Of course it’s not normal. It’s not normal at Temple, either. It happened once and made national news. Nothing like that had happened before (except maybe people had been trying to make something like that happen for a couple of weeks before it actually happened). Now that it has happened, a lot of effort is going to go into making certain it doesn’t happen again.
And, just to be clear, Temple (much less Philadelphia) was not “overrun by a violent mob” or engulfed in “bloody riots.” What happened was no doubt scary, abnormal, and unacceptable, but it was neither of those things. It seems like there were effectively four or five violent incidents, some of which may have involved the same small group of troublemakers, out of hundreds (maybe thousands) of people participating in the flash mob. Many of them intervened to stop the violence when it occurred.
It is much, much more difficult to imagine something like this happening at Penn. Some of things that cause tension between Temple and its surrounding community-- university expansion displacing longtime residents or pricing them out of their own neighborhood – happened so long ago at Penn that it’s not a current issue for anyone. At Temple, the pace is accelerating. And other tension-producing things never happened at all at Penn. Attracting stronger students and more out-of-region and out-of-state students has meant that the number and percentage of Temple students from the city’s African-American community has plummeted over the past 15 years. Financial aid has shifted from need to merit, too. I think there is a sense that opportunity has been taken away from them, that an institution in which the community felt it had a real stake has rejected them. There aren’t any other public bachelor’s degree options in the city, and the nearest suburban ones are not convenient at all for city kids or very welcoming to them.