Category: events

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.

Today, executive orders and federal funding cuts are threatening life-saving research at Penn; the principles of racial justice, equity, accessibility, and nondiscrimination that are necessary to higher education for the public good; and the rights of faculty, staff, and students, including those who are international or noncitizens, people of color, and trans and LGBTQ+.

On Thursday, March 20 at noon at 34th and Walnut, join Penn employees, students, community members, and elected officials to send a message: Penn must not obey in advance! The Penn administration must uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA, nondiscrimination, and the rights of all members of our community.

This demonstration is co-sponsored by 6+ Penn labor organizations representing faculty, medical residents, graduate workers, postdocs, museum workers, and library workers.  For more on our coalition and goals, read our recent op-ed. If you work at Penn, sign the coalition petition in support of these principles.

2.20.25

AAUP-Penn’s Committee on immigrant employees and the Executive Committee signed on to the following statement to Penn’s administration urging more material support for undocumented, immigrant, and international students, faculty, and staff. The statement was drafted collectively with the Penn Undergraduate Assembly (UA), IDEAL Student Council of GAPSA (Graduate and Professional Student Assembly), and the Penn Carey Law Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG).

To: Interim President Larry Jameson, Provost John Jackson, and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee

As faculty, staff, grad workers, postdocs, students, and community members of the University of Pennsylvania, we write to express our concern about Penn’s commitment to its undocumented, immigrant, and international students and employees.

Recent Executive Orders issued by the White House that threaten the safety of immigrants and minorities in the name of “protecting the American people,” “protecting women and girls,” or “combating anti-Semitism” raise grave concerns and necessitate a clear, principled stance from university leadership. Although your message to the community on Tuesday, January 28, took some positive steps toward “protecting each other,” it did not go far enough in addressing the climate of fear and uncertainty these orders have created. Our community is reeling—students, faculty, and staff alike in fear for themselves and their neighbors. In this moment, it is imperative that university leadership offer unequivocal reassurance and a concrete commitment to protecting those most vulnerable. Specifically, the university must publicly clarify its stance and the steps it will take regarding cooperation with the federal government in the enforcement of these executive orders.

We ask for clarification on these questions:

1. What is campus policy with regard to working with federal immigration authorities?
2. Whom should faculty contact in the event that they are approached by ICE agents?
3. What private/limited-access spaces can you make available where ICE agents cannot enter without a valid warrant?
4. Are you planning to communicate with students, staff, and faculty about their privacy rights and about whom to contact if approached by ICE? 
5. What legal support and representation will the university provide for people who are faced with visa or deportation problems?

In 2016, Penn declared itself a “sanctuary” for undocumented students, affirming that it “will not allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) / Customs and Border Protection (CBP) / U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on our campus unless required by warrant” and that it “will not share any information about any undocumented student with these agencies unless presented with valid legal process.” This commitment aligns with the protections afforded under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which strictly limits the disclosure of student records, including immigration status, without explicit student consent. FERPA mandates that institutions safeguard the privacy of student information, and any deviation from this standard—such as compliance with federal requests for student data absent a legal warrant—would not only violate Penn’s stated values but also risk breaching federal privacy laws. 

President Trump’s order to “Combat Anti-Semitism” also directs the Secretaries of State, Education, and Homeland Security to provide “recommendations…[to] monitor and report activities by alien students… [that] lead to investigations… and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” This vague and open-ended directive amounts to an attack on academic freedom. Using civil rights protections as pretext, it allows administrators to target student activists and silence criticism of a foreign state. Historically, university campuses have served as the conscience of the nation, leading movements against war and oppression—whether opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, or challenging institutional complicity in human rights violations. Now, in this moment of heightened risk, we call upon you to reaffirm Penn’s commitment to freedom of expression and to expand its commitment to include protections of undocumented staff and workers as well as those community members on F-1, J-1, and H1-B visas—and to make clear that Penn will not cooperate in any way with these unjust policies of intimidation and deportation.

Signed,

AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

Penn Undergraduate Assembly (UA)

IDEAL Student Council of GAPSA (Graduate and Professional Student Assembly)

Penn Carey Law Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG)

GET-UP (UAW)

Mark your calendars and spread the word to your colleagues!

This Wednesday, February 19 at 12 p.m., join colleagues and coworkers from across Penn outside Senator Dave McCormick’s office (2000 Market Street) to say no to federal funding cuts to essential research, teaching, and healthcare. Register here to attend!

The Trump administration’s attempts to freeze federal research funding, slash NIH and NSF resources, and impose a debilitating cap on indirect costs in NIH grants all threaten life-saving scientific and medical research. They endanger the future of higher education, research, and healthcare that serves the public good. They could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in our city.

Wednesday’s demonstration is part of a national day of action against federal funding cuts, organized by faculty, graduate workers, postdocs, healthcare workers, and other higher ed workers in AAUP, AFT, UAW, CWA, and other higher ed unions. Across the country, higher ed workers will stand together to say: Hands Off Our Healthcare, Research, and Jobs! 
Join the demonstration this Wednesday at noon, and bring a colleague with you. Everyone is welcome. Register here to attend!

Original Link Here

August 26, 2024

Larry Jameson, Interim President, the University of Pennsylvania, president@upenn.edu

John Jackson, Provost, the University of Pennsylvania, provost@upenn.edu

Jeffery Kallberg, Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Pennsylvania, kallberg@sas.upenn.edu

Steve Fluharty, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Pennsylvania, stevenfl@upenn.edu

Dr. Hikaru (Karu) Kozuma, Vice Provost for University Life, the University of Pennsylvania, vpul-central@pobox.upenn.edu

Dear Interim President Jameson and Colleagues:

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our grave concern about the apparent cooperation of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) with the witch-hunt which the Republican majority on the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce is conducting against several members of its faculty, as well as faculty and students at other institutions of higher education. Your failure to resist the committee’s improper demands and resolutely defend your faculty makes a mockery of your university’s avowed commitment to academic freedom. 

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.

In a letter to the president of the University of Pennsylvania and the chair of its board of trustees dated 24 January 2024, Representative Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, alleged that the university had failed to address antisemitism on campus or protect its Jewish students, and she requested that the university turn over to the committee a very broad range of documents that would ostensibly enable the committee to investigate these allegations. The letter falsely accused three members of Penn’s faculty — Associate Professor of Arabic Literature Huda Fakhreddine, Dr. Ahmad Almallah, an art­ist-in-residence at Penn’s Creative Writing Program, and Professor of Political Science Robert Vitalis – of making “antisemitic remarks and statements of support for Hamas.” As we noted in a 9 November 2023 letter calling on Penn’s administration to defend its faculty against vicious attacks on social media, “[t]hese allegations are based on the tendentious conflation of criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and its well-documented violations of Palestinian rights and aspirations with antisemitism.”

Unfortunately, it appears that since January 2024 Penn has provided the committee with some of the materials it requested – even though no subpoena has been issued with which the university is legally obligated to comply. On 20 August 2024 the university’s counsel informed Professor Fakhreddine and Dr. Almallah that it had received a request from the committee to provide it with their c.v.s, their syllabi since the fall 2022 semester, “all course-wide communications for courses since the fall 2023 semester, and any communications since 8/1/23 relating to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and/or the Palestine Writes Festival.” Penn has agreed to turn over Professor Fakhreddine’s and Dr. Almallah’s c.v.s and syllabi. The extent to which it will comply with the committee’s other demands is not clear, but it has apparently placed holds on Professor Fakhreddine’s and Dr. Almallah’s university email accounts, which indicates that it may give the committee access to their email messages. 

As we noted in a 7 May 2024 letter to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “[t]hrough its recent investigations and public hearings, the committee has threatened the freedoms essential to university life and learning, including academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. As a result of this campaign, the committee has made our campuses less safe for students, faculty and staff alike. These efforts shock the conscience and violate the First Amendment in ways that are reminiscent of the now-disgraced House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the late 1940s and 1950s.” The letter went on to note that “the framing and content of [the committee’s hearings and investigations] make it clear that many committee members are less concerned with combatting invidious discrimination than with suppressing and punishing pro-Palestine speech.”

That the University of Pennsylvania would collaborate with the committee’s politically motivated investigations, at the cost of sacrificing the academic freedom and right to free speech of members of its faculty, is deeply troubling. We must remind you of the statement on “Academic Freedom in Times of War” issued by the AAUP on 24 October 2023, which is directly relevant to the current circumstances: “It is in tumultuous times that colleges’ and universities’ stated commitments to protect academic freedom are most put to the test. As the Israel-Hamas war rages and campus protests proliferate, institutional authorities must refrain from sanctioning faculty members for expressing politically controversial views and should instead defend their right, under principles of academic freedom, to do so.”

We therefore call on the University of Pennsylvania to immediately desist from any form of cooperation with the witch-hunt which the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has launched against members of its faculty. We further call on you to affirm your commitment to protect the academic freedom of your faculty, students and staff, and to vigorously defend them against all forms of governmental harassment and intimidation. Finally, we urge you to offer a public apology to the Penn faculty members whose information you chose to turn over to the committee.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Aslı Ü. Bâli. MESA President, Professor, Yale Law School

Laurie Brand, Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom, Professor Emerita, University of Southern California

cc:

aaup.penn@gmail.com, sigalbp@upenn.edu, lisa.bellini@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Welcome back to a new year, colleagues! As we get ready for 2024-25 on these hot end-of-August days, we look back on our inspiring, chilly rally on the campus Green—OUR campus Green—last January, where we heard speakers from all corners of our community stand up for academic freedom, shared institutional governance, open expression, and diversity and racial justice. Below, find the speeches from that day…and revisit our earlier post with images from the rally.

Dear Penn Community,

Penn’s AAUP chapter welcomes all Penn community members back for the 2022-23 year! Please reach out to us at aaup.penn@gmail.com, and please mark your calendar to attend our first general meeting of the year, scheduled for 11am – 12:00pm on Friday, October 14: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98007289840. We’ll discuss, among other things, plans for a compensation survey focused on contingent faculty in connection with the “Who Teaches at Penn?” project, political education for undergraduates about contingent faculty working conditions to broaden our base of support, and any new issues you want to raise. The elected members of our chapter’s Executive Committee are listed below, and we are eager to work with you this year!

AAUP–Penn represents all Penn faculty, and we take “faculty” in its most expansive sense: all those who teach or research at Penn, including tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty, full-timers and part-timers, librarians, grad workers, and postdocs. If you do the work, then you are faculty, regardless of titles assigned by the administration, and without concern for hierarchies imposed from on high. As we have learned in our efforts over the last two years to improve pandemic-era working conditions, to advocate for greater equity and job security for all instructors, to make institutional governance inclusive and collective, to push Penn to pay its fair share in local taxes, and to defend local residents against gentrification, the best way to improve our living conditions is to use our collective strength to fight for all our working conditions and the lives of our diverse communities. 

The last few months have been busy, so here are some updates!

In June, AAUP affiliated at a national level with the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. All AAUP members are automatically AFT members, and while we retain our independence we also add to our strength across and well beyond higher education. 

Two AAUP/AFT chapters just reached tentative contract agreements after difficult negotiations, at Eastern Michigan University and Rider University—back in the classroom with great student support, stronger because together! Another, at the New School, is currently working “overtime” to help their unionized colleagues secure basic, fair working conditions. 

The fight to preserve the UC Townhomes at 40th & Market as subsidized, affordable housing continues to gain momentum. Residents are calling on Penn, Drexel, area hospitals, and the City to contribute to a preservation fund to help acquire the site. Recently City Councilmembers Helen Gym and Kendra Brooks issued a statement in support of residents’ right to remain in their homes.

You can also read our article on contingent academic labor at Penn and on the threat of casualization to higher ed more broadly in this year’s Penn Disorientation Guide. Over the summer, in addition to standing with campus and local unions in several contract rallies, we held two Labor Solidarity Happy Hours with Penn and area union members to learn more about each other’s campaigns and as a first step toward building coalitions to support organized workers on our campus and around the city. 

Last but not least, every THURSDAY we will host weekly AAUP-Penn happy hours outside at New Deck Tavern on Samson Street from 4:00-5:30pm. All AAUP-Penn members and friends are welcome, so please come if you can!

In Solidarity,

AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

• Chi-ming Yang, President
• Jessa Lingel, Vice President
• Rupa Pillai, Treasurer
• David Kazanjian, Communications Secretary
• Heather Hughes, General Member-Elect
• Fabian Arzuaga, General Member-Elect
• Sam Layding, General Member-Elect

Join your AAUP-Penn colleagues for a happy hour from 4-5:30 on the outdoor patio at New Deck Tavern, 3408 Sansom. All welcome! First drinks on AAUP!