Former Penn president Judith Rodin on shifting business/university relations, and rebuilding Philly

Judith Rodin stepped down as University of Pennsylvania’s president 20 years ago and onto a national stage: The previous head of Yale’s psychology department went on to run the Rockefeller Foundation until 2017 and was well-paid to join blue-chip corporate boards — Aetna, BlackRock, Citigroup, and as lead independent director of Comcast.

But the Philadelphia native, a graduate of Philadelphia High School for Girls and Penn, with a doctorate from Columbia University, never quite left town: She hung onto her 34th Street office (as past Penn presidents do), taught a section on leadership at the university’s Wharton School — and has lately taken another post, back in the neighborhood.

Rodin, 79, is an adviser to the Bellwether District, Chicago-based Hilco Redevelopment Partners’ project to adapt and make profitable the postindustrial moonscape covering two square miles of former oil refineries along the Schuylkill in South and Southwest Philly. Other advisers include Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostwick, ex-commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; Ron DeGregorio, a former Exelon Power president; and Michael K. Ohm, a corporate environmental lawyer.

Bellwether plans two main projects: a 10 million-square-foot warehouse district spreading from 26th Street and a 3.5 million-square-foot office district and drug development park south of Grays Ferry Avenue and Pennovation, the former DuPont Co. paint facility that Penn Engineering redeveloped as a center for research, start-ups, and corporate partners on Rodin successor Amy Gutmann’s watch.

Rodin, who served as Penn president from 1994 to 2004, agreed to talk with The Inquirer about Bellwether and the rapid changes in business-academic relations during her career. She declined to speak about the recent ouster of Penn president Elizabeth Magill following complaints and canceled contributions led by billionaire Wharton donors. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

The world has changed so much since my academic career at Yale [1973-92, from junior professor to provost]. Then, when a faculty member had a new discovery, you had to clunkily go to the office that dealt with patents and licenses and let them decide whether to use it.

And you worried about telling your colleagues. Was it too commercial?

Today, faculty members put all their patents right on their resume. It’s considered a positive rather than something to be embarrassed about.

I have been a major advocate for the view that there isn’t enough money in the [nonprofit] sector — or even the government research sector — to really create the innovations of the future. Unless there is collaboration with the private sector, you will never get these innovations.

I don’t think controlling each other is the issue. They see each other as leverage-able partners, where one plus one equals four, instead of two.

It started with big pharma. The companies realized you don’t have to do all the research in your labs: You can find university partners with [taxpayer-financed National Institutes of Health] funding.

I think that’s great — the government and universities jumping into that [business] interface. That is where all the breakthroughs will happen.

We used to do a lot of research in labs, where often it didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t know how to sell it, to keep it going.

There’s no question that there’s concern around scientific fraud, which seems to be increasing and motivated by economic outcomes. With the right kind of controls, the research journals can know the sources of [scholarly authors’] funding and whether they were influenced by economic collaborations with a company. That goes a long way to relieving concerns.

Penn had less of that concern than many of its Ivy peers. I think it’s because our DNA comes before Ben Franklin. He said to do everything theoretical — and everything practical. He was an important investor and polymath. So it is in our DNA to say we aren’t against the commercial, and we aren’t against applying [scholarship to commerce].

When I became president, one of the first people I chatted with was [the late State] Sen. Hardy Williams. We began with a contentious discussion, him asking, ‘What do you really know about Philadelphia?’ I said, ‘Hardy, you and I went to the same elementary school.’ That was the beginning of what became [a positive] relationship.

Philly is a city of relationships. I chaired [then-Mayor John] Street’s transition team and joined the Chamber of Commerce. Penn isn’t isolated. The president has to be part of the city. They have to know the political actors and the corporate sector.

With our partners in West Philadelphia, we reimagined the old Civic Center site [on 33rd Street to expand the Penn and Children’s Hospitals]. We laid the groundwork to develop Penn as a place to come and shop, to work in construction and health-care jobs, to become what it is now. It has exceeded expectations.

John Fry [later president of Drexel] was Penn’s executive vice president at the time. We collaborated with the city on the West Philadelphia Initiatives [which helped form the University City District to add security and cleaning people]. We started Hire West Philadelphia First and Buy West Philadelphia First. We had Wharton MBAs mentoring West Philadelphia start-ups. We had a sense we could revitalize with the community, its economic and social capacity.

We all worked hard on the Science Center, which added Pennovation [at the other end of the campus]. Now we are working on the next piece: Bellwether, the gateway from the airport, to Penn. It hadn’t been the gateway we like to show as we recruit students and employees.

The Hilco site begins where Pennovation ends — on 34th Street, which now dead-ends, and would extend through Bellwether. [Hilco is] working with the city and PennDot to open Bellwether into Southwest and West and South Philadelphia with new transit routes, new pedestrian and bike routes, so it is no longer a closed-off area. It will be a main corridor linking West Philadelphia and Center City projects.

You can imagine a Penn student who generates an amazing new idea. Their incubator space at Pennovation develops into a manufacturer in the Bellwether District with an office in Center City. Like Route 128 in Boston, where [space and financing for computer and biotech development] led to extraordinary cooperation between Harvard, MIT, and other universities, and industry. I can see that happening here. There is room for many more universities and entrepreneurs than the Science Center can hold. It’s way bigger than University City.