Penn student, finalist for Oticon Focus on People Awards, advocates for those with hearing loss
Yaduraj Choudhary (C’27 W’27) is confronting his hearing loss through advocacy work and his student-led non-profit organization, Three Tiny Bones. The organization is dedicated to creating a more inclusive society by educating communities about healthy hearing and destigmatizing hearing loss. Choudhary was recently featured on Fox29, promoting his efforts and recognition as a finalist for the Oticon Focus on People Awards. These awards honor individuals with hearing loss who actively contribute to spreading awareness, education, and support within their communities.
New Faces, Same Mission: 50 Years of the Penn Women’s Center
Content warning: The following article includes mentions of rape, sexual violence, and murder, and can be disturbing and/or triggering for some readers. Please find resources listed at the bottom of the article.
In the early ‘70s, news of sexual assault on campus traveled in the forms of rumors and whispers.
“No one could confirm what was really happening,” Carol Tracy (C ‘76) says. “Because of the rumor mill, we didn’t know if there was one [assault] in Houston Hall or five.”
Before 1973, no woman on Penn’s campus was thinking about safety, or at least no woman that Tracy knew. But when the stories of sexual assault around campus began circulating, this changed.
From Tracy’s perspective, the rumors were largely ignored by Penn’s administration, contributing to a climate of fear for women on campus. When two nursing students were gang–raped in the SEPTA station at 34th and Chestnut streets in March of 1973, a group of Penn students decided they could no longer ignore the problem.
Tracy had been previously involved in feminist activism at Penn. She came to Penn as a secretary in 1968, taking night classes until she was able to enroll as a full–time student. Throughout that time, she was focused on a union movement for secretaries. But in 1973, her activism focus shifted to sexual harassment.
In April of that year, students and community members organized a sit–in at College Hall that would eventually lead to the founding of the Penn Women’s Center. The PWC still exists, offering a community space for gender equity on Penn’s campus, Director Elisa Foster says. Fifty years after the sit–in, their mission remains the same, even if the faces who are leading it have changed.
1973 was the height of the second–wave feminist movement, when equality for women was at the forefront of social activism. The Equal Pay Act was passed in the previous decade, prohibiting sex–based discrimination. Title IX had been enacted the year before, ending Penn’s gender–segregated honor societies. In January of that year, the United States Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, protecting abortion rights.
“With Title IX, people weren’t even thinking about sexual harassment,” Tracy says. While the Equal Pay Act, Title IX, and Roe v. Wade were legal victories, “sexual assault and domestic violence was the one issue that didn’t come from legislators but from grassroots movements.”
This grassroots organizing approach is what fueled the sit–in at College Hall. Efforts to start a Women’s Studies program at Penn were well underway, and students began to consider the best way to handle the assault rumors on campus. Survivors weren’t the ones to come forward; rather, it was students worried about it happening to them.
The students had previously met with the director of public safety to learn more about what was going on and how to stay safe. In the meeting, he offered them advice: Don’t wear provocative clothing.
“My response was, ‘I should be able to walk down Locust Walk buck naked and it’s still your job to protect me,” Rose Weber (C ‘75, L ‘96) says. “That meeting was the real catalyst that just got us mad enough that we decided we needed to sit–in.”
A few days after the meeting, Robin Morgan, radical feminist and author of Sisterhood is Powerful, came to give a campus talk by invitation from the English department. “She said, ‘You absolutely have to do something. This can’t go on,” Tracy recalls.
So students gathered in the Christian Association basement to make a plan. “Any story about the development of the Women’s Center has to take the CA into account,” former CA intern Betsy Sandel says. Later renamed Concern through Action, the anti–war movement had just ended, and the CA had been “the place for everything” throughout the protests. The students returned there to plan.
Their decision: a sit–in, one of the first all–women sit–ins on a college campus, and among the most influential.
“This was truly a collective moment,” Tracy says. “Students and community members worked really closely together to create a safe space for women on campus.”
Former Psychiatry and History professor Caroll Smith–Rosenberg and Tracy were the key negotiators, sitting around a table in College Hall with the president, provost, dean of students, and several other administrators.
They presented the group’s list of demands, which included better lighting on campus, a bus service, alarms in bathrooms, staffing of a senior–level policewoman to support assault survivors, the right to bring their dogs to class, and of course, the Women’s Center.
As they negotiated, over 200 students and community members occupied College Hall. “We just congregated. It was a huge number of people,” Sandel says. “And it wasn’t just all women. There were lots of male faculty and male students too, but mostly women, just congregated in the hallways.”
The group was careful not to violate open expression guidelines. They lined the hallways, ensuring they didn’t prevent anyone from entering the building or getting to their classes. Local restaurants provided food, and they slept in sleeping bags on the floor for four days.
As Tracy and Smith–Rosenberg continued negotiations, the dean of students received a note requesting their permission to rent College Hall 200, which had been the protest hotspot of the anti–war movement. He was surprised, telling Tracy that protests usually don’t rent the room. “Well, I’m sorry,” Tracy recalls Smith–Rosenberg responding. “Women are overly socialized, and we’re just going to stay until this is over.”
When Friday rolled around, the College Hall security guards were under the impression that the protestors would pack up and go home for the weekend. “By late afternoon, they realized we were really and truly going to stay as long as it took, and they basically caved,” Weber says.
Negotiations were straightforward. Every demand was met, much to the organizers’ surprise. In fact, Weber never expected the Women’s Center to become a reality—it was a throwaway demand, designed to be something they were willing to give up during negotiations.
“It was pretty clear the University had to do something,” Sandel says. “There was serious fear and danger, plus a public relations crisis.”
Getting the center off the ground was a “process,” according to Weber, but a process that moved quickly. Housed in Logan Hall (since renamed Claudia Cohen Hall), the PWC became a place for women to connect with each other and engage in activist work.
They also developed educational opportunities, including the Free Women’s School, a ‘courses without credit’ program offering women from Penn and the greater Philadelphia area an education in “areas not usually offered in the college curriculum,” Sandel says.
Filipino language and culture
Eight thousand miles away from Philadelphia lies the Philippines, a tropical archipelago dotting the Pacific Ocean. Its 117 million inhabitants speak more than 120 languages, including the country’s national language, Filipino, a modernized version of the indigenous Tagalog with loan words from English, Spanish, and Chinese.
It’s also one of the most spoken languages in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Filipino is the fourth most spoken language following English, Spanish, and Chinese, but Filipino language classes are rare, even at the college level. At Penn, they’ve been offered since 1996.
This semester, Vicky Faye Aquino, is teaching Beginning Filipino to 13 students every Tuesday and Thursday evening, with the assistance of Deo Mar Suasin, a teaching assistant and Fulbright Visiting Scholar from the Philippines who is also taking classes in the Graduate School of Education. Many of the students enrolled in the course so they can connect with their heritage and communicate with their families, Aquino says.
Though raised bilingual, Katrina Verano, a second-year student majoring in mathematics from Malvern, Pennsylvania, says she stopped practicing Tagalog during elementary school because there was no one else her age to converse with. “I was the only Filipino in my high school. I really took it to heart,” she says. “It was always only me.”
Verano says she regrets that she no longer remembers the language and is taking the class to rectify that. “I want my kids to be able to speak Tagalog. I was so grateful that my parents taught me,” she says. “I felt like it was really a gift. In order for me to stay connected as strong as I want to be, I have to speak the language.”
Many first-born Filipino Americans were not taught to speak their parents’ language, Verano says, including her cousins and most students in the class. Some students say their parents didn’t teach Filipino to them fearing they would pick up an accent or not excel at school. Assimilating and fitting in was the goal.
Jonathan Villegas, a third-year mechanical engineering major from Pasadena, California, is biracial, and his Filipino father came to the U.S. for college at age 18. Villegas says his father “doesn’t talk about it much. He had some negative experiences being Filipino in L.A.” and felt he was passed up for jobs and promotions.
Villegas heard about the class from another friend who had previously enrolled. Before that, learning Filipino “honestly never really occurred to me,” Villegas says. “I assumed it wouldn’t be available. A lot of colleges don’t have it.”
At Penn, the program was started by Erlinda Juliano 27 years ago. As she was preparing for her retirement, Juliano met Aquino at a Filipino cultural event called Barrio, hosted by the Penn Philippine Association, and started asking pointed questions. Was Aquino originally from the Philippines? She was. Does she speak Filipino fluently? She does. Had she ever taught the language before? She had.
Juliano encouraged Aquino to apply for the lecturer position. Aquino almost hesitated. She already had a full-time job as the associate director at the Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) and a 2-year-old daughter at home.
But the language is important to her, Aquino says. She didn’t want students to miss the chance of learning how to speak their heritage language.
Aquino stays late twice a week to teach her students, bringing movies, art, culture, and music into the classroom. Aquino took students to the Penn Museum to look at artifacts from the Philippines. She brings in cultural components, teaching the students slang and showing contemporary videos. On Oct. 31, the students are headed to PAACH for “Halo-Halloween.” Halo-Halo is an elaborately layered, special occasion dessert. There will also be singing because “Karaoke is part of our culture,” she says. “It’s not just a language class.”
Polyglot Oksana De Mesa, a clinical research nurse at the Perelman School of Medicine, is originally from Ukraine. She grew up speaking Ukrainian, learned Russian when her family immigrated to Chicago, added Mandarin, and dabbled in Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. De Mesa loves languages and enrolled in the course so she could speak with her husband in his native tongue, she says. “Plus, it would be nice to impress my in-laws eventually, especially Lola Luz, the grandmother.” (Lola means grandmother in Filipino.)
De Mesa’s Spanish has come in handy because of the abundance of Spanish loan words in Filipino, she says. This includes common vocabulary like sala (living room), gwapo (handsome; guapo in Spanish) and mundo (world), recognized in Filipino along with the Tagalog word for world, daigdig.
The commonalities are no coincidence. Spain colonized the Philippines for more than 300 years until 1898, when it ceded the region to the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. The U.S. established military rule over the country and remained in power until Japanese occupation during World War II. The Philippines gained independence in 1945.
Now, Aquino says, Filipinos have a great sense of national pride in their language and culture, and students living in the diaspora want to take part. In one class, at Aquino’s urging, Verano led the class in singing the anthem, “Lupang Hinirang,” which means “Chosen Land.”
Aquino, who grew up in the Philippines, says, “Every morning, we had to sing the national anthem, place our hands over our hearts.” Most of her students had heard the anthem before. “Honestly, it’s kind of a banger,” says one of the students, and her classmates laugh and nod.
Hearing the students learn and speak Filipino is the most gratifying part of the work, Aquino says. Even though she is away from her daughter, “it’s for her, too,” Aquino says, and an important part of perpetuating the language and cultural knowledge.
Sefora Elish, a first-year nursing student from Syosset, New York, calls her grandparents to share what she’s learned after every class. They taught her a few words, she says, but mainly switched to Filipino when they wanted to tell secrets, she says. When Elish saw the language offered at Penn, “I had to do it,” she says. “It’s important because a lot of schools don’t offer it.” Often in class, Elish finds herself saying, “Oh, I know that word, but now I can put it in a sentence.”
As for Villegas, he hasn’t yet told his family in California that he’s learning Filipino. He’s going to wait. Then, during Winter Break, he can greet and surprise his grandparents with “Mano po. Kumusta po kayo,” a traditional way of greeting elders. “It’s going to be a Christmas present,” he says.
(While the terms “Filipino” and “Tagalog” refer to different variations of the language, they are used interchangeably by speakers in this story.)