” Gill said. “The goal we conceded at the end was disappointing, because I feel like it was preventable.” Penn’s next match will be a Saturday-afternoon showdown in Cambridge, Mass. against Harvard (3-6-2, 2-2 Ivy). The Crimson sit just a point back of the Quakers in the Ivy League standings. “We’re just going to keep working as hard as we can. We’re going to get hot, and once we do, I think we’re going to be a scary team,” Howard said.
Reach for a treat
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easy choice for me from there on out.” Although the decision to begin her Division I athletic career at Penn was an easy one, she still felt the struggle during her first years in Philadelphia both on and off the field. “I really, really struggled with confidence my first couple years here. I really struggled with it because I felt like every mistake meant that I was going to be done. Like it was over. There was someone else that was going to come do a better job,” Fuss said. However, Fuss overcame those challenges. Her secret? Learning to give herself grace. “When you give yourself grace, it allows you to build more confidence,” she said. That confidence helped her find the path to show up as her best self on the field. “I play best when I feel free, and I’m having fun. And so I think that’s one of the biggest differences that I’ve had between my early years and now,” Fuss said. “You want to be precise. You want to be clinical. But one mistake isn’t gonna ruin everything.” Fuss’ growth is evident to everyone around her, especially her coach, Turner. “She’s probably one of the fastest players you know in the country from a speed perspective, so I think sometimes it’s just easy to run by people,” Turner said about Fuss’ skills on the field. “But we need her to run by people and then make the proper decision. She’s done a really good job of putting herself in good spaces in front of goal, and her teammates have done a good job of finding her in those spaces, and then she’s been confident to finish.” It’s this confidence that’s made Fuss stand out as a key player. She scored two late game-winning
goals in women’s soccer’s back-to-back victories last month, keeping the team’s win streak alive both times. “I’m so focused that I almost kind of black out in those moments,” she said about those goals. Even when she’s in the zone, her objective out on the field is clear: collective success and progress. “My ultimate goal is just to have the team win. Whether or not that’s me scoring the goal, I don’t really care. If I’m being completely honest, it’s great if I do. But I just want to win so bad,” Fuss said. “So it’s a collective effort, and I’m there for it.” But it wasn’t an easy feat to get to where she is now. She describes struggling with anxiety and feeling like she didn’t belong in her early years. “My freshman year … I did not talk at all. We would have pregame team meals, and I would sit with my AirPods in. Not to be rude, but just because I was so socially anxious, and I didn’t really know where I fit in yet because I was new and I didn’t want to impose on other people’s friendships,” Fuss said. Fuss has since become more comfortable with her role on the team, as a mentor and leader to the younger players. “I understand the impact that I have on the younger eyes on the team … It’s a privilege to be in that position, and I think myself and everyone else in the senior class, we’ve all spoken about it, and we’re all really honored to have such influential roles,” Fuss said. Turner praised Fuss for her leadership. “She sets a terrific example, not only for the players that are younger than her who look up to her, but her preparation is really at a very high level. She always arrives to preseason fit and ready to go. She really cares about and is very reflective on her own self performance and what she can do better and what the team can do better,” Turner said. “I think Mia is a very loyal person. I think she puts the people she cares about really at the forefront of her mind, and I think she does that with the
team as well. She’s very much a team player, and she wants success for herself, but it’s team first,” senior goalkeeper Megan Graves said. Fuss’ relationship with Graves is special — they share the goal of going to medical school after graduating from Penn. Fuss hopes to eventually become a surgeon. “Having Megan and having a teammate that is also going through the exact same thing as me, and being able to lean on each other, study together, having the exact same schedule … I actually don’t know if I would have been able to get through it so seamlessly without her,” Fuss said. When asked about how she handles the pressure of competing at the Division I level and staying on the pre-med track, she credited her meticulously planned schedule, her love of learning, and a good support system. After Penn, Fuss would love to go back to her hometown of Austin for a year to spend time with her family, including her three younger brothers. She doesn’t plan on playing professionally but is certain she will be “a Sunday League menace.” During her year off, she’s considering doing research or becoming a medical assistant back at home, but the new NCAA fifth-year rule has opened up an additional possibility. “I’m kind of finding myself in this gray space where I’m not really sure what I’m going to do yet because I would love to take a fifth year, but I would only really like to do it near home,” Fuss said. In Fuss’ final season with the team, she’s trying to embrace every moment and take in all the experiences. Settling into the final stretch of her soccer career, she has found time to reflect on what she has learned from playing soccer for so long. “I was learning to give myself grace and then also understanding delayed gratification,” she said. “The things that you do now may or may not pay off later. But they could. Just be extremely disciplined, so that when the time comes, you are prepared, because luck favors the prepared.”
qualifying rounds as the No. 9 seed. Despite dropping her first set to Drexel’s Alina Sogomoyan, Deng went on a tear, winning the next four sets to qualify for the main draw. “There’s no fuss with Peien,” Kunovac said. “She’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll just play.’ Doesn’t matter qualies, pre-qualies, main draw. It doesn’t matter. I just want to compete. So she just takes care of business, and she did a phenomenally good job.” Senior Liza Tkachenko rounded out the Quakers who made it out of the qualifying rounds, winning four sets in a row while limiting her opponents to three games or fewer in each set. Of the eight Quakers in the main draw’s round of 64, six advanced to the round of 32. Although most of the matches were played concurrently, players made a concerted effort to support their teammates whenever possible. After dropping the first set to Temple’s Lou Baudouin, Deng relied on her teammates’ support and newfound understanding of her opponent’s patterns to pull off the reverse sweep. “Her playing style was pretty unusual,” Deng wrote. “I struggled to get used to her rhythm at first, especially her variety of slices and drop shots … My coach Sanela [Kunovac] gave me really helpful direction on court, and my teammates’ support also made a huge difference.” Most of the matches in the round of 32 were pretty straightforward, but Tomova and Velaga were forced to face off in a rare Penn-on-Penn battle. Unlike in every other match of the tournament, Kunovac wasn’t on the court, and the rest of the roster
was notably absent from the stands, honoring an unspoken program rule. “Facing a teammate is always tough because I want her to do as well as she can in the tournament as well, so there are always mixed emotions during a match like that,” Velaga wrote. “I want to do the best for myself, but at the same time, I want all my teammates to win their matches, so it’s always tough for both players, no matter who comes out on top.” Velaga ultimately took the match, but it was a hard-fought battle between the Red and Blue duo. Velaga took the first and third sets, 7-5, 6-3, while Tomova claimed the second set, 6-4. Deng and sophomore Joleen Saw advanced alongside Velaga to the round of 16 off decisive two-set victories. “Playing a teammate is never easy because we both want the other to succeed, so there are mixed emotions in the match,” Tomova wrote. “However, I think me and Esha handled it very well. We showed sportsmanship and respect for one another and represented Penn admirably.” Saw and Deng put up a fight in the round of 16 but ultimately succumbed to Princeton’s Tsehay Driscoll and No. 5 seed Kenzie Nguyen of Columbia, respectively. Driscoll and Nguyen advanced to the final round of the tournament, which will be played at the NCAA Singles Tournament in November. It looked like Velaga would face a similar fate after dropping the first set, 6-2, to No. 9 seed Zuzanna Frankowska of Rutgers, but the Colmar, Pa., native bounced back in the next two sets, defeating Frankowska, 7-5, 6-3, to advance to the
quarterfinals. Velaga claimed the ITA Northeast Super Regionals singles title in 2023 as a freshman and finished as the tournament runner-up in her sophomore year. In her final season with the Quakers, would Velaga go on to reclaim the title? Her opponent in the quarterfinals, Princeton’s No. 9 seed Zhang, took her home-court advantage in stride. Although Velaga was able to put some points on the board, she ultimately fell to Zhang, 6-1, 6-3, in two sets. “I definitely took away the difficulties I faced in the match, and I will use that match to work on different things in practice!” Velaga wrote. “It’s never easy to lose a match like that, but it is helpful for me to know where my game can improve so I can win that match next time.” Penn women’s tennis has a stacked slate of tournaments ahead. It’ll take on the rest of the conference in New York this weekend before flying out to Georgia for the ITA Masters Tournament in early November. Velaga and Schlepphorst will stay home, though, defending the fort at the Hamlin/Hecht Tennis Centers at the ITA Sectionals. Even though the team will be split up and potentially competing against each other in the tournaments to come, Deng remained positive. “It never felt like I was competing alone,” Deng wrote. “Winning matches felt like a win for our whole team. I’m so grateful for their support. When I fell behind, their cheers lifted me back up and helped me reset.”
FOOTBALL, from back page
FUSS, from back page
“It was a miscommunication,” Santos said of the decision to rush the field goal. “We had the ability to spike the ball and not run out and have a bazooka opportunity. We’re going to make sure we correct those things in Sunday’s meeting. Obviously, the right move in that situation is to spike it.” As Penn heads into its next game, it is unclear who will start at quarterback. “Miles [Teodecki] was cleared, but we wanted to make sure that we protected him,” Santos said. “Karson earned the right [to start] after he played that second half last week and found a way to get it done.” The Quakers’ next game will be under the Friday night lights on Oct. 23, as they look to grab their first conference win against No. 25 Yale (3-1, 1-1 Ivy). “I think we just have to respond and reload,” McPherson said. “I don’t think our brand of football was put on tape today. I think we can do better, and I think we’re going to respond.”
JEKEUN JUNG | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Siqueiros-Lasky prepares to throw the ball.
TENNIS, from back page sectionals in the coming weeks. “I think Athina and I have good coordination as a doubles team and powerful shots, both of which make us a good pair together,” Velaga wrote. “Hopefully, we will be able to take this experience and use it in our future tournaments.” As for the rest of the Quakers, three pairs won their opening matches before falling in the round of 32. “There was no moment of panic. There was no moment of doubt. It was just perseverance. They were very resourceful,” Kunovac said. “So I think they can take a lot of confidence from it.” Singles All 10 Quakers qualified for the singles tournament at the ITA Northeast Regionals, but five had to play through the qualifying rounds before making it to the main draw. Freshman Emma Tomova was the favorite in the qualifying rounds, as the No. 1 seed out of 64 entries. She still faced some stiff competition, going to extra games in her final set against Princeton’s Maren Urata. Tomova ultimately defeated Urata in two sets, 6-2, 7-5, to earn her spot in the main tournament. Fellow freshman Peien Deng entered the
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THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA • FOUNDED 1885
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VOL. CXLII
NO. 25
Penn women’s rowing takes gold at Head of the Charles Penn beat the runners-up by 13 seconds, clocking 17:12.30 EARL COKER AND ELANA MASER Sports Associates
Penn women’s rowing took first place in the Women’s Championship Fours event this past weekend at the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston. With sophomore stroke seat Eden Alfi, senior three-seat Makeda Harrison, senior two-seat Anna Johnson, junior bow Jemima Wilcox, and senior coxswain Mehreen Khan, Penn won outright in 17:12.30. The Quakers put the rest of the finishers to shame, with the runners-up trailing by 13 seconds. Following Penn was the 2025 winner of the Mixed PR3 Fours, UTSC-Boston. Penn’s winning time at this year’s Head of the Charles was over a minute faster than UTSC-Boston’s winning time last year of 18:14.497. All of the Ivy League schools, except Yale, participated in this race, showing dominance for the Quakers early on over their Ivy League competitors. The success of Penn women’s rowing at the Head of the Charles was not out of the blue, as it followed its wins in the Navy Day Regatta. In this regatta, the Red and Blue finished first and second in the collegiate four, first in the freshman/novice four, first and second in the collegiate eight, and first in the freshman/novice eight. The Quakers also finished 23rd out of 32 in the Women’s Championship Eights with a time of 16:02.595, putting in a strong effort against the toptier competition. Penn women’s rowing is starting the fall off strong as it heads to the Head of the Schuylkill Regatta this Saturday, Oct. 24.
COURTESY OF PENN ATHLETICS
Penn women’s rowing took first place in the Women’s Championship Fours event at the Head of the Charles Regatta.
CATHERINE GARCIA | DESIGN ASSOCIATE
Mia Fuss believes ‘luck favors the prepared’ The senior soccer forward reflects on growth, discipline, and what lies ahead after her final season AMBER URENA Staff Reporter
Senior forward Mia Fuss was only 4 years old when her mother first put her in soccer. “I played it when I was younger, and I was always really overly competitive as a child,” she said. Like many kids, she played several sports before having to decide which one was the one for her. Stuck between gymnastics and soccer, Fuss eventually had to make her choice. “Ultimately, I went with soccer just because I loved the team aspect, and I like there being a ball involved and using my feet more,” Fuss said. “And I hated the balance beam, so it was a no-go for me.” Fuss bounced between club and school teams throughout high school, even competing as a long jumper and sprinter in track and field during her final years. “I ended up quitting soccer my junior year, high school-wise. I picked up track instead, so I did track
my junior and senior year, and I just did club soccer my senior year rather than high school as well,” she explained. She credits that track experience with helping her develop the skills that still apply to her game today. “When it came to training for track, it was working on agility and explosiveness off the first step and stuff like that,” she said. “And so when you look at the game of soccer, that’s really applicable in the first five to 10 yards of movement, and it really helps determine if you’re in a 50-50, who’s gonna get there first. It’s probably the person that’s been working on explosiveness.” By the time Fuss began navigating the college recruitment process, she had spent years perfecting her skill on the field. Still, Penn was not a destination she settled on early, only committing in August of her senior year.
“Most girls were committed by then. Funny enough, I was actually at a camp for a different school when I got a call from coach Krissy [Turner], and she was like, ‘Can you come out, stay Saturday through Monday, we want you to play at the camp over the weekend, but make sure you stay that extra day.’ And I was like, ‘OK.’ So I went out there, and then she spoke to me,” Fuss said. The combination of the people she met, a positive environment, and Penn’s academics sealed the deal for Fuss. “My parents really emphasized education over athletics to me since I was very, very little, so obviously Penn being an Ivy that checked all those boxes for them, and so having the support from them and also enjoying the athletics piece of it myself, it was like every box was checked,” she said. “It was a very See FUSS, page 9
Penn football blows 17-point lead, falls 28-27 to Columbia
Velaga, Schlepphorst advance to final at ITA Northeast Regionals
The Quakers went up two scores but were plagued by interceptions and a botched field goal attempt
The doubles tennis pair finished as runners-up at the New Jersey tournament
DANIEL OBSTGARTEN AND GRANT HAN Sports Associate and Staff Reporter
As relentless rain soaked Franklin Field, Friday night’s game bled past midnight, and by the time it ended early Saturday morning, the Quakers’ 17-point lead was gone. Penn lost its Ivy home opener to Columbia, 28-27, after leading 24-7 early in the second quarter. With the loss, Penn (2-3, 0-2 Ivy) remains winless in conference play, while Columbia (4-1, 1-1 Ivy) picked up its first Ivy win. Junior quarterback Karson Siqueiros-Lasky, starting in place of injured freshman quarterback Miles Teodecki, went 23-for-41 for 374 yards and two touchdowns — but he also threw four interceptions. “At the end of the day, we need to stop having self-inflicted wounds,” Penn football coach Rick Santos said. “Too many turnovers. You know, [we] didn’t get key stops when we needed to. Ultimately, it falls on myself, our staff.” Wide receivers sophomore Isaac Lee and freshman Mason Page both hauled in over 100 receiving yards in the Quakers’ largest offensive output of the season. Columbia quarterback Chase Goodwin threw for 237 yards and three touchdowns on 17 completions. All three touchdown passes went to Columbia wide receiver Bryce Coleman, who totaled 90 yards on six catches. The Quakers’ defense got off to an electric start, forcing a quick Columbia three-and-out on the Lions’ opening drive. The offense picked up where the defense left off and marched down the field. The slick conditions caused Siqueiros-Lasky to bobble a snap, but he recovered and turned it into a 28-yard completion to Page. Penn would put the finishing touches on its opening drive a few plays later with a six-yard touchdown run from sophomore running back Tommy Lafayette. This marked the first time all season the Quakers scored on their opening drive. The momentum didn’t end there. On the next drive, not even one minute later, junior defensive back Ty Cortes intercepted Goodwin’s pass, setting up a 52-yard field goal from sophomore kicker Mason Walters that gave Penn a 10-point lead. The Lions, however, would respond with a 70-yard touchdown drive immediately after to cut the lead to 10-7. Penn special teams stepped up again, with the kickoff being returned 66 yards by senior returner Jayden Drayton. This set up the Quakers for a 19-yard touchdown pass from Siqueiros-Lasky to Page, capping off a one-play touchdown drive. The Quakers’ defense would follow that with a crucial stop on fourth down as the first quarter ticked to an end. Penn’s offense would finish the hot streak with a 43-yard completion to Lee and a 20-yard touchdown pass to senior receiver Dante Barone. The Quakers had scored on each of their four possessions, building a 24-7 lead less than a minute into the second quarter. But the Lions couldn’t be tamed. The Quakers’ defense forced another punt, but Siqueiros-Lasky threw his first SEND STORY IDEAS TO DPSPORTS@THEDP.COM
interception of the night to Columbia defensive back A.J. George. The Lions would capitalize on the error with a 58yard touchdown drive. Penn’s attempt at a response came to a halt when Siqueiros-Lasky’s effort to throw the ball out of bounds was picked off by Columbia defensive back Carter McCray, leading to another Columbia touchdown that cut the lead to 24-21. The Quakers looked like they were driving for points at the end of the half, but Siqueiros-Lasky would throw his third interception of the quarter with the Quakers in field goal range. “That last interception before half, we had it schematically man for man,” Santos said. “They caught an edge on one of our guys, and Karson got hit.” The Quakers’ offense looked set to rebound in the second half, moving the ball to Columbia’s nine-yard line. However, the Lions’ defense would get a crucial stop on its own goal line, forcing Walters to kick a 28-yard field goal. Those three points, which extended the Quakers’ lead to 27-21, were the only points in the third quarter. Columbia opened the fourth with a drive down to the red zone, but a tipped-ball interception by sophomore defensive lineman Duncan McPherson prevented the Lions from adding more points. “Yeah, honestly, a lot of it goes to my teammate [junior linebacker Derek] McCrum,” McPherson said. “He tipped the ball, and I just got there and got it.” However, Penn’s offense couldn’t capitalize, with a completion on third-and-five being taken back by an offensive pass interference call. “You know, the last one was not an offensive pass interference. We have the iPads right now, and it was a good run play, and we got open,” Santos said. On Columbia’s next drive, the Lions would convert two third downs en route to a touchdown, giving them their first lead of the game, 28-27. The teams traded punts, and the Quakers were driving as the game hit the two-minute mark. Then, on the first play on the other side of the warning, a desperate deep ball by Siqueiros-Lasky was picked off. It looked all but over for the Red and Blue as the wind and rain picked up again. But the Quakers’ defense wasn’t going to go quietly, forcing a Columbia punt and giving the Quakers one last chance with under a minute on the clock. The drive looked promising, as three quick plays put Penn near midfield with 15 seconds to go. Siqueiros-Lasky threw over the middle to Page, setting up what would be a 51-yard field goal from Walters. Yet with nine seconds left on a ticking clock, the Quakers chose not to spike the ball, leading to a rushed field goal attempt. The wind blowing against Walters made the kick fall just short, leading to heartbreak for the Quakers as the game crept past midnight. See FOOTBALL, page 9
ELLIE CLARK AND DYLAN SHAH Sports Editor and Staff Reporter
It was net positive vibes only for Penn women’s tennis. Women’s tennis took a trip to Princeton, N.J., for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Northeast Regionals. Senior Esha Velaga and freshman Athina Schlepphorst, the No. 6 seed in the doubles tournament, made a deep run to the final. Velaga also advanced to the quarterfinals of the singles tournament, where she was the No. 4 seed, before being upset by Princeton’s Pearlie Zhang, 6-1, 6-3. Here’s how Penn women’s tennis fared in the rest of the tournament. Doubles Penn’s pairs had a successful tournament, highlighted by Velaga and Schlepphorst’s run to the final. The duo got off to a hot start, with two straight 8-2 wins over pairs from Villanova and Temple. In the quarterfinals, they pulled off a stunner, beating No. 1 seed Alice Ferlito and Madeleine Jessup of Princeton, 8-7, 8-6. “It was so exciting because we were at Princeton, and the number one seeds were from Princeton,” coach Sanela Kunovac said. “It was on razor’s edge how tight the margins are, which way the match
is gonna tip, and it was probably one of the best matches of the tournament in doubles, across the board.” They went on to the semifinals, where they prevailed in a three-set thriller. After dropping the first set, 6-3, Velaga and Schlepphorst regrouped to win the next set, 7-6, to send the match to a tiebreaker, which they went on to win, 10-8. This set up a showdown against No. 2 seed Maelie Monfils and Patricia Grigoras of Penn State. After falling behind early, the duo dug deep to win the second set in a tiebreaker. Kunovac had nothing but praise for her team’s perseverance. “Even when they were down a set, it always felt like, yeah, we’re OK,” Kunovac said. “We’ve fought back throughout the entire tournament so many times, it just seemed like par for the course. And sure enough, they came back and they won the tiebreak and pushed themselves into the third.” After bringing the match to its deciding set, the duo fell short in the tiebreaker, 10-5. Although Velaga wished they had made it all the way, she recognized it was valuable experience heading into See TENNIS, page 9
GRACE CHEN | DP FILE PHOTO
Velaga plays against Princeton on March 29, 2025.
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