Penn - always disappointing - just about the time I think they're starting to recover from the shame of the Water Buffalo and stolenbutnotreallystolenbecauseitwasminoritystusentswhotooktheDP's incidents, they go and give an honory degree to Kofi Annan, and now this - for all their powerful intellect, they don't learn very fast.....
No, they don't. They still sound just like they did back in the 80's when I was a math grad student there. My best friend (a physics grad student who TAed for the math dept his first three years), one of his professors and I went to disrupt a 'racism awareness workshop' (an event held so politically correct white girls could have their requisite does of guilt) by introducing rational argument.
It is one of my few political triumphs that I effectively won the day. I argued that racial prejudice was functionally gone in the US, but that cultural prejudice remained. By the end of the session--in which they had to pull the administrator who was running the thing out of her session and send her to mine to counter my arguments--we were all talking about culture not race.
(I actually wonder whether 'anti-racism' originally turned into 'multiculturalism' at Penn, and whether I unwittingly had a hand in the name change.)