<p>Again if you define "first" with enough qualifications (the first "college that later became a university", then it's Harvard. But that's not the same as "the first University", for which Penn clearly has a legit. claim. BTW, Penn itself is not free of tricks - note that they do not measure their founding from the 1779 charter or even more appropriately , the 1791 charter of "the University of Pennsylvania" (this is the charter that they operate under today), but from 1740, when Franklin first proposed a "Charity School" which was nothing like a college.</p>
<p>In fact, none of the colleges or universities in the US were anything like what we would recognize as "modern" Universities before the Civil War - almost all the stuff we associate with college life is from that later period. But the date of their founding is still important - compare the founding date of the colleges to their ranking in the USNWR and you'll find a lot of the oldest schools are also the most high ranking,</p>
<p>Actually, Percy, the "fuzziness" of Penn's founding date is between 1740 and either 1749 or some time in the 1750s. The Academy/College of Philadelphia was really proposed by Franklin in 1749 ("Proposals for the Education of Youth in Pennylvania", or something like that), and college classes began in the 1750s, with the first class graduating in 1756, iirc. 1740 was when the charity school building that the Academy later took over was built, and when it was chartered (and that charter was later assumed by the Academy/College). No critic of the 1740 date thinks that the 1779 or 1791 dates are the correct ones, just as no one argues that Princeton's founding date should be changed from 1746 to 1896, when it transitioned from The College of New Jersey to Princeton University.</p>
<p>I agree w. you 45 %er - Penn can certainly legitimately trace itself to the "College of Philadelphia", (organized 1749, classes began meeting 1751, first grads 1757) but the 1740 date is really hard to support - basically at that time they built a building for a charity elementary school but it sat empty after it was built for lack of funding until the College took it over. To give you a notion of how little this had to do with the future Penn (at least the way Penn would like to see itself), another reason the building was built was that a traveling revivalist preacher, George Whitfield, who today would be one of those tele- evangelists , had been banned from speaking in all the mainstream churches in Philadelphia and his fans wanted a lecture hall where he could speak. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Again, the claim is "the first Med school in the US", not the first med school that would be suitably impressive to PosterX
[/quote]
</p>
<p>hehehe.</p>
<p>I don't get it, if Yale were as great as PosterX seems to think it is then he wouldn't need to waste time putting it down in a most frothy fashion, he could just sit there at Yale getting Teach For America offers and Rhodes scholarships thrown upon him as seems to be par for the course for Yale, at least according to posterx...</p>
<p>If my eyes were rolling any harder I'd detach a retina...</p>
<p>one reason to go to penn--the medical programs are amazing...their MD program, bioengineering program etc. Their research is excellent!
--one of the reason I decided to apply ED to penn.</p>
<p>Whether Penn was the "first" something or not is really beside the point. The point is that Penn remains a place that fulfills Franklin's vision of an institution that is connected to the outside world and not isolated from it, that teaches students skills that will have real world applications and not just the classic poems in the original Greek. A "trade school" if you will, but the trades are not plumbing and carpentry but training the people who will be the leaders of medicine, law, finance and industry, government, etc. at the highest level (such as the future Mayor Nutter, Wharton '79). This was always part of Penn's "mission statement" from day 1 so if Franklin could see Penn today he would be proud of its pre-professionalism (Franklin was a very successful businessman as well as a scientist who did science with practical implications - he didn't just study lightning, he invented the lightning rod) and not ashamed of it. If you want someplace "intellectual" where the philosophers do nothing but stand on clouds and debate the timeless questions for their own sake, Penn has never been that place and I doubt (and hope) it ever will be. Harvard and Yale were founded as divinity schools and so that kind of aimless seeking is much more in tune there than at Penn which was always a secular institution.</p>
<p>Percy, if that's all true, then how come 5 of the past 7 Presidents of the U.S. (once Hillary is elected) went to Yale, a Yalie has been on a major party ticket in every Presidential election since 1972, and in the White House every year since 1980, and Harvard and Yale produce more government leaders than the rest of the Ivies combined? I think you need to more carefully separate the rhetoric from the reality. Harvard and Yale may have been founded as divinity-related institutions, back 300+ years ago when the church was the only thing going, but they have a long history of being much different from that, going back to Harvard basically inventing the modern concept of a college education in the 1850s, Yale awarding the nation's first Ph.D. degree in 1861, and Yale creating the nation's first forestry and university art schools. To use another example, Dartmouth was founded as a place to indoctrinate Native Americans but ended up founding the first modern business school. Furthermore, just because something was founded in such and such year doesn't mean anything at all. IBM was founded in such and such year, but it didn't actually produce what it is known for (computers) until many years after that. Also, many institutions were "founded" in certain years but actually had predecessors going back much farther. For example, read about the Tapping Reeve Law School. Looking at Wikipedia articles that spout off certain dates is just looking at the surface -- and surfaces can be very misleading.</p>
<p>I think the answer is that government has replaced religion as a center of coercion, so that it's not surprising that a school of divinity would shift its goals toward government, which is now the institution that has more power over people. Basically, H and Y have always been places for people who seek to impose their vision on other people because they think that they are so much smarter and know what's best for you (but often exempt themselves from their own rules). Yes, Yale has been turning out Presidents lately, but have they been great Presidents or arrogant ones? Part of thinking you are better is snobbism, the idea that some professions are "better" or have "higher status" than others.</p>
<p>Penn is the center of the consensual, egalitarian model, of which business is the leading example - in business you can't force anyone to buy your product - people have to want it. Business is also inherently egalitarian because one dollar is as good as the next - it doesn't matter whether you earned that $ digging ditches or debating philosophy (not that anyone will ever pay you much for debating philosophy). Future Mayor Nutter ran on an anti-corruption platform, based on the idea that the laws should apply equally to those in government as they do to the rest of us, that he should be the leader because he is willing to work for the common good, not that he is entitled to special privileges because he is smarter than the rest of us.</p>
<p>Before you point out to me that political leaders have to be elected in a democracy, I'll point out "the tyranny of the majority" - in business, every single customer has to want the product or else he won't buy it. In government, if you can persuade 51% of the people of something, you can shove it down the throat of the other 49%.</p>
<p>I agree with you that the distinctions have been somewhat blurred over the years so to some extent the schools are interchangeable (especially given that all of American education was radically re-structured in the post Civil War period) but the founding philosophy is still in the "DNA" of the school.</p>
<p>Bill Clinton went to Georgetown SFS for undergrad
You can count Bush Jr... although I don't see how taht is conducive to yale's fame at all
Bush Sr was okay</p>
<p>But nonetheless, it's more of a correlation than a causation. Rich/white/political families have always gone to Harvard/Yale as they are the historically stock schools for ppl of these pedigrees. As a result, Harvard and Yale tends to produce more presidents. ANd if you really wanna count affiliations, I'm not familiar with other Ivies but Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt attended Columbia Law, Eisenhower was President of Columbia, and Obama is closing in for the win (crosses fingers).</p>
<p>And frankly, basing your measures of a quality of an institution based on <15 people out of the hundreds of thousands of Yale/harvard grads in the past century is really really dumb.</p>
<p>"Penn is the center of the consensual, egalitarian model, of which business is the leading example". Really?</p>
<p>According to Susan Caminiti's article, "Where the CEOs went to College" published in Fortune Magazine, these were the top colleges at producing Fortune 500 CEOs among their undergraduate alumni:</p>
<p>"government has replaced religion as a center of coercion"</p>
<p>Are you sure? Given the coercive nature of advertising, many people would argue differently. Of course, you might say that much of the advertising is the result of existing government policies in the first place, such as massive subsidies going towards corporate welfare, highway construction, wars for cheaper oil and travel to Las Vegas. But I think that many if not most people find that government participation, at the local as well as state/federal level, is only accessible route through which they can change their communities. It's not like people can go to the local utility company or Cheeto manufacturer and ask them to pave a sidewalk or set up a new school for their kids. But they can call up their representatives.</p>
<p>In case you weren't convinced that this is an issue, check out today's CNN top story:</p>
<p>Philadelphia: 'Afraid every day' as gun violence soars
May 17, 2007
Angry youth, plentiful guns behind murder spike in City of Brotherly Love
Philadelphia's increase in homicides more than twice the national rate
150 killings so far this year</p>
<p>"9-year-old boy is killed on the streets of Philadelphia, no one comes forward. Where a 4-year-old girl is shot no one comes forward. Where a house is firebombed, six people killed -- four under the age of 5 years -- no one comes forward"</p>
<p>Fortune 500's are bureaucracies not that different from government - Wharton tends to produce people who start their own companies - e.g Donald Trump, Jon Huntsman, etc. </p>
<p>Government is the only entity with the power to throw you in jail if you do the "immoral" thing - smoke dope, drink alcohol, gamble, etc. - this used to be the church's job.</p>
<p>Advertising is only "coercive" if you twist the meaning of the world like Humpty Dumpty - no one is "coerced" into buying a Coke because they've watched a Coke commercial. Only communists believe crap like this. "Oh, help me Great Hilary Clinton, please help me, the evil Cheeto people have made me fat and refuse to replace the sidewalk in front of my house and my butt is too fat to do it myself."</p>
<p>"Fortune 500's are bureaucracies not that different from government - Wharton tends to produce people who start their own companies"</p>
<p>Isn't that a contradiction? I mean, Fred Smith, a Yale graduate, founded FedEx in his dormitory room sometime around 1970 and then it ended up growing into a pretty big company. Are you penalizing people who start companies that grow into something big?</p>