Penn President Gaylord P. Harnwell (1953-1970)

Penn President Gaylord P. Harnwell’s leadership team provided $60,000 in seed funds to help establish the West Philadelphia Community Free School. The motivation was starkly political. In the late 1960s, the University faced ominous budget deficits accruing from large-scale campus redevelopment projects in the 1960s urban renewal era. The University sought to protect its huge investment in an expanded and modernized campus by controlling development in the low-income Market Street corridor a few blocks north of the campus.

Acting through a non-profit coalition of “higher eds and meds” named the West Philadelphia Corporation, which Penn dominated, Harnwell’s leadership team and their allies took a heavy hand in establishing the University City Science Center along Market Street. And they promised financial and logistical support for the creation of University City High School, which Penn and the School District of Philadelphia planned to be a specialized high school of science, comparable to Bronx Science High School of New York City and affiliated with the University City Science Center.

In Becoming Penn: The Pragmatic American University, 1950–2000 (Philadelphia, 2015), John Puckett and Mark Lloyd offer a “reasoned speculation” as to why the Harnwell administration decided to shift University support from the high school project to the Community Free School. First, vocal Black and White activists strongly opposed a high school of science, believing it would favor the children of University City’s white-professional-managerial elites. Perhaps of greater significance, Penn worried that the perennially underfunded school district would be unable to fulfill its end of the bargain and leave the now cash-strapped University holding the bag. “With Jessica Orliff, who wrote a scholarly paper on University City High School, we would also conjecture that the University’s role in the West Philadelphia [Community] Free School presented an honorable and relatively inexpensive way out of this dilemma” (p. 113).