When the visionaries at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, established in 1740, think loftily about the future of the institution, they speak loftily. “It’s about taking the university from excellence to eminence,” says Anne Papageorge, the school’s vice president of facilities and real estate services.
This idea doesn’t originate from Papageorge, though; it actually belongs to Dr. Amy Gutmann, the president of the Ivy League university. When she arrived at the world-class institution in 2004, she laid out a plan called the Penn Compact in her inaugural address. Reupped as the Penn Compact 2020 in 2013, the program is essentially a wholesale effort to improve access to the school, encourage more cross-disciplinary work between its departments, and better connect it to more teaching and research, both locally and globally.
The university is tackling the Penn Compact from two angles: one, the Making History fundraising campaign, focuses on scholarships, endowed chairs, and capital for the school. The other, the Penn Connects plan, involves physical transformation of the campus and its facilities. The university recruited Papageorge from the New York City government, and a large portion of her responsibilities relate to the implementation of the Penn Connects plan.
Papageorge arrived in the fall of 2006, at the beginning of the campus plan’s first phase. She followed that phase through to completion, then immediately spearheaded an update to create Penn Connects 2.0, a renewed vision that the university is now in the midst of completing.
Papageorge and her executive team are responsible for planning, design and construction, facilities operations, maintenance and utilities, and real estate operations and development. She manages a staff of approximately 950 people, including 175 managers, 525 housekeeping staff, and 250 tradespeople, and she also leads the university’s Environmental-Sustainability Advisory Committee. She has incorporated the school’s sustainability goals into all its capital projects, with a mandate of at least LEED Silver for all major projects, and her team has also set goals for energy conservation, waste minimization, and education, incorporating sustainability into students’ course work.
“Our department is the glue that ensures all the pieces work together,” Papageorge says. This means taking responsibility even for smaller concerns such as sidewalks, curb cuts, landscaping, and the way two building renovations might interface with each other—key differentiators for the 12 centrally located urban schools and centers.