Administrative Services > Space Management

The Administrative Core is responsible for space within the PSC.

This requires:

• (a) working with SAS to see that space is cleaned, maintained, and refurbished, as required;
• (b) assigning space, with highest priority for space for funded research projects; and
• (c) dealing with the other primary institutional units in the McNeil Building, the Departments of Economics and Sociology.

This may sound unsettlingly vague: Wouldn’t it be better if the PSC knew formally what its space were, and partitioned it accordingly? Yes, if the Penn PSC were a new entity, seeking to establish itself; no, if—as is actually the case—it were an almost 50 year-old institution with a history of expansion and strong interpenetration (if not co-optation) of Sociology (dating back to the mid-1980s, the department has been chaired in all but 2 years by Preston, P. Morgan, D. Massey [both PSC research associates], Allison, and now Zuberi) and Economics (we are entering a rare period with a non-PSC Chair, G. Mailath, but before that almost 3 decades of Behrman, P. Taubman, Postlewaite, M. Rosenzweig, and Wolpin). Thus the functional space available for distribution by the Administrative Core far exceeds that shown on static SAS maps, a fact borne in on Smith when he was the associate dean responsible for these matters. An SAS policy exists on “space relations” in McNeil, with top priority for funded research, as a memorandum from Smith (as associate dean) to Allison as Chair of Sociology, recently reiterated by the current SAS dean. Or, as Preston pointed out when the matter of formalization of space “ownership” was raised in a recent PSC Executive Committee meeting, “The problem when you start staking out your property rights is that other people tend to start staking out theirs.”