Philadelphia City Council Testimony on Attacks against DEI at Penn

On May 9, 2025, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee gave the following testimony at a Philadelphia City Council Hearing on Attacks against DEI at Penn.

We are proud to testify today to amplify a message sent by Penn employees across the university this spring: the Penn administration must end its backtracking on racial and social justice. It must uphold basic principles of equity, and it must reaffirm that diversity and open inquiry are essential to research, teaching, and the advancement of knowledge. In March, over 1,100 Penn employees signed their names to these demands in a petition to the administration, and hundreds of us demonstrated on campus.  We are proud that the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-Penn) was one of six campus labor organizations that cosponsored this petition, and we are proud to stand together in this work with unions representing Penn graduate workers, postdocs, medical residents, library workers, and museum workers.  These are consensus issues among those of us who work at Penn. 

It is important to understand that the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are in fact attacks on the gains of the civil rights movement and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  It is also important to understand that those movements won institutional changes that improved the quality of US universities. During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, US universities were relatively closed, segregated institutions with little tolerance for critical thought and open inquiry.  Faculty were purged for participating in the civil rights and labor movements, and those purges impoverished the intellectual life of our entire society: they drove out scholars in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and they chilled the speech of faculty, staff, and students who remained.  Just as important, those purges compounded the effects of decades of racial, gender, and ethnic discrimination that had already put higher education out of reach of most people in the United States.

In many ways, we owe the revitalization of our universities to the Black freedom movement and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which broke through the repressive atmosphere of the early Cold War and opened US higher education to people, ideas, and entire fields of knowledge that had been shut out.  We have those movements to thank for the very existence of African-American studies, ethnic studies, the study of gender and sexuality, and critical research on racism, colonialism and imperialism.  It is no accident that those are precisely the areas of study under attack today at Penn and across the country. And it is no accident that attacks on those fields are going hand-in-hand with assaults on diversity, on racial and social justice, and on our colleagues and students who are people of color, noncitizens, trans and LGBTQ+ who have every right to be at Penn and without whose knowledge and insights our university and our society would be impoverished. For many of us the DEI initiatives that existed were only a step in the right direction as they often did not address the structural and systemic inequities and power dynamics built into the institutions of higher education, learning processes and means of knowledge production that have led to the reproduction of the status quo. If they had been successful, we would not have been in this place so soon.  Now even those overtures and attempts at change are under attack, leading to further regression.  

So we stand against executive orders that would return us to the days of segregation. We stand against politicians, donors, and lobbying organizations that would like to control what can be taught and studied in the United States. And we believe that it is time for the Penn administration to stand with us.

To this point, Penn’s administration has failed to do so. In the wake of Donald Trump’s executive orders attacking DEI, we are proud that the national AAUP sued the Trump administration, arguing that the orders were unlawful and unconstitutional.  By contrast, Penn’s central administration began directing faculty and staff to scrub websites and censor academic programming.  Some colleagues were told by supervisors that Penn’s General Counsel had a list of prohibited words. Other colleagues were told that really, they could keep teaching and researching whatever they wanted, but just change all the words.  As these colleagues noted, this is not possible.  Censorship threatens the very existence of many fields of study: it is not possible to conduct research or teaching on racism, gender, or sexuality when those terms, concepts, and issues are deemed unspeakable.  It is not possible to hold a workshop for faculty on how to make classes accessible to students from diverse backgrounds when you can’t circulate an announcement using any of the words that would tell people what the workshop is about.  Censorship fatally undermines the freedom of faculty to teach, as well as the freedom of students to learn.  It destroys the conditions of free and open inquiry that are necessary for universities to fulfill their mission—to produce and disseminate new knowledge that can serve the public good in a democratic society.

For these reasons, 1,100 Penn employees have called on Penn’s administration to end its backtracking on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.  The Penn administration must cease instructing faculty, staff, and students to censor programs, funding proposals, and websites. It must restore policies, websites, and programming that were in place to make the University open and accessible to all before the publication of executive orders.  It must retain staff who implement those policies and programs.  It must vigorously defend researchers and instructors who face targeted harassment for their scholarship and teaching on racism, disability, gender, and sexuality.  And all future decisions on these issues must be made by the affected members of the University, not handed down unilaterally by the central administration.