title: Ark of the Covenant

text: To many scholars, Hezekiah is also credited as having written all or some of the Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes in the Christian tradition), in particular the famously enigmatic epilogue. Notably, the epilogue appears to refer to the Ark story with references to almond blossoms (i.e., Aaron's rod), locusts, silver, and gold. The epilogue then cryptically refers to a pitcher broken at a fountain and a wheel broken at a cistern.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Although scholars disagree on whether the Pool of Siloam's pure spring waters were used by pilgrims for ritual purification, many scholars agree that a stepped pilgrimage road between the pool and the Temple had been built in the first century CE. This roadway has been partially excavated, but the west side of the Pool of Siloam remains unexcavated.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In 587 BC, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple. There is no record of what became of the Ark in the Books of Kings and Chronicles. An ancient Greek version of the biblical third Book of Ezra, 1 Esdras, suggests that Babylonians took away the vessels of the ark of God, but does not mention taking away the Ark:


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In Rabbinic literature, the final disposition of the Ark is disputed. Some rabbis hold that it must have been carried off to Babylon, while others hold that it must have been hidden lest it be carried off into Babylon and never brought back. A late 2nd-century rabbinic work known as the "Tosefta" states the opinions of these rabbis that Josiah, the king of Judah, stored away the Ark, along with the jar of manna, and a jar containing the holy anointing oil, the rod of Aaron which budded and a chest given to Israel by the Philistines. This was said to have been done in order to prevent their being carried off into Babylon as had already happened to the other vessels. Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Shimon, in the same rabbinic work, state that the Ark was, in fact, taken into Babylon. Rabbi Yehudah, dissenting, says that the Ark was stored away in its own place, meaning somewhere on the Temple Mount.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The Kohathites were one of the Levite houses from the Book of Numbers. Theirs was the responsibility to care for "the most holy things" in the tabernacle. When the camp, then wandering the Wilderness, set out the Kohathites would enter the tabernacle with Aaron and cover the ark with the screening curtain and "then they shall put on it a covering of fine leather, and spread over that a cloth all of blue, and shall put its poles in place." The ark was one of the items of the tent of meeting that the Kohathites were responsible for carrying.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Samaritan tradition claims that until the split between Samaritanism and Judaism, which arose when the priest Eli stole the Ark of the Covenant and established a rival cult at Shiloh, the Ark of the Covenant had been kept at the sanctuary of YHWH on Mt. Gerizim.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Archaeological evidence shows strong cultic activity at Kiriath-Jearim in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, well after the ark was supposedly removed from there to Jerusalem. In particular, archaeologists found a large elevated podium, associated with the Northern Kingdom and not the Southern Kingdom, which may have been a shrine. Thomas Römer suggests that this may indicate that the ark was not moved to Jerusalem until much later, possibly during the reign of King Josiah. He notes that this might explain why the ark featured prominently in the history before Solomon, but not after. Additionally, 2 Chronicles 35:3 indicates that it was moved during King Josiah's reign.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Some scholars believe the story of the Ark was written independently around the 8th century in a text referred to as the "Ark Narrative" and then incorporated into the main biblical narrative just before the Babylonian exile.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Römer also suggests that the ark may have originally carried sacred stones "of the kind found in the chests of pre-Islamic Bedouins" and speculates that these may have been either a statue of Yahweh or a pair of statues depicting both Yahweh and his companion goddess Asherah. In contrast, Scott Noegel has argued that the parallels between the ark and these practices "remain unconvincing" in part because the Bedouin objects lack the ark's distinctive structure, function, and mode of transportation. Specifically, unlike the ark, the Bedouin chests "contained no box, no lid, and no poles," they did not serve as the throne or footstool of a god, they were not overlaid with gold, did not have kerubim figures upon them, there were no restrictions on who could touch them, and they were transported on horses or camels. Noegel suggests that the ancient Egyptian bark is a more plausible model for the Israelite ark, since Egyptian barks had all the features just mentioned. Noegel adds that the Egyptians also were known to place written covenants beneath the feet of statues, proving a further parallel to the placement of the covenental tablets inside the ark.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The Ark is first mentioned in the Book of Exodus and then numerous times in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, I Chronicles, II Chronicles, Psalms, and Jeremiah.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In the Book of Jeremiah, it is referenced by Jeremiah, who, speaking in the days of Josiah, prophesied a future time, possibly the end of days, when the Ark will no longer be talked about or be made use of again:


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Rashi comments on this verse that "The entire people will be so imbued with the spirit of sanctity that God's Presence will rest upon them collectively, as if the congregation itself was the Ark of the Covenant."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The "mountain from the top of which Moses saw God's promised land" would be Mount Nebo, located in what is now Jordan.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In the New Testament, the Ark is mentioned in the Letter to the Hebrews and the Revelation to St. John. Hebrews 9:4 states that the Ark contained "the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant." Revelation 11:19 says the prophet saw God's temple in heaven opened, "and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The contents of the ark are seen by theologians such as the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas as personified by Jesus Christ: the manna as the Holy Eucharist; Aaron's rod as Jesus' eternal priestly authority; and the tablets of the Law, as the Lawgiver himself.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Catholic scholars connect this verse with the Woman of the Apocalypse in , which immediately follows, and say that the Blessed Virgin Mary is identified as the "Ark of the New Covenant." Carrying the saviour of mankind within her, she herself became the Holy of Holies. This is the interpretation given in the third century by Gregory Thaumaturgus, and in the fourth century by Saint Ambrose, Saint Ephraem of Syria and Saint Augustine. The Catholic Church teaches this in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "Mary, in whom the Lord himself has just made his dwelling, is the daughter of Zion in person, the Ark of the Covenant, the place where the glory of the Lord dwells. She is 'the dwelling of God . . . with men."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In the Gospel of Luke, the author's accounts of the Annunciation and Visitation are constructed using eight points of literary parallelism to compare Mary to the Ark.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Saint Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, is credited with writing about the connections between the Ark and the Virgin Mary: "O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness. For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word? To whom among all creatures shall I compare you, O Virgin? You are greater than them all O (Ark of the) Covenant, clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which Divinity resides" ("Homily of the Papyrus of Turin").


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: According to Uri Rubin, the Ark of the Covenant has a religious basis in Islam (and the Baha'i faith), which gives it special significance.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Since its disappearance from the Biblical narrative, there have been a number of claims of having discovered or of having possession of the Ark, and several possible places have been suggested for its location.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: 2 Maccabees 2:4-10, written around 100 BC, says that the prophet Jeremiah, "being warned by God" before the Babylonian invasion, took the Ark, the Tabernacle, and the Altar of Incense, and buried them in a cave, informing those of his followers who wished to find the place that it should remain unknown "until the time that God should gather His people again together, and receive them unto mercy."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church claims to possess the Ark of the Covenant in Axum. The Ark is currently kept under guard in a treasury near the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. Replicas of the tablets within the Ark, or "Tabots", are kept in every Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and kept in its own holy of holies, each with its own dedication to a particular saint; the most popular of these include Saint Mary, Saint George and Saint Michael.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The "Kebra Nagast" is often said to have been composed to legitimise the Solomonic dynasty, which ruled the Ethiopian Empire following its establishment in 1270, but this is not the case. It was originally composed in some other language (Coptic or Greek), then translated into Arabic, and translated into Ge'ez in 1321. It narrates how the real Ark of the Covenant was brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I with divine assistance, while a forgery was left in the Temple in Jerusalem. Although the "Kebra Nagast" is the best-known account of this belief, it predates the document. Abu al-Makarim, writing in the last quarter of the twelfth century, makes one early reference to this belief that they possessed the Ark. "The Abyssinians possess also the Ark of the Covenant", he wrote, and, after a description of the object, describes how the liturgy is celebrated upon the Ark four times a year, "on the feast of the great nativity, on the feast of the glorious Baptism, on the feast of the holy Resurrection, and on the feast of the illuminating Cross."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In his controversial 1992 book "The Sign and the Seal", British writer Graham Hancock reports on the Ethiopian belief that the ark spent several years in Egypt before it came to Ethiopia via the Nile River, where it was kept in the islands of Lake Tana for about four hundred years and finally taken to Axum. (Archaeologist John Holladay of the University of Toronto called Hancock's theory "garbage and hogwash"; Edward Ullendorff, a former professor of Ethiopian Studies at the University of London, said he "wasted a lot of time reading it.") In a 1992 interview, Ullendorff says that he personally examined the ark held within the church in Axum in 1941 while a British Army officer. Describing the ark there, he says, "They have a wooden box, but it's empty. Middle- to late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: On 25 June 2009, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia, Abune Paulos, said he would announce to the world the next day the unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant, which he said had been kept safe and secure in a church in Axum, Ethiopia. The following day, on 26 June 2009, the patriarch announced that he would not unveil the Ark after all, but that instead he could attest to its current status.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The Lemba people of South Africa and Zimbabwe have claimed that their ancestors carried the Ark south, calling it the "ngoma lungundu" or "voice of God", eventually hiding it in a deep cave in the Dumghe mountains, their spiritual home.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: On 14 April 2008, in a UK Channel 4 documentary, Tudor Parfitt, taking a literalist approach to the Biblical story, described his research into this claim. He says that the object described by the Lemba has attributes similar to the Ark. It was of similar size, was carried on poles by priests, was not allowed to touch the ground, was revered as a voice of their God, and was used as a weapon of great power, sweeping enemies aside.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In his book "The Lost Ark of the Covenant" (2008), Parfitt also suggests that the Ark was taken to Arabia following the events depicted in the Second Book of Maccabees, and cites Arabic sources which maintain it was brought in distant times to Yemen. Genetic Y-DNA analyses in the 2000s have established a partially Middle-Eastern origin for a portion of the male Lemba population but no specific Jewish connection. Lemba tradition maintains that the Ark spent some time in a place called Sena, which might be Sena in Yemen. Later, it was taken across the sea to East Africa and may have been taken inland at the time of the Great Zimbabwe civilization. According to their oral traditions, some time after the arrival of the Lemba with the Ark, it self-destructed. Using a core from the original, the Lemba priests constructed a new one. This replica was discovered in a cave by a Swedish German missionary named Harald von Sicard in the 1940s and eventually found its way to the Museum of Human Science in Harare.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: French author Louis Charpentier claimed in his 1966 book "Les Mystères de la Cathédrale de Chartres" that the Ark was taken to the Chartres Cathedral by the Knights Templar.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: One author has theorised that the Ark was taken from Jerusalem to the village of Rennes-le-Château in Southern France. Karen Ralls has cited Freemason Patrick Byrne, who believes the Ark was moved from Rennes-le-Château at the outbreak of World War I to the United States.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: The Ark of the Covenant was said to have been kept in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, surviving the pillages of Rome by Alaric I and Gaiseric but lost when the basilica burned.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: "Rabbi Eliezer ben José stated that he saw in Rome the mercy-seat of the temple. There was a bloodstain on it. On inquiry he was told that it was a stain from the blood which the high priest sprinkled thereon on the Day of Atonement."


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: At the turn of the 20th century, British Israelites carried out some excavations of the Hill of Tara in Ireland looking for the Ark of the Covenant. The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) campaigned successfully to have them stopped before they destroyed the hill.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Philip Kaufman conceived of the Ark of the Covenant as the main plot device of Steven Spielberg's 1981 adventure film "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where it is found by Indiana Jones in the Egyptian city of Tanis in 1936. In early 2020, a prop version made for the film (which does not actually appear onscreen) was featured on "Antiques Roadshow".


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In the Danish family film "The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar" from 2006, the main part of the treasure found in the end is the Ark of the Covenant. The power of the Ark comes from static electricity stored in separated metal plates like a giant Leyden jar.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: In Harry Turtledove's novel "Alpha and Omega" (2019) the ark is found by archeologists, and the characters have to deal with the proven existence of God.


title: Ark of the Covenant

text: Yom HaAliyah (Aliyah Day) () is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the tenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan to commemorate the Israelites crossing the Jordan River into the Land of Israel while carrying the Ark of the Covenant.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universities by numerous organizations and scholars. While the university dates its founding to 1740, it was created by Benjamin Franklin and other Philadelphia citizens in 1749.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The university has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Wharton School, and the School of Nursing. Among its highly ranked graduate schools are its law school, whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, its medical school, the first in North America, and Wharton, the first collegiate business school. Penn's endowment is US$20.7 billion, putting it amongst the wealthiest academic institutions in the world, and its 2019 research budget was $1.02 billion.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn was one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the U.S. Declaration of Independence when Benjamin Franklin, the university's founder and first president, advocated for an educational institution that trained leaders in academia, commerce, and public service. The campus, in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, is centered around College Hall, and notable landmarks are Houston Hall, the first modern "student union", and Franklin Field, the first double-decker college football stadium. Penn also is the home of the Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which is located 15 miles northwest of the campus, in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. The university's athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Throughout its existence, Penn alumni, trustees, and/or faculty have included 8 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 7 signers of the U.S. Constitution, 2 Presidents of the United States, 3 Supreme Court justices, 32 U.S. senators, 163 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 12 U.S. Cabinet Secretaries, 46 governors, and 9 foreign heads of state. Alumni and or faculty include 36 Nobel laureates and 33 Rhodes Scholars. Penn alumni (a) have won 28 Tony Awards, 16 Grammy Awards, 11 Emmy Awards, and 4 Academy Awards and (b) include one of only 17 people who have earned all 4 awards (an EGOT). In addition, Penn has the greatest number of alumni on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans out of all colleges and has the greatest number of undergraduate billionaire alumni of all colleges, with 64 living billionaires, 28 of whom are alumni of Penn's undergraduate schools. Penn alumni have won 81 Olympic medals (26 of them gold). Two Penn alumni have been NASA astronauts and 5 have been awarded the United States Armed Forces' highest award for gallantry, the Medal of Honor.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton and Columbia Universities.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time in which it was preached. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin's autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, "thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution". However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin (though Peters was one of Penn's founding trustees [1749 to 1776],


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Treasurer of board of trustees [1769 to 1770]) and nothing further was done by Franklin for another six years when he again contacted not just Peters but many others. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled "", his vision for what he called a "Public Academy of Philadelphia".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey—Franklin's new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation's first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727–1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as "Independence Hall"), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin's group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the "Academy of Philadelphia", using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753, by the intentions of the original "New Building" donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the "College of Philadelphia" was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith's "Loyalist" tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a "University" (which in 1785 the legislature changed name to University of the State of Pennsylvania). The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of "the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself". The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn's General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university's founding date to 1740 for a number of reasons, including to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies. Penn has two claims to being the first university in the United States, according to the former university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd:


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Academy of Philadelphia, a secondary school for boys, began operations in 1751 in an unused church assembly hall building at 4th and Arch Streets which had sat unfinished and dormant for over a decade. Upon receiving a collegiate charter in 1755, the first classes for the College of Philadelphia were taught in the same building, in many cases to the same boys who had already graduated from The Academy of Philadelphia. When the British abandoned Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, Penn's then only academic building "College Hall" served as temporary meeting site of the Second Continental Congress (from July 2 to July 13, 1778) as the British armed forces extensively damaged many parts of the city including the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall), the site in which the Second Continental Congress had convened on May 10, 1775 and had been forced to abandon on December 12, 1776 to escape capture by the British. The Second Continental Congress delegates returned to Philadelphia on learning of the British retreat and by July 7, 1778, acquired a quorum, and thus were able to re-convene Congress on Penn's College of Philadelphia campus (briefly establishing Penn as site of capital of the United States). Such status as capital of the United States is evidenced by letter sent on July 13, 1778, from Josiah Bartlett (a signatory to the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence) to John Langdon (who was Bartlett's fellow New Hampshire "Founding Father" as Langdon later became a signatory of the United States Constitution):


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 1801, the university moved to the unused Presidential Mansion at ninth and Market Streets, a building that both George Washington and John Adams had declined to occupy while Philadelphia was the temporary national capital.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Among the classes given in 1807 at this building were those offered by Benjamin Rush, a professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice who was also a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence, member of the Continental Congress, and surgeon general of the Continental Army.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Classes were held in the mansion until 1829 when it was demolished. Architect William Strickland designed twin buildings on the same site, College Hall and Medical Hall (both 1829–1830), which formed the core of the Ninth Street Campus until Penn's move to West Philadelphia in the 1870s.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In the 1750s, roughly 40 percent of Penn students needed lodging as they came from areas too far to commute including other colonies in the South or the West Indies. Before the completion of the construction of the first dormitory in 1765, out of town students were typically placed with "guardians" in the homes of faculty or in suitable boarding houses (such as the one run by widow Rachel Marks Graydon, mother of Penn College Class of 1775 (who did not graduate) alumnus Alexander Graydon).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 1765, the campus was expanded by the opening of the newly completed dormitory run by Ben Franklin's collaborator on study of electricity using electrostatic machines and related technology and Penn Professor and "chief master" Ebenezer Kinnersley. Kinnersley was designated "steward" of the students in the dormitory and he and his wife were given "powers of discipline" over the students and supervised the cleanliness of the students with respect to personal hygiene and washing of the students' dirty clothing. However, even after its construction, many students sought living quarters elsewhere, where they would have more freedom resulting in loss of funds to Penn such that in fall of 1775, Penn's trustees voted to advertise to lease the dormitory to a private family who would board the pupils at lesser cost to Penn. In another attempt to control the off-campus activities of the students, the trustees agreed not to admit any out-of-town student unless he was lodged in a place which they and the faculty considered proper. As of 1779, Penn, through its Trustees, owned three houses on Fourth Street, just north of the campus's "New Building" with the largest residence located on the corner of Fourth and Arch Streets.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Starting in 1849 (with formation of Penn's Eta chapter of Delta Phi (St. Elmo) by five founders and fifteen "initiates", Penn students began to establish chapters of and live in houses rented or owned by fraternities. Since Penn only had limited housing near campus and since students (especially the students at the medical school who) came from all over the country, the students elected to fend for themselves rather than live in housing owned by Penn trustees and good number chose housing by pledging and living in Penn's first fraternities (Delta Phi, Zeta Psi, Phi Kappa Sigma, and Delta Psi). These first fraternities were located in walking distance of 9th and Chestnut (as campus was located from 1800 to 1872 on West side of 9th Street, from Market Street on the North to Chestnut Street on the South). For example, Zeta Psi Fraternity was located at Southeast corner of 10th Street and Chestnut Street, Delta Phi was located on South side of 11th Street near Chestnut Street, and Delta Psi was located on North side of Chestnut Street, West of 10th Street.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: When Penn moved West in 1872 to its "new" campus (centered on the intersection of Woodland Avenue, 36th Street, and Locust Street) so did the fraternities. Among the first fraternities to build near the new campus were Phi Delta Theta in 1883 and Psi Upsilon in 1891. By 1891 there were at least seventeen fraternities at the university.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: From its founding until construction of the Quadrangle Dormitories, which started construction in 1895, the student body did not live in university-owned housing as, with a significant exception in the 18th century (see above content and Wikimedia image of the sketch of first Penn owned dormitory), there was none. Indeed, a significant portion of the undergraduate population commuted from Delaware Valley and a large number of students resided in the Philadelphia area. The medical school (with roughly half the students) was a significant exception to this trend as it attracted a more geographically diverse population of students. For example, in the 1850s when Penn's medical school accounted for two-thirds to three-quarters of the student body, over half of the population of the medical school was from the southern part of the United States.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn had increasing need for housing in the last decade of 19th century and first decades of the twentieth century due to number of factors including its competition for students with peer institutions and active recruitment of foreign students.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: With respect to the desire to compete with peer institutions to attract students from across the nation, such was aptly reported by George Henderson, President of the College Class of 1889 (in his monograph he distributed to his classmates at their 20th reunion), which charted not only Penn's strong growth in acreage and number of buildings over the prior two decades but also the near-quadrupling in the size of the student body, which was accommodated, in part, by building of the Men's Dormitory, the Quadrangle. Henderson argued that building The Quad played a vital role in attracting students, and made an impassioned plea for its expansion:


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: With respect to the active recruitment of foreign students, for example, Penn's first director of publicity translated a Penn recruiting brochure into Spanish and circulated approximately 10,000 copies throughout Latin America. The success of such efforts were evident in fall of 1910 when Vice Provost Edgar Fahs Smith (who the following year would start a ten-year tenure as Penn's provost) formally welcomed to Penn students from 40 different nations at an annual party. Vice Provost Fahs spoke about how Penn wanted to "bring together students of different countries and break down misunderstandings existing between them".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Since it was difficult to house the international students due to the then socially acceptable and legally permissible racist housing regulations extant in Philadelphia and across the United States, in fall of 1911, The Christian Association at The University of Pennsylvania hired as its first Foreign Mission Secretary, Reverend Alpheus Waldo Stevenson. By 1912, Stevenson focused almost all his efforts on the foreign students at Penn who needed help finding housing resulting in the Christian Association, buying 3905 Spruce Street contiguous to Penn's campus. By January 1, 1918, 3905 Spruce Street officially opened under the sponsorship of the Christian Association as a Home for Foreign Students, which came to be known as the International Students' House with Reverend Stevenson as its first director. The International Students' House provided " ... counseling and information services for a host of problems foreign students might encounter, including language, financial, health and diet, immigration and technical problems as well as maladjustment to living in the United States. It was also used for recreation and leisure, as lounges had radio, phonograph and television facilities and there were game and reception rooms. The International Students' House also provided for programs including forums, debates, lectures, panels and planned trips and outings as well as weekend activities such as dances, films and game nights. Also, for the next thirty-three years, the International Students' House would be sponsored by the Christian Association of the University of Pennsylvania."


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The success of efforts to reach out to the international students' was reported in 1921 when the official Penn publicity department reported that of the over 12,000 students at Penn (who came from all 50 states), 253 students came from at least 50 foreign countries and foreign territories, including India, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, " ... every Latin American country, and most of the Oriental and European nations".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: By 1931, first-year students were required to live in the quadrangle unless they received official permission to live with their families or other relatives. However, throughout this period and into the early post-World War II period, the undergraduate schools of the university continued to have a large commuting population. As an example, into the late 1940s, two-thirds of Penn women students were commuters.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: After World War II, Penn began a capital spending program to overhaul its campus, especially student housing. A large number of students migrating to universities under the GI Bill, and the resultant increase in Penn's student population, highlighted that Penn had outgrown previous expansions, which ended during the Depression-era. Nonetheless, in addition to a significant student population from the Delaware Valley, Penn attracted international students from at least 50 countries and from all 50 states as early as the second decade of the 20th century. Referring to the expansion in students (particularly from the Delaware Valley) due to Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (commonly known as the G.I. Bill), Penn Trustee Paul Miller remarked about Penn's undergraduate housing situation in the post World War Two era that: "[t]he bricks-and-mortar Capital Campaign of the Sixties...built the facilities that turned Penn from a commuter school to a residential one..." By 1961, 79% of male undergraduates and 57% of female undergraduates lived on campus.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: From 1930 to 1966, there were 54 documented Rowbottom riots, a student tradition of rioting which included everything from car smashing to panty raids. After 1966, there were five more instances of "Rowbottoms", the latest occurring in 1980.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 1965, Penn students learned that the university was sponsoring research projects for the United States' chemical and biological weapons program. According to Herman and Rutman, the revelation that "CB Projects Spicerack and Summit were directly connected with U.S. military activities in Southeast Asia", caused students to petition Penn president Gaylord Harnwell to halt the program, citing the project as being "immoral, inhuman, illegal, and unbefitting of an academic institution". Members of the faculty believed that an academic university should not be performing classified research and voted to re-examine the university agency which was responsible for the project on November 4, 1965.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 1983, members of the Animal Liberation Front broke into the Head Injury Clinical Research Laboratory in the School of Medicine and stole research audio and video tapes. The stolen tapes were given to PETA who edited the footage to create a film, "Unnecessary Fuss". As a result of media coverage and pressure from animal rights activists, the project was closed down.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The school gained notoriety in 1993 for the water buffalo incident in which a student who told a group of mostly black female students to "shut up, you water buffalo" was charged with violating the university's racial harassment policy.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 2022, some asked for the tenure of a University of Pennsylvania law school professor to be revoked after she said the country is "better off with fewer Asians."


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn's educational innovations include the nation's first medical school in 1765; the first university teaching hospital in 1874; the Wharton School, the world's first collegiate business school, in 1881; the first American student union building, Houston Hall, in 1896; the country's second school of veterinary medicine; and the home of ENIAC, the world's first electronic, large-scale, general-purpose digital computer in 1946. Penn is also home to the oldest continuously functioning psychology department in North America and is where the American Medical Association was founded. In 1921, Penn was also the first university to award a PhD in economics to an African-American woman, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (in economics).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn's motto is based on a line from Horace's . From 1756 to 1898, the motto read "". When it was pointed out that the motto could be translated as 'Loose women without morals', the university quickly changed the motto to .


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The official seal of the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania serves as the signature and symbol of authenticity on documents issued by the corporation. A request for one was first recorded in a meeting of the trustees in 1753 during which some of the Trustees "desired to get a Common Seal engraved for the Use of [the] Corporation". However, it was not until a meeting in 1756 that "a public Seal for the College with a proper device and Motto" was requested to be engraved in silver. The most recent design, a modified version of the original seal, was approved in 1932, adopted a year later and is still used for much of the same purposes as the original.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The outer ring of the current seal is inscribed with "Universitas Pennsylvaniensis", the Latin name of the University of Pennsylvania. The inside contains seven stacked books on a desk with the titles of subjects of the trivium and a modified quadrivium, components of a classical education: Theolog[ia], Astronom[ia], Philosoph[ia], Mathemat[ica], Logica, Rhetorica and Grammatica. Between the books and the outer ring is the Latin motto of the university, "Leges Sine Moribus Vanae".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Much of Penn's architecture was designed by the Philadelphia-based architecture firm Cope and Stewardson (same architects who designed Princeton University and a large part of Washington University in St. Louis) known for having combined the Gothic architecture of the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge with the local landscape to establish the Collegiate Gothic style.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The present core campus covers over in a contiguous area of West Philadelphia's University City section, whereas the older heart of the campus comprises the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District. All of Penn's schools and most of its research institutes are located on this campus. The surrounding neighborhood includes several restaurants, bars, a large upscale grocery store, and movie theater on the western edge of campus. Penn's core campus borders Drexel University and is a few blocks from the University City campus of Saint Joseph's University (which absorbed University of the Sciences in Philadelphia via merger) and The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The renowned cancer research center Wistar Institute is also located on campus. In 2014, a new 7-story glass and steel building was completed next to the institute's original brick edifice built in 1897 further expanding collaboration between the university and the Wistar Institute.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Module 6 Utility Plant and Garage at Penn was designed by BLT Architects and completed in 1995. Module 6 is located at 38th and Walnut and includes spaces for 627 vehicles, of storefront retail operations, a 9,500-ton chiller module and corresponding extension of the campus chilled water loop, and a 4,000-ton ice storage facility.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 2010, in its first significant expansion across the Schuylkill River, Penn purchased at the northwest corner of 34th Street and Grays Ferry Avenue, the then site of DuPont Marshall Research Labs. In October 2016, Penn completed the design (with help from architects Matthias Hollwich, Marc Kushner, and KSS Architects) and renovation of the center piece of the project, a former paint factory it named "Pennovation Works". "Pennovation Works" houses shared desks, wet labs, common areas, a "pitch bleacher," and other attributes of a tech incubator. The rest of the site, which Penn is formally calling "South Bank" (of Schuylkill River), is a mixture of lightly refurbished industrial buildings that serve as affordable and flexible workspaces and land for future development. Penn hopes that "South Bank will provide a place for academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs to establish their businesses in close proximity to each other to facilitate cross-pollination of their ideas, creativity, and innovation.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 2007, Penn acquired about between the campus and the Schuylkill River (the former site of the Philadelphia Civic Center and a nearby site owned by the United States Postal Service). Dubbed the Postal Lands, the site extends from Market Street on the north to Penn's Bower Field on the south, including the former main regional U.S. Postal Building at 30th and Market Streets, now the regional office for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Over the next decade, the site became the home to educational, research, biomedical, and mixed-use facilities. The first phase, comprising a park and athletic facilities, opened in the fall of 2011.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In September 2011, Penn completed the construction of the $46.5 million, Penn Park, which features passive and active recreation and athletic components framed and subdivided by canopy trees, lawns, and meadows. It is located east of the Highline Green and stretches from Walnut Street to South Streets.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn maintains two arboreta. The roughly "The Penn Campus Arboretum at the University of Pennsylvania" encompasses the entire University City campus. The campus arboretum is an urban forest with over 6,500 trees representing 240 species of trees and shrubs, ten specialty gardens and five urban parks, which has been designated as a Tree Campus USA since 2009 and formally recognized as an accredited ArbNet Arboretum since 2017. Penn maintains an interactive website linked to Penn's comprehensive tree inventory, which allows users to explore Penn's entire collection of trees. Penn also owns and operates the Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill in northwestern Philadelphia. The Morris Arboretum is also the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn also owns the New Bolton Center, the research and large-animal health care center of its veterinary school. Located near Kennett Square, New Bolton Center received nationwide media attention when Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro underwent surgery at its Widener Hospital for injuries suffered while running in the Preakness Stakes.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn's library began in 1750 with a donation of books from cartographer Lewis Evans. Twelve years later, then-provost William Smith sailed to England to raise additional funds to increase the collection size. Benjamin Franklin was one of the libraries' earliest donors and, as a trustee, saw to it that funds were allocated for the purchase of texts from London, many of which are still part of the collection, more than 250 years later.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn library system has grown into a system of 15 libraries (13 are on the contiguous campus) with 400 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees and a total operating budget of more than $48 million. The library system has 6.19 million book and serial volumes as well as 4.23 million microform items and 1.11 million e-books. It subscribes to over 68,000 print serials and e-journals.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn has the following fifteen libraries located on campus, associated by school or subject area: (1) Annenberg (School of Communications), located in the Annenberg School; (2) Biddle (Law), located in the Law School; (3) Biomedical, located adjacent to the Robert Wood Johnson Pavilion of the Medical School; (4) Chemistry, located in the 1973 Wing of the Chemistry Building; (5) Dental Medicine; (6) Engineering, located on the second floor of the Towne Building in the Engineering School; (7) Fine Arts, located within the Fisher Fine Arts Library; (8) Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, located at 420 Walnut Street, near Independence Hall and Washington Square; (9) Lea Library, located within the Van Pelt Library; (10) Lippincott (Wharton School), located on the second floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center; (11) Math/Physics/Astronomy, located on the third floor of David Rittenhouse Laboratory; (12) Museum (Archaeology); (13) Rare Books and Manuscripts; (14) Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center (Humanities and Social Sciences) – location of Weigle Information Commons; (15) Veterinary Medicine, located in Penn Campus (and two libraries located off campus (i) library at New Bolton Center and (ii) a High Density Storage facility).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Fine Arts Library was built to be Penn's main library (and first to have its own building). The then main library was designed by Frank Furness to be first library in nation to separate the low ceilings of the library stack, where the books were stored, from forty foot plus high ceilinged rooms, where the books were read and studied.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Yarnall Library of Theology, a major American rare book collection, is part of Penn's libraries. The Yarnall Library of Theology was formerly affiliated with St. Clement's Church in Philadelphia. It was founded in 1911 under the terms of the wills of Ellis Hornor Yarnall (1839–1907) and Emily Yarnall, and subsequently housed at the former Philadelphia Divinity School. The library's major areas of focus are theology, patristics, and the liturgy, history and theology of the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. It includes a large number of rare books, incunabula, and illuminated manuscripts, and new material continues to be added.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The campus has more than 40 notable art installations, in part because of a 1959 Philadelphia ordinance requiring total budget for new construction or major renovation projects (where any governmental resources are used) to include 1% for art (Philadelphia's ordinance created the first such program in the country) to be used to pay for installation of site-specific public art, in part because of many alumni who collect and donate art to Penn, and in part because of the presence of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design on campus.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 2020, Penn installed "Brick House", a monumental work of art (a "critical fabulation" in language used by its creator, Simone Leigh) at the College Green gateway to Penn's campus (near corner of 34th Street and Woodland Walk).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: This bronze sculpture, which is high and in diameter at its base, depicts an African woman's head (crowned with an afro framed by cornrow braids) atop a form that resembles both a skirt and a clay house. At the installation, Penn president Amy Guttman proclaimed that "Ms. Leigh's sculpture brings a striking presence of strength, grace, and beauty—along with an ineffable sense of mystery and resilience—to a central crossroad of Penn's campus."


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The "Covenant", better known to the student body as "Dueling Tampons" or "The Tampons", is a large red structure created by Alexander Liberman and located on Locust Walk as a gateway to the high-rise residences "super block". It was installed in 1975 and is made of rolled sheets of milled steel.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: A larger-than-life white button, known as "The Button" (officially "Split Button") is a modern art sculpture designed by designed by Swedish sculptor Claes Oldenburg (who specialized in creating oversize sculptures of everyday objects). It sits at the south entrance of Van Pelt Library and has button holes large enough for people to stand inside. Penn also has a replica of the "Love" sculpture, part of a series created by Robert Indiana. It is a painted aluminum sculpture and was installed in 1998 overlooking College Green.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 2019, the Association for Public Art loaned Penn two multi-ton sculptures. The two works are "Social Consciousness" (created by Sir Jacob Epstein in 1954 and sited on the walkway between Wharton's Lippincott Library and Phi Phi chapter of Alpha Chi Rho fraternity house) and "Atmosphere and Environment XII" (created by Louise Nevelson in 1970, which is sited on Shoemaker Green between Franklin Field and Ringe Squash Courts).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In addition to the contemporary art, Penn also has a number of more traditional statues including a good number created by Penn's first Director of Physical Education Department, R. Tait McKenzie. Among the notable sculptures is that of "Young Ben Franklin", which McKenzie produced and Penn sited adjacent to the fieldhouse contiguous to Franklin Field. The sculpture is titled "Benjamin Franklin in 1723" and was created by McKenzie during the pre-World War 1 era (1910–1914). Other sculptures he produced for Penn include the 1924 sculpture of then Penn provost Edgar Fahs Smith.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn is presently re-evaluating all of its public art and has formed a Campus Iconography Group led by Penn Design dean Frederick Steiner, who was part of a similar effort at the University of Texas at Austin (that led to the removal of statues of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials), and Penn's Chief Diversity Officer, Joann Mitchell. Penn has begun the process of adding art and removing or relocating art. Penn removed from campus in 2020 the statue of the Reverend George Whitefield (who had inspired the 1740 establishment of a trust to establish a charity school, which trust Penn legally assumed in 1749) when research showed Whitefield owned fifty enslaved people and drafted and advocated for the key theological arguments in favor of slavery in Georgia and the rest of the Thirteen Colonies.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Since the Penn Museum was founded in 1887, it has taken part in 400 research projects worldwide. The museum's first project was an excavation of Nippur, a location in current day Iraq.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn Museum is home to the largest authentic sphinx in North America at about seven feet high, four feet wide, 13 feet long, and 12.9 tons (made of solid red granite).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The sphinx was discovered in 1912 by the British archeologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, during an excavation of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, Egypt, where the sphinx had guarded a temple to ward off evil. Since Petri's expedition was partially financed by Penn Petrie offered it to Penn, which arranged for it to be moved to museum in 1913. The sphinx was moved in 2019 to a more prominent spot intended to attract visitors.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The museum has three gallery floors with artifacts from Egypt, the Middle East, Mesoamerica, Asia, the Mediterranean, Africa and indigenous artifacts of the Americas. Its most famous object is the goat rearing into the branches of a rosette-leafed plant, from the royal tombs of Ur.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Penn Museum's excavations and collections foster a strong research base for graduate students in the Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. Features of the Beaux-Arts building include a rotunda and gardens that include Egyptian papyrus.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn maintains a website providing a detailed roadmap to small museums and galleries and over one hundred locations across campus where the public can access Penn's over 8,000 artworks acquired over 250 years and includes, but is not limited to, paintings, sculptures, photography, works on paper, and decorative arts. The largest of the art galleries is the Institute of Contemporary Art, one of the only kunsthalles in the country, which showcases various art exhibitions throughout the year. Since 1983 the Arthur Ross Gallery, located at the Fisher Fine Arts Library, has housed Penn's art collection and is named for its benefactor, philanthropist Arthur Ross.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Every College House at the University of Pennsylvania has at least four members of faculty in the roles of House Dean, Faculty Master, and College House Fellows. Within the College Houses, Penn has nearly 40 themed residential programs for students with shared interests such as world cinema or science and technology. Many of the nearby homes and apartments in the area surrounding the campus are often rented by undergraduate students moving off campus after their first year, as well as by graduate and professional students.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The College Houses include W.E.B. Du Bois, Fisher Hassenfeld, Gregory, Harnwell, Harrison, Hill College House, Kings Court English, Lauder College House, Riepe, Rodin, Stouffer, and Ware. The first College House was Van Pelt College House, established in the Fall of 1971. It was later renamed Gregory House. Fisher Hassenfeld, Ware and Riepe together make up one building called "The Quad".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn students in Junior or Senior year may live in the 45 sororities and fraternities governed by three student-run governing councils, Interfraternity Council, Intercultural Greek Council, and Panhellenic Council.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania Police Department (UPPD) is the largest, private police department in Pennsylvania, with 117 members. All officers are sworn municipal police officers and retain general law enforcement authority while on the campus.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn's "One University Policy" allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn's twelve schools. The College of Arts and Sciences is the undergraduate division of the School of Arts and Sciences. The School of Arts and Sciences also contains the Graduate Division and the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, which is home to the Fels Institute of Government, the master's programs in Organizational Dynamics, and the Environmental Studies (MES) program. Wharton is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. Other schools with undergraduate programs include the School of Nursing and the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn has a strong focus on interdisciplinary learning and research. It offers double degree programs, unique majors, and academic flexibility. Penn's "One University" policy allows undergraduates access to courses at all of Penn's undergraduate and graduate schools except the medical, veterinary and dental schools. Undergraduates at Penn may also take courses at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore under a reciprocal agreement known as the Quaker Consortium.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Undergraduate admissions to the University of Pennsylvania is considered by "US News" to be "most selective". Admissions officials consider a student's GPA to be a very important academic factor, with emphasis on an applicant's high school class rank and letters of recommendation.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: For the class of 2026, entering in the fall of 2022, the university received 54,588 applications. "The Atlantic" also ranked Penn among the 10 most selective schools in the country. At the graduate level, based on admission statistics from "U.S. News & World Report", Penn's most selective programs include its law school, the health care schools (medicine, dental medicine, nursing, veterinary), and Wharton business school.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn offers unique and specialized coordinated dual-degree (CDD) programs, which selectively award candidates degrees from multiple schools at the university upon completion of graduation criteria of both schools in addition to program-specific programs and senior capstone projects. Additionally, there are accelerated and interdisciplinary programs offered by the university. These undergraduate programs include:


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Dual-degree programs that lead to the same multiple degrees without participation in the specific above programs are also available. Unlike CDD programs, "dual degree" students fulfill requirements of both programs independently without the involvement of another program. Specialized dual-degree programs include Liberal Studies and Technology as well as an Artificial Intelligence: Computer and Cognitive Science Program. Both programs award a degree from the College of Arts and Sciences and a degree from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Also, the Vagelos Scholars Program in Molecular Life Sciences allows its students to either double major in the sciences or submatriculate and earn both a BA and an MS in four years. The most recent Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) was first offered for the class of 2016. A joint program of Penn's School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, VIPER leads to dual Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science in Engineering degrees by combining majors from each school.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: For graduate programs, Penn offers many formalized double degree graduate degrees such as a joint J.D./MBA and maintains a list of interdisciplinary institutions, such as the Institute for Medicine and Engineering, the Joseph H. Lauder Institute for Management and International Studies, and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, commonly known as Penn SP2, is a school of social policy and social work that offers degrees in a variety of subfields, in addition to several dual degree programs and sub-matriculation programs. Penn SP2's vision is: "The passionate pursuit of social innovation, impact and justice."


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Originally named the School of Social Work, SP2 was founded in 1908 and is a graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania. The school specializes in research, education, and policy development in relation to both social and economic issues.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The School of Veterinary Medicine offers five dual-degree programs, combining the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (VMD) with a Master of Social Work (MSW), Master of Environmental Studies (MES), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Master of Public Health (MPH) or Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree. The Penn Vet dual-degree programs are meant to support veterinarians planning to engage in interdisciplinary work in the areas of human health, environmental health, and animal health and welfare.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In 2018, the university's nursing school was ranked number one by Quacquarelli Symonds. That year, Quacquarelli Symonds also ranked Penn's school of Veterinary Medicine sixth. In 2019, the Perelman School of Medicine was named the third-best medical school for research in "U.S. News & World Report's" 2020 ranking.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania Health System (also known as UPHS) is a multi-hospital health system headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, owned by Trustees of University of Pennsylvania. UPHS and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania together constitute Penn Medicine, a clinical and research entity of the University of Pennsylvania. UPHS hospitals include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Pennsylvania Hospital, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Hospital, and Princeton Medical Center. Penn Medicine owns and operates the first hospital in the United States, the Pennsylvania Hospital. It is also home to America's first surgical amphitheatre and its first medical library.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn is classified as an "R1" doctoral university: "Highest research activity."<ref name="RU/VH"></ref> Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 2015 amounted to $14.3 billion. Penn's research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.442 billion, the fourth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Penn received $582.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn's research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing, the Center for Global Women's Health at the Nursing School, the $13 million Morris Arboretum's Horticulture Center, the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts 165 research centers hosting a research community of over 4,300 faculty and over 1,100 postdoctoral fellows, 5,500 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research President Amy Gutmann established the "Penn Integrates Knowledge" title awarded to selected Penn professors "whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge". These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn's schools.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With 487 PhDs awarded in 2009, Penn ranks third in the Ivy League, only behind Columbia and Cornell (Harvard did not report data). It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees (933 in number for 2004–2007), ranking third in the Ivy League (behind Harvard and Yale) and tenth nationally.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In most disciplines Penn professors' productivity is among the highest in the nation and first in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn's 41 assessed programs were placed in ranges including the top 10 rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the top five rankings in these fields.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn's research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school, the first university teaching hospital, the first business school, and the first student union, Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called "The American Law Register," now the "Penn Law Review", one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which "BusinessWeek" wrote, "Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It was here also where the world's first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer's link with genes, cognitive therapy, Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin, the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the (a) genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; (b) spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; (c) Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs; and (d)


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: genetically engineered T cells used to treat lymphoblastic leukemia and refractory diffuse large B cell lymphoma.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On faculty since 1965, Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research, Simon Kuznets's method of measuring Gross National Product, the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the "Wharton Model" developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon's health reform in the 1970s.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the London School of Economics, University of Edinburgh, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Melbourne, Sciences Po, University of Queensland, University College London, King's College London, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and ETH Zurich.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: "U.S. News & World Report"s 2022 rankings place Penn seventh among national universities in the United States and Center for World University Rankings' ("CWUR") 2020/2021 survey also ranks Penn as the eighth best university in the world. The Princeton Review included Penn in its Dream Colleges list in 2015. As reported by "USA Today", Penn was ranked first in the United States by College Factual for 2015.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In their 2021 edition, Penn was ranked tenth in the nation by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds). In the 2020 edition, Penn was ranked 15th in the world by the "QS World University Rankings" and in 2019, 17th by the "Academic Ranking of World Universities" (ARWU) and 12th by the "Times Higher Education World University Rankings". In 2019, it ranked 12th among the universities around the world by "SCImago Institutions Rankings". According to the 2015 ARWU ranking, Penn is also the eighth- and ninth-best university in the world for economics/business and social sciences studies, respectively. University of Pennsylvania ranked 12th among 300 Best World Universities in 2012 compiled by Human Resources & Labor Review (HRLR) on Measurements of World's Top 300 Universities Graduates' Performance.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Center for Measuring University Performance places Penn in the first tier of the United States' top research universities (tied with Columbia, MIT and Stanford), based on research expenditures, faculty awards, PhD granted and other academic criteria. Penn was also ranked 18th of all U.S. colleges and universities in terms of R&D expenditures in fiscal year 2013 by the National Science Foundation. The High Impact Universities research performance index ranks Penn eighth in the world, whereas the 2010 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities (published by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan) ranks Penn 11th in the world for 2007, 2008 and 2010 and ninth for 2009.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers measures universities' research productivity, research impact, and research excellence based on the scientific papers published by their academic staff. The SCImago Institutions Rankings World Report 2012, which ranks world universities, national institutions and academies in terms of research output, ranks Penn seventh nationally among U.S. universities (2nd in the Ivy League behind Harvard) and 28th in the world overall (the first being France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The , which ranks universities on the basis of the number of alumni listed among CEOs in the 500 largest worldwide companies, ranks Penn 11th worldwide and second nationally behind Harvard. According to a "U.S. News" article in 2010, Penn is tied for second (tied with Dartmouth College and Tufts University) for the number of undergraduate alumni who are current Fortune 100 CEOs. "Forbes" ranked Penn 17th, based on a variety of criteria. In 2022, Poets & Quants ranked the undergraduate Wharton business school as the top business school in the nation for the fifth year in a row.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Among its professional schools, the school of education was ranked number one in 2021 and Wharton School of Business was ranked number one in 2022, the communication, dentistry, medicine, nursing, and veterinary medicine schools rank in the top 5 nationally. Penn's Law School was ranked number 6 in 2022 and Design school, and its School of Social Policy and Practice are ranked in the top 10 In the 2010 QS Global 200 Business Schools Report, Penn was ranked second in North America.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Jonathan and Philip Gayienquitioga, two brothers of the Mohawk Nation, were recruited by Benjamin Franklin to attend the Academy of Philadelphia, making them the first Native Americans at Penn when they enrolled in 1755. Moses Levy, the first Jewish student, enrolled in 1769 (and was also elected Penn's first Jewish trustee in 1802, serving to 1826). Joseph M. Urquiola (aka José María de Urquiola y Fernández de Zúñiga), School of Medicine (Penn Med) class of 1829 was the first Latino (from Cuba), and Auxencio Maria Pena, School of Medicine (Penn Med) class of 1836, was first South American (from Venezuela) to graduate from Penn.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: William Adger, James Brister, and Nathan Francis Mossell in 1879 were the first African Americans to enroll at Penn. Adger was the first African American to graduate from the college at Penn (1883), and when Brister graduated from the School of Dental Medicine (Penn Dental) (class of 1881), he was the first African American to earn a degree at Penn. Mossell was first African American to graduate from Penn Med (1882) (and had a brother, Aaron Albert Mossell II who was the first African American graduate of University of Pennsylvania Law School (in 1888)


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: and niece, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, Albert's daughter, who not only was first African American woman to graduate from Penn Law (in 1927) and be admitted to practice law in Pennsylvania, but prior to such noteworthy accomplishments was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in the United States (from Penn in 1922)). Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander's uncle (via her mother's Tanner family), Lewis Baxter Moore, in 1896 became the first person of African descent to earn a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and only the fifth black person in the United States to earn a doctor of philosophy degree and in 1899 founded the Teachers College (now known as School of Education) of Howard University and served as its dean continuously from 1899 through September 1920.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Tosui Imadate was the first person of Asian descent to graduate from Penn (College Class of 1879). In 1877, Imadate became the first Asian member of a fraternity at Penn when he became a brother at Phi Kappa Psi. In a quote from a portion of a letter published in December 1880 issue of "The Crescent", Imadate is described by a Phi Kappa Psi brother as a "brother member of Penn's I [iota] chapter of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity, who is a professor in college at Kiota [(Kyoto, Japan)]".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Fuji Tsukamoto (Penn Graduate School Class of 1889) became the first woman of Asian descent to matriculate at Penn when she started her study of biology and botany in 1885 and, like Tosui Imadate, also taught at Kyoto college in Japan.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Mary Alice Bennett, MD, PhD, and Anna H. Johnson were in 1880 the first women to enroll in a Penn degree-granting program and Bennett was the first woman to receive a degree from Penn, which was a PhD.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Julian Abele ("Willing and Able" to his fellow students) in 1902 was the first African American to graduate from University of Pennsylvania School of Design (then named Department of Architecture) and was elected as the president of Penn's Architectural Society. Abele won a 1901 student competition where he designed a Beaux Arts pedestrian gateway that was built and still stands on the campus of Haverford College, The Edward B. Conklin Memorial Gate at the Railroad Avenue entrance to Haverford College. Abele contributed to the design of more than 400 buildings, including the Widener Memorial Library at Harvard University (1912–1915), Philadelphia's Central Library (1917–1927), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1914–1928). and was the primary designer of the west campus of Duke University (1924–1954). Duke honored Abele by prominently displaying his portrait, the first portrait of an African American to be displayed on the campus.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (paternal niece of Nathan Francis Mossell and maternal niece of Lewis Baxter Moore) was the first African American to receive a PhD in economics in the United States (and third black woman to earn one in the United States in any subject) and first from Penn in 1921, the first African-American woman to receive a law degree from Penn Law in 1927, and the first African-American woman to practice law in Pennsylvania.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Alan L. Hart, MD, who earned a master's degree at Penn Med in radiology (class of 1928), was born in 1890 and publicly identified as a female, Alberta Lucille Hart, through much of 1917, the year Dr. Hart transitioned to being a man by having a hysterectomy, one of the first in the United States to be performed to help a person become a trans man, and lived the rest of his life as a man. Dr. Hart, Penn's most prominent transgender alumnus in the first half of the twentieth century, was a pioneer in using x-ray photography to detect tuberculosis, allowing the identification of asymptomatic TB carriers (seventy-five percent of the total infected), permitting treatment of patients before they had complications, and allowing for separation of TB patients from others to stop the spread of one of the more infectious deadly diseases known to humanity.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The first openly LGBTQ+ organization funded by Penn was formed in 1972 by "Steve" Kiyoshi Kuromiya (a Benjamin Franklin scholar and Penn alumnus from college class of 1966) when he created the Gay Coffee Hour, which met every week on campus and was also open to non-students and served as an alternative space to gay bars for gay people of all ages. Penn funded the Gay Coffee House program (via a grant from the student government), which was held in Houston Hall at six o'clock in the evening every Wednesday and attracted, on average, roughly sixty people of all ages with roughly "one-quarter to one-third women and two-thirds to three-quarters men."


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: As detailed in part above, by the first decades of the twentieth century, Penn made strides and took an active interest in attracting diverse students from around the globe. Two examples of such action occurred in 1910. Penn's first director of publicity, created a recruiting brochure, translated into Spanish, with approximately 10,000 copies circulated throughout Latin America. That same year, the Penn-affiliated organization, the Cosmopolitan Club, started an annual tradition of hosting an opening "smoker", which attracted students from 40 nations who were formally welcomed to the university by then-vice provost Edgar Fahs Smith (who the following year would start a ten-year tenure as provost) who spoke about how Penn wanted to "bring together students of different countries and break down misunderstandings existing between them".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The success of such efforts were reported in 1921 when the official Penn publicity department reported that


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Of those accepted for admission in 2018, 48 percent were Asian, Hispanic, African-American or Native American. Fourteen percent of entering undergraduates in 2018 were international students. The composition of international first-year students in 2018 was: 46% from Asia; 15% from Africa and the Middle East; 16% from Europe; 14% from Canada and Mexico; 8% from the Caribbean, Central America and South America; 5% from Australia and the Pacific Islands. The acceptance rate for international students admission in 2018 was 493 out of 8,316 (6.7%). In 2018, 55% of all enrolled students were women.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: In the last few decades, Jewish enrollment has been declining. Circa 1999 about 28% of the students were Jewish. In early 2020, 1,750 Penn undergraduate students were Jewish, which would be approximately 17% of the some 10,000 undergrads for 2019–20.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The university's social pressure surrounding academic perfection, extreme competitiveness, and nonguaranteed readmission have created what is known as "Penn Face": students put on a façade of confidence and happiness while enduring mental turmoil. Stanford University calls this phenomenon "Duck Syndrome." In recent years, mental health has become an issue on campus with ten student suicides between the years of 2013 to 2016. The school responded by launching a task force. The most widely covered case of Penn Face has been Madison Holleran. In 2018, initiatives were enacted to ameliorate mental health problems, such as requiring sophomores to live on campus and the daily closing of Huntsman Hall at 2:00 a.m. The university's suicide rate was the catalyst for a 2018 state bill, introduced by Governor Tom Wolf, to raise Pennsylvania's standards for university suicide prevention. The university's efforts to address mental health on campus came into the national spotlight again in September 2019 when the director of the university's counseling services died by suicide six months after starting the position.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Philomathean Society, founded in 1813, is one of the United States' oldest collegiate literary societies and continues to host lectures and intellectual events open to the public.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: "The Daily Pennsylvanian" is an independent, student-run newspaper, which has been published daily since it was founded in 1885. The newspaper went unpublished from May 1943 to November 1945 due to World War II. In 1984, the university lost all editorial and financial control of "The Daily Pennsylvanian" (also known as "The DP") when the newspaper became its own corporation. "The Daily Pennsylvanian" has won the Pacemaker Award administered by the Associated Collegiate Press multiple times, most recently in 2019. The "DP" also publishes a weekly arts and culture magazine called "34th Street Magazine".


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Penn Debate Society (PDS), founded in 1984 as the Penn Parliamentary Debate Society, is Penn's debate team, which competes regularly on the American Parliamentary Debate Association and the international British Parliamentary circuit.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The "Penn History Review" is a journal, published twice a year, through the Department of History, for undergraduate historical research, by and for undergraduates, and founded in 1991.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn has been ranked as the number one LGBTQ+ friendly school in the country. Penn's LGBTQ+ center is second oldest in the nation and oldest in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as it has been serving the LGBTQ+ community since 1979 by providing support and guidance through 25 groups (including Penn J-Bagel a Jewish LGBTQ+ group, the Lambda Alliance a general LGBTQ social organization, and oSTEM a group for LGBTQ people in STEM fields). Penn offers courses in Sexuality and Gender Studies which allows students to discover and learn queer theory, history of sexual norms, and other gender orientation related courses. The first Penn funded LGBTQ+ organization was formed in 1972 by "Steve" Kiyoshi Kuromiya (Penn college class of 1966) when he created the Gay Coffee Hour, which met every week on campus and served as an alternative space to gay bars for gay people of all ages. Penn funded the Gay Coffee House via a grant from the student government and the weekly event was held in Houston Hall Wednesday evenings.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn Electric Racing is the university's Formula SAE team that competes in the international FSAE EV competition (Formula Society of Automotive Engineers, Electric Vehicle). Colloquially known as "PER", the team designs, manufactures, and races custom Formula-style electric racecars against other collegiate teams. In 2015, PER built and raced their first racecar, REV1, at the Lincoln Nebraska FSAE competition, winning first place. The team repeated their success with their next two racecars: REV2 won second place in 2016, and REV3 won first place in 2017.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn is home to numerous organizations that promote the arts, from dance to spoken word, jazz to stand-up comedy, theatre, a cappella and more. The Performing Arts Council (PAC) oversees 45 student organizations in these areas. The PAC has four subcommittees: A Cappella Council; Dance Arts Council; Singer, Musicians, and Comedians (SMAC); and Theatre Arts Council (TAC-e).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania Glee Club, founded in 1862, is tied for fourth oldest continually running glee clubs in the United States and the oldest performing arts group at the University of Pennsylvania. Each year, the Penn Glee Club writes and produces a fully staged, Broadway-style production with an eclectic mix of Penn standards, Broadway classics, classical favorites, and pop hits, highlighting choral singing from all genders (as of April 9, 2021, it merged with Penn Sirens, a previously all female chorale group), clever plots and dialogue, dancing, humor, colorful sets and costumes, and a pit band. The Glee Club draws its singing members from the undergraduate and graduate students (and men and women from the Penn community are also called upon to fill roles in the pit band and technical staff when the club is involved with theatrical productions). The Penn Glee Club has traveled to nearly all 50 states in the United States and over 40 nations and territories on five continents. Since the 1950s, Penn Glee Club has appeared on national television with such celebrities as Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, Ed McMahon, Carol Lawrence, and Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco and has been showcased on television specials such as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and at professional sporting events for The Philadelphia Phillies where club sung the National Anthem at the 1993 National League Championship Series. Since its first performance at the White House for President Calvin Coolidge in 1926, the club has sung for numerous heads of state and world leaders. One of the highlights of 1989 was the club's performance for Polish President Lech Wałęsa. Bruce Montgomery, its best-known and longest-serving director, led the club from 1956 until 2000.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The University of Pennsylvania Band has been a part of student life since 1897. The Penn Band presently mainly performs at football and basketball games as well as university functions (e.g. commencement and convocation) throughout the year but in past it was known not only as the first college band to perform at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade but performed with notable musicians, including John Philip Sousa, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the U.S. Marine Band ("The President's Own"), Doc Severinsen of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Beginning in the late 1920s and 1930s Penn Band recorded with the Victor Talking Machine Company (RCA-Victor Company) and was nationally broadcast on WABC (AM). In 1977, Penn Band performed with Chuck Barris of The Gong Show and in 1980 opened for Penn Alumnus, Maury Povich in his eponymously named show.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Penn Band has performed for Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco (sister and aunt to number of alumni), alumnus and District Attorney and Mayor of Philadelphia, and Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell, Vice President Al Gore, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and Polish dissident and President Lech Wałęsa. By the 1970s, however, Penn Band had begun moving away from the traditional corps style and is now a scramble band. The first one hundred years of the organization's history was described in a book from Arcadia Publishing: "Images of America:The University of Pennsylvania Band" (2006).


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The A Cappella Council (ACK) is composed of 14 a cappella groups. Penn's a cappella groups entertain audiences with repertoires including pop, rock, R&B, jazz, Hindi, and Chinese songs. ACK is also home to Off The Beat, which has received the most contemporary a cappella recording awards of any collegiate group in the United States and the most features on the "Best of College A Cappella" albums. Penn Masala, formed in 1996, is world's oldest and premier South Asian a cappella group based in an American university, which has performed for Barack Obama, Henry Kissinger, Ban Ki Moon, Farooq Abdullah, Imran Khan, Rajkumar Hirani, A.R. Rahman, and Sunidhi Chauhan, had their a cappella version of Nazia Hassan's Urdu classic "Aap Jaisa Koi", (originally from the movie "Qurbani") sung in the movie American Desi, and was invited by Penn alumni Elizabeth Banks (class of 1996) and Max Handelman (Banks' husband, class of 1995) to appear in "Pitch Perfect 2", as Banks reported that Penn's a capella community inspired the film series starring and/or produced by Banks and Handleman.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Mask and Wig Club, founded in 1889, is the oldest all-male musical comedy troupe in the country. Bloomers comedy group, founded in 1978, was the "... nation's first collegiate all-women musical and sketch comedy troupe..." and now accepts all persons from under-represented gender identities who perform comedy.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Dating back to 1857, The Christian Association (a.k.a. The CA) is the oldest religious organization at the university and is composed primarily of students from Mainline Protestant backgrounds. When the university moved to its current campus in the 1880s the CA was based in Houston Hall. After moving around several times it relocated to building at 36th and Locust Streets, which it built and owned (now the ARCH Building), and occupied from 1928 until 2000. The CA ran several foreign missions including one of lasting import when in 1906 it financed University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine graduate, Josiah McCracken, MD, trip to China to investigate the viability of operating the medical department of the Canton Christian College (now known as Lingnan University (Guangzhou)). The following year, Dr. McCracken moved to China and renamed the department as "The University Medical School in Canton, China," and served as its president from the time of renaming through the date in 1913 when the CA ended its affiliation with the Canton Christian College. The CA


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: Though Moses Levy, Penn's first Jewish student, enrolled in 1772 and was the first Jewish trustee (elected in 1802 and served through 1826), organized Jewish life did not begin in earnest until the start of 20th century. Jewish Life on campus is centered at Penn branch of Hillel International, which inspires students to explore Judaism, creates patterns of Jewish living that can be sustained after graduation, provides religious communities, promotes educational initiatives, social justice projects, social and cultural opportunities, and groups focusing on Israel education and politics, and hosts a Kosher Penn approved dining hall (supervised by the Community Kashrus of Greater Philadelphia). In addition Penn Hillel student and professional staff help facilitate the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute's Sinai Scholars Society Academic Symposium, a prestigious event that brings together Jewish college students with noted Jewish academics for a day of in-depth discussion and debate at the university.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: The Penn Newman Catholic Center (the Newman Center) was founded in 1893 (and was the first Newman Center in the country) with the mission of supporting students, faculty, and staff in their religious endeavors. The organization brings prominent Christian figures to campus, including Rev. Thomas "Tom" J. Hagan, OSFS, who worked in the Newman Center and founded Haiti-based non-profit Hands Together; and, in September 2015, James Martin SJ (Wharton undergraduate class of 1982). In addition to his duties as a Jesuit priest, Father Martin is an editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine "America", a "New York Times" Best Selling author, and frequent commentator on the life and teachings of Jesus and on Ignatian spirituality. Father Martin is especially well known for his outreach to the LGBT community, which has drawn a strong backlash from parts of the Catholic Church, but has provided comfort to Penn students and other members of Roman Catholic community who wish to stay connected with their faith and identify as LGBQT. During the 2015 World Meetings of Families, which included a visit from Pope Francis to Philadelphia, the Newman Center hosted over 900 Penn students and alumni.


title: University of Pennsylvania

text: University of Pennsylvania funds (via the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly or similar undergraduate organization) a variety of official clubs focused on India including a number focused on students who are Hindu or Jain. In addition to 'Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH)', a center for students to celebrate South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, culture and religion, 'Rangoli, the Indian Association at Penn', a Penn club, that educates and informs Penn students (mainly graduate and professional students) with ancestry and/or interest in India whose goals include a desire to "rekindle the spirit of various Indian traditions and festivals", and 'Penn Masala', the first and now world famous South Asian a cappella group (detailed above under performing arts clubs), Penn funds the 'Penn Hindu & Jain Association', a student-run official club at Penn that has 80 to 110 student members and an extensive alumni network, dedicated to raise awareness of the Hindu and Jain faiths and foster further development of these communities in the greater Philadelphia area by providing a variety of services and hosting a number of events such as Holi Festival (which has been held annually at Penn since 1993) and ". . . aims to be a home to anyone seeking to explore their spiritual, religious, or social interests."