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AAUP-Penn is thrilled to announce that the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has granted our request to vacate the District Court ruling ordering Penn to comply with the Trump administration’s unconstitutional subpoena to create a list of Jews at Penn.

After the Penn administration refused to comply with an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) order requesting identities and personal information of university employees affiliated with Jewish groups, the EEOC sued the University. AAUP-Penn, along with the national AAUP, the American Academy of Jewish research, and other groups intervened on the side of the University to ensure that the rights of Penn community members would be protected. On March 31, the District Court ruled in favor of the EEOC, and both Penn and the intervenors appealed. Over the summer, Penn settled with the EEOC when the EEOC agreed not to enforce the subpoena. However, AAUP did not close our appeal: we kept fighting to ensure that the existing ruling could not be used to coerce Penn or other universities to disclose lists of Jews or any other group.

We have now succeeded in vacating that District Court decision, leaving the EEOC with no list of Jews at Penn, and no precedent that it could use to compel similar lists in the future.

We are so grateful to AAUP-Penn members Amanda Shanor, Serena Mayeri, Steve Weitzman, and Lorena Grundy for their tireless work to win this victory, and also to the ACLU of Pennsylvania and Democracy Defenders for representing us.

When we fight, we win!

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These principles are cosponsored by GETUP-UAW, RAPUP-UAW, AFSCME DC47 Local 590, and AFSCME DC47 Local 397, and CIR/SEIU Local 1957.

[Note: AAUP-Penn is working to grow our coalition to advocate for real protection of open expression at Penn. This issue affects us all – if you are interested in getting in touch and staying informed about upcoming opportunities to fight for open expression together with colleagues across the university, share your contact information here.]

Open expression, including the right to assemble, speak, and protest, is fundamental to education and to democracy itself. Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression were in place for decades before the administration unilaterally imposed deeply problematic Temporary Standards in June 2024 and initiated an illegitimate process to produce new proposed guidelines.

As a result of campus-wide protest and mobilization, the proposed guidelines have been scrapped, and the authority to draft new guidelines has been returned to the Committee on Open Expression. This Committee has the important job of drafting guidelines that can ensure our university lives up to its values, giving us a narrow window of time when we can help shape open expression on campus.

We call on the Penn administration to restore the Guidelines on Open Expression and strengthen them in the following ways:

  1. Guarantee a democratic interpretation, amendment, and enforcement mechanism for the Guidelines. The power to modify, interpret, and enforce the Guidelines must be transferred from the administration to a representative, democratically elected body consisting of faculty (tenure-track and non-tenure-track), postdocs, staff, and students, all elected at large. The disciplinary process for student open expression cases should be transferred from CSA to the same democratically elected body and reformed to provide a fair procedure and equal treatment for all members of the university. Modification of the Guidelines must be democratic and subject to a campus-wide referendum vote.
  2. The Guidelines should apply only to activity on Penn’s private property and not nearby public property or online spaces, where all people have rights to freedom of speech and assembly under the First Amendment.
  3. Protect forms of non-violent political action, including disruptive protest, that facilitate campus-community interaction and have historically been necessary in creating high-quality universities that serve the public good in a democratic society. 
  4. The Guidelines must be consistent with US labor law, guaranteeing that university policy does not infringe on workers’ right to engage in concerted activity. The Guidelines should state that in case of conflict, workers’ right to engage in concerted activity supersedes university policy. The Guidelines should acknowledge that any disciplinary decisions based on alleged violation of the guidelines are subject to collectively-bargained grievance and arbitration procedures for unionized workers.
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If you are a Penn employee, join hundreds of colleagues across the university in signing a pledge not to be a strikebreaker.

For over a year, Penn graduate employees (GETUP members) have been bargaining with the Penn administration to win support for international students and fair pay and benefits—proposals that would make Penn a better place to research, teach, and learn. As their strike deadline approaches, administrators can avert a strike by bargaining in good faith and settling a contract. Instead, they are employing a costly anti-union law firm, and they are pressuring faculty to participate in their anti-union campaign by asking us to serve as strikebreakers. You can read more about unionization at Penn from AAUP-Penn’s perspective here.

In asking employeees to break a strike and interfere in the collective bargaining process, the administration is asking us to compromise our integrity and relationships with graduate workers. We must simply say no, standing together with hundreds of colleagues.

Some colleagues have signed this pledge because they do not wish to take sides and intend to remain neutral. Others have signed because they support GETUP.  For all of us, this pledge allows us to protect our own integrity, preserve our relationships with each other and with graduate workers, and respect the collective bargaining process as it unfolds between GETUP and Penn’s central administration.

The pledge is short and simple:

We affirm the value of the work done by graduate research and teaching assistants, unionized as GETUP-UAW, and we affirm their federally protected right to bargain collectively for a fair contract. After bargaining with Penn’s central administration for over a year, seeking support for international graduate workers and fair pay and benefits, Penn graduate workers voted by 92% to authorize a strike, as is their right under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. We hope that the Penn administration will come to a fair agreement to avert a strike.

We pledge that if GETUP-UAW calls a strike, we will not serve as strikebreakers; that is, we will not take sides against graduate teaching and research assistants. If we are asked to break their strike by (a) doing strikers’ teaching or research, (b) doing strikers’ grading, (c) assigning strikers’ work to others, or (d) reporting the names of strikers for possible retaliation, we will simply decline to do so.

If you are a Penn employee, click here to sign, and please share this pledge with two colleagues. Your participation will make a difference in building strength in numbers.

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July 7, 2025

Larry Jameson, President
John L. Jackson, Jr., Provost
Marta Bartholomew, Director of Postdoctoral Affairs

Dear President Jameson and Colleagues,

We write on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-Penn) to ask that you implement a policy of neutrality in all union organizing drives at Penn. In particular, we ask you to end the anti-union campaign against Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP), take down the anti-union website https://facts4pennpostdocs.org/, and respect the results of the upcoming union election on July 16 and 17.

The website presents talking points that have been part of anti-union campaigns in the United States since the 1970s, crafted by anti-union law firms and consultants. When workers launch organizing drives in the United States, over three-quarters of employers hire such firms to design anti-union campaigns for them.[1] Penn currently uses the law firm Cozen O’Connor in its campaign against postdocs and RAs.

Anti-union campaigns target workers with a standard set of messages, delivered through phone calls, text messages, emails, websites, mailers, posters, and meetings with supervisors:

  • They depict unions as third parties that supposedly interfere with workers’ individual relationships with their employers. In fact, unions are organizations of workers themselves. Workers make up the bargaining committees that negotiate contracts, they vote on contracts, and they participate in grievance procedures as stewards. Workers organize unions precisely because individuals do not have effective negotiating power with large institutions. Collective bargaining is a way to make workers’ voices heard.
  • They warn workers about union dues, implying that they might be worse off if they form a union. This is not a credible argument. Workers do not pay dues until they vote to ratify their first contract, and workers have no reason to ratify contracts that leave them worse off. Furthermore, according to the US Department of Labor, unionized workers in the United States earn 18% more than non-union workers do;[2] union dues are generally less than 2% of wages.
  • They issue threats, often couched as expressions of concern. For instance, employers warn workers that even if they vote to form a union, it might take them years to negotiate a first contract, and the terms of that contract might fall short of their expectations—they might even be worse than their current terms of employment. These are threats indicating the employer intends to fight workers in contract negotiations.
  • They warn that unions will impose rigid rules inappropriate to their workplace. This argument presents a distorted picture of union contracts, which take many forms. Unionized workers, including those in US universities, have long negotiated contracts protecting some forms of flexibility while establishing guarantees that workers need. This argument also obscures the fact that workers in non-union settings are already subject to rules; having a union simply allows them a voice in determining and enforcing those rules. Finally, this argument loses its luster when one realizes that all employers make it: big-box stores, manufacturers, and institutions of higher education all claim that they are uniquely flexible workplaces where unions could not operate.
  • They present positive workplace policies as evidence that workers don’t need unions. This obscures the fact that current policies are often products of past mobilizations. For instance, in recent decades, union organizing drives by postdocs and research associates have led universities nationwide to improve pay and benefit packages. Penn’s website now presents those improvements as evidence that organizing is needless or destructive.
  • They advise workers who signed cards to change their minds and vote no in the election. They tell workers to give management one more chance.

All of these talking points appear on the website above. We understand that the university administration is deploying other standard anti-union tactics as well. Lawyers from Cozen O’Connor representing Penn challenged the right of postdocs and research associates to organize before the NLRB, based on the false argument that they are only “temporary” employees.[3] The NLRB rightly rejected this argument. In addition, Penn has illegally deployed the Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations—now in effect for over a year—to repress union gatherings on campus in violation of federal labor law. Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, workers have the right to engage in concerted activity—that is, collective action to address shared workplace concerns—and on college campuses, concerted activity routinely takes the form of rallying on campus.[4] Yet on June 12, when RAPUP members gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the Button, they were forced off campus. The Penn administration knows that such measures are illegal: in August 2024, Penn security prevented medical residents in CIR/SEIU from gathering in the courtyard of Pennsylvania Hospital for a union event. This violation of federal labor law resulted in an Unfair Labor Practice charge against Penn.[5]

These messages and tactics have no place in our community. Their fundamental purpose is to interfere with workers’ right to organize, guaranteed in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. That law established that the decision to form a union—or not to do so—belongs to workers themselves. It is theirs alone to make; employers do not get a vote in certification elections, and their views are simply irrelevant. Penn’s anti-union campaigns convey an unwillingness to accept those facts. They aim to sow doubt, fear, and confusion among workers to sway the outcome of elections. Their legal maneuvers seek to strip workers of their right to organize and prevent an election from happening at all.

We further object to recent attempts to enlist faculty members in anti-union activity. The anti-union website has been shared with faculty in a clear attempt to instrumentalize our relationships of mutual respect and trust with postdocs and research associates. In setting us up to deliver intimidating and misleading messages, they threaten to corrode those very relationships and compromise our integrity.

Finally, we object to these anti-union tactics because they are inconsistent with the research and teaching mission of the university. Paying law firms and consultants to fight our own postdocs and research associates is not a productive use of Penn’s resources in any situation, and it is particularly egregious given that Penn has cited federal funding cuts as the reason for hiring freezes, cuts to graduate training, contract nonrenewals for non-tenure-track faculty, and other austerity measures that compromise the university’s core mission. As over 1,100 of us demanded this spring, the administration must use its resources to uphold research and teaching, and to uphold the rights of all members of the Penn community; it should not use those resources to disenfranchise our own colleagues. Nor is Penn’s anti-union campaign a rational defense of institutional interests. The improved working conditions that unionization might yield would not harm the university; rather, they would make Penn a better place for all of us to teach, learn, and conduct research.

The proper posture of an employer during an organizing drive is neutrality: management should simply step back and allow workers to make their decision. Neutrality not only respects the original spirit of the National Labor Relations Act, but it lays the groundwork for a productive, mutually beneficial relationship with a union should workers vote to form one.

For all these reasons, we ask that you take down the https://facts4pennpostdocs.org/ website, end the anti-union campaign under way, and refrain from such activity in the future. We also ask that you respect the results of the upcoming RAPUP union election. We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Executive Committee, AAUP-Penn

[1] John Logan, “The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States,” British Journal of Industrial Relations vol. 44, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 651-675; Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[2] US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, News Release USDL-23-071, January 19, 2023.

[3] NLRB Case 04-RC-364372, https://www.nlrb.gov/case/04-RC-364372

[4] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/concerted-activity

[5] “Penn Med residents seek unfair labor practice charge after attempt to deliver petition,” Daily Pennsylvanian, September 2, 2024, https://www.thedp.com/article/2024/09/penn-medicine-union-rally-petition-mahoney-krajewski

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We stand with our colleagues in Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP) as they prepare to win their union in the upcoming NLRB election on July 16 and 17. As faculty, we know that postdocs and research associates play essential roles in advancing the research and teaching mission of the university. In building a union together, they are organizing to make Penn a better, fairer, and more democratic institution. They are part of a growing movement of higher education workers, including Penn’s graduate research and teaching assistants in GETUP, organizing with the UAW to improve their working conditions, and by extension, the University as a whole. All of us who do the work that sustains Penn’s research and educational mission deserve a meaningful voice in institutional policies that affect our lives. All of us deserve working conditions that are equitable. Unions are essential institutions that provide a democratic voice at work and the capacity to win real change for the better. We stand in solidarity with postdocs and research associates in their efforts to achieve those goals.

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the University administration has responded to RAPUP’s organizing drive by launching an anti-union campaign, following the same playbook it has used to fight recent union organizing drives by Penn museum workers, medical residents, resident advisors, graduate research and teaching assistants, and librarians. Designed by the anti-union law firm Cozen O’Connor, the fundamental purpose of these expensive campaigns is to sow fear and confusion to sway the outcome of union elections, and to interfere with workers’ legal right to organize.

In its efforts to suppress RAPUP’s unionization efforts, the Penn administration first attempted to strip postdocs and research associates of their right to organize at all: they argued to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that these workers were supposedly “temporary” employees ineligible to unionize. In a recent hearing, the National Labor Relations Board rebuked the administration’s arguments, clearly affirming that postdocs and research assistants are employees with the right to unionize. Second, the administration has created an anti-union website and circulated it by email and text to postdocs, research associates, and faculty. As RAPUP’s website makes clear, Penn’s website is laden with misleading and intimidating claims; it is in no way a trustworthy source of information. By sending faculty this material, the administration is asking us to transmit misinformation, threatening our integrity and our relationships of mutual trust and respect with research associates and postdocs. Faculty, chairs, and deans should refuse to transmit these messages on behalf of Cozen O’Connor.

The final element of Penn’s anti-union campaign has been to repress union gatherings in plain violation of federal labor law. Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, workers have the right to engage in concerted activity—that is, collective action to address shared workplace concerns—and on college campuses, concerted activity routinely takes the form of rallying on campus. Yet on June 12, when RAPUP members gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the Button, they were forced off campus. The Penn administration knows that such measures are illegal: in August 2024, Penn security prevented medical residents in CIR/SEIU from gathering in the courtyard of Pennsylvania Hospital for a union event. This violation of federal labor law resulted in an Unfair Labor Practice charge against Penn.

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee has written to the Penn administration calling on them to end the anti-union campaign against RAPUP, take down the anti-union website, and pledge to respect the results of the upcoming election; we await their response. Only by taking these measures can the university administration demonstrate respect for the principles of democracy.If these last several years have taught us anything, it’s that the University of Pennsylvania and the United States itself need stronger systems of democratic decision-making. Today, unaccountable donors and politicians who care nothing for education or democracy are attempting to control what can be taught and studied in the United States. As over 1,100 of us demanded this spring, the administration must use its resources to uphold research and teaching, and to uphold the rights of all members of the Penn community; it should not use those resources to attempt to strip those of us who make the university run of our rights to organize, assemble, speak, and protest. The freedoms to teach, learn, study, assemble, and speak are necessary to the integrity of higher education and to democracy itself. If we hope to safeguard the mission of higher education, in which postdocs and research associates play a crucial part, we need to create legitimate forms of democratic decision-making within our universities to resist abuses of power and external interference. In building a union together, our postdoc and RA colleagues are showing us the way.

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Today, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee issued the following public statement regarding the recent police raid on Penn undergraduate students:

October 26, 2024

We are alarmed by the Penn administration’s escalating use of police action against Penn students. So too are we alarmed by the University’s pattern—established last year and extended this year—of treating all protest by faculty, staff, and students against Israeli government policies and warmaking chiefly as a security concern, rather than an expression of students’ rights to assemble and engage in political activity, and faculty’s right to freedom in extramural speech.

On October 18, members of the University of Pennsylvania Police Department and Philadelphia Police Department raided the home of a group of Penn undergraduates in the middle of the night, reportedly wearing “full tactical gear, including riot helmets, and armed with assault rifles and handguns.” According to The Intercept, the police were executing a warrant investigating a victimless act of vandalism: on September 12, red paint had been poured on the Ben Franklin statue. According to the same reporting, “the police threatened to break down the door with a battering ram and pointed a gun at a neighbor before storming the residence.” They reportedly “trained guns” on students in the house and “refused to provide their names or badge numbers.”

No reasonable person can believe that a student suspected of pouring paint on a statue should be subject to this dangerous and traumatizing treatment. But the university administration has shown itself willing to threaten students with potentially deadly physical violence and terrorize them in their homes. Authorizing an armed police raid on students in these circumstances is abhorrent, and it gives the lie to the university administration’s pretension to be acting to protect students from harm. On October 18, based on what has been reported, the university administration and the police appear to have been the preeminent threats to safety in our community.

This escalation is part of a pattern. Just four days earlier, on October 14, the administration needlessly disrupted the intellectual life of the university by responding to a non-violent demonstration with draconian measures: barricading campus, inhibiting access to academic buildings, and broadcasting fear-inducing security alerts that mischaracterized political speech and peaceful assembly as threats to safety. As it has done repeatedly over the past year, the administration unjustly depicted Penn faculty, staff, and students who were grieving the deaths of Palestinians as outsiders to our community and threats to others. The administration’s actions, not the protest itself, were threatening to members of our community and disruptive to the research and teaching mission of the university. Moreover, they represent clear violations of Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, which prohibit the administration from restricting demonstration on the basis of the substance of the views expressed.

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The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee shares the following Statement from the National AAUP

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

As an apparent reaction to student protests since last October, a number of college and university administrations have hastily enacted overly restrictive policies dealing with the rights to assemble and protest on campus. These policies, which go beyond reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression. For example, these policies often require registration for demonstrations or protests, which, because they take place spontaneously or with little planning time, is tantamount to forbidding them. Requiring registration also enables surveillance of protest plans, which can discourage protests by groups with minority viewpoints. Many of the latest expressive activity policies strictly limit the locations where demonstrations may take place, whether amplified sound can be used, and types of postings permitted. With harsh sanctions for violations, the policies broadly chill students and faculty from engaging in protests and demonstrations.

Those who care about higher education and democracy should be alarmed for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, these policies severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education. Free inquiry and free expression are indispensable for the transmission of knowledge, the development of students, and the well-being of democracy. Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs.

Second, these new policies trample on the rights of students. In 1967, during another wave of student protests, the AAUP and other groups, including the Association of American Colleges (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, issued the Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students. The principles and standards set forth in the statement are germane to current efforts to suppress student speech and conduct.

College and university students are both citizens and members of the academic community. As citizens, students should enjoy the same freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, and right of petition that other citizens enjoy and, as members of the academic community, they are subject to the obligations that accrue to them by virtue of this membership. Faculty members and administration officials should ensure that institutional powers are not employed to inhibit such intellectual and personal development of students as is often promoted by their exercise of the rights of citizenship both on and off campus. (emphasis added)

Third, many of these new campus policies are being imposed with little to no faculty input, which is essential to developing policies that affect academic freedom of faculty and students. Such top-down edicts by university administrators bypass the central role of elected faculty bodies, such as faculty senates, in university governance. Under the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, the faculty has “primary responsibility” over teaching content and methods and “those aspects of student life which relate to the educational  process,” and faculty play an instrumental role in determining general educational policy.

Fourth, the policies curtail the rights of faculty, who are entitled to freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing as citizens. Institutions of higher learning should aim to foster an environment in which faculty, graduate employees, students, and other members of the campus community are free to discuss and debate difficult topics, inside and outside the classroom. The new policies are likely to disproportionately affect contingent and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members, and graduate student employees, especially people of color in these groups.

The recent proliferation of these new restrictive policies seems to be an attempt to appease politicians who are calling for university administrators to use a heavy hand against faculty and student protestors. We must reiterate, as we said in our November 2023 statement Polarizing Times Demand Robust Academic Freedom, “By acceding to external political pressures and demands for political censorship instead of encouraging the utmost freedom of discussion, college and university administrations abandon their own responsibility for protecting the academic community’s central mission of education, research, and service to the broader society and to the public good.” Administrators who claim that “expressive activity” policies protect academic freedom and student learning, even as they severely restrict its exercise, risk destroying the very freedoms of speech and expression they claim to protect.

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We stand with our colleagues in Penn Libraries United who are unionizing to make Penn a better, fairer, and more democratic university.  They are choosing to come together across job categories and join their long-unionized colleagues in AFSCME DC47 Local 590, which has a proud and productive history at Penn. All of us who do the work that makes Penn run deserve a meaningful voice in institutional policies that affect our lives.  All of us deserve working conditions that are equitable.  Unions are essential institutions that provide a democratic voice at work and the capacity to win real change for the better.

If this last year taught us anything, it’s that the University of Pennsylvania and the United States itself need stronger systems of democratic decision-making.  Today, unaccountable donors and politicians who care nothing for education or democracy are attempting to control what can be taught and studied in the United States. Meanwhile, our own university administration is attempting to strip faculty, staff, and students of our rights to assemble, speak, and protest. The freedoms to teach, learn, study, assemble, and speak are necessary to the integrity of higher education and to democracy itself.  If we hope to safeguard the mission of higher education, in which library workers play a crucial part, we need to create legitimate forms of democratic decision-making within our universities to resist external interference and abuses of power.  In building a union together, our colleagues in the libraries are showing us the way. 

As librarians and other library staff are working to build democratic institutions at Penn, the university administration is attempting to undermine them. As they have repeatedly done in past organizing drives, administrators have hired an anti-union law firm and launched an anti-union campaign designed to interfere with workers’ legal right to organize. They have disseminated misleading and intimidating anti-union materials framed as neutral “information,” a standard tactic that employers use to sow fear, doubt, and confusion and sway the outcome of elections. We call on Penn’s central administration and on library administrators to cease this coercive attempt to interfere with workers’ right to organize, and we call on them to honor the legacy of negotiation with a well-established union at Penn. Only by ending the anti-union campaign can the university administration demonstrate respect for the principle of workplace democracy—a principle that we so desperately need at Penn and across higher education today.

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On May 10, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee issued the following statement on the Penn Administration’s Decision to Arrest Students and Faculty and the University’s Imposition of Mandatory Leaves of Absence on Six Students.

May 10, 2024

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the decision of the Penn administration to call in riot police early this morning to arrest students and faculty engaged in nonviolent antiwar protest on our campus. This repressive action was a violation of the University’s Guidelines on Open Expression and a cowardly, shameful attempt to silence and punish speech that administrators simply do not want to hear.  We further condemn the administration’s abuse of the student disciplinary system in summoning numerous students to disciplinary meetings on specious grounds.  And we condemn the decision of Penn’s Provost, John Jackson, to impose mandatory leaves of absence on six students involved in the encampment on May 9. Provost Jackson abused the student disciplinary system, using it not to punish violations of university rules—there are none here that we know of—but simply to silence criticism of Israeli government policies and of the war on Gaza. Bowing to pressure from donors, politicians, and lobbying organizations that would like to control what can be taught and studied in the United States, and which have consistently misrepresented the character of a peaceful antiwar encampment, Penn’s administration has violated a core principle of academic freedom: the right of students to freedom in learning, which includes their right to assemble and engage in political activity.  

We demand that all charges be dropped, that the university reverse the mandatory leaves and other sanctions imposed on students, that the university dismiss all disciplinary cases against students targeted for their participation in the encampment, and that the university cease its pattern of threatening students with discipline and arrest for nonviolent antiwar protest.

Those of us who have spent time on College Green in recent weeks know that the encampment was an example of nonviolent protest. It complied with Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, and it embodied a form of protest that is utterly familiar and ordinary on college campuses: students slept in tents, hung banners, hosted talks and teach-ins, created art, read, studied, and chanted. Heeding the advice of groundskeepers, student protesters even periodically repositioned their tents so as not to harm the grass. Classes, exams, meetings, research, and education on our campus have proceeded. In fact, with support from faculty and staff, the encampment hosted educational events that were in desperately short supply this year, as donor pressure and administrative repression undermined the ability of faculty, staff, and students to organize events on the history, culture, and politics of Israel and Palestine.  While the university administration repeatedly mischaracterized the encampment as a threat to safety, the only threats of violence that occurred here were threats against the students in the encampment, including one from a man armed with a hunting knife and the other from a man who sprayed tents and food with a chemical agent.

It was not the encampment but the university administration that created a crisis.  Mimicking the response of university administrations across the country, administrators spent weeks whipping up fear by misrepresenting peaceful protest as a threat to safety, threatening the students with discipline, and accusing them of violating unnamed rules without any evidence, all in an apparent attempt to legitimate a crackdown or intimidate protesters into leaving.  When protesters stayed, as was their right, the administration turned to flagrant violations of due process, summarily imposing mandatory leaves of absence on six students on May 9—silencing them by removing them from campus. These acts of escalation were in no one’s interest. They have imperiled the futures of students who were exercising their rights to assemble and to engage in political activity—rights protected by the principle of academic freedom and by the university’s own policies. They were forms of incitement and acts of intimidation. They were intolerable responses to a nonviolent student demonstration. This is not the kind of university our students deserve.

The administration’s acts of escalation were also violations of the university’s own policies.  Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression are framed to protect the right to protest specifically in situations like this one, where there is disagreement. For that very reason, in case of conflict between university policies, the Guidelines on Open Expression explicitly take precedence over all other policies. The Guidelines prohibit the University from restricting assembly or demonstration on the basis of the substance or nature of the views expressed. Yet that is exactly what the administration has done for months. Since last fall, the university administration has established a pattern of silencing, threatening, and punishing speech critical of the war in Gaza and of Israeli government policies. In futile attempts to appease donors, lobbying organizations, and politicians who neither understand nor respect the principles of academic freedom and open expression, the administration has restricted a Jewish student group’s ability to screen a film critical of the state of Israel; it has banned the student group Penn against the Occupation; it has failed to show adequate concern for the harassment of Palestinian, Muslim, Iranian, and Arab students and faculty; it has issued public statements that have contributed to that harassment; and it has repeatedly abused the student disciplinary system to punish nonviolent antiwar activity. This pattern of discrimination, in every instance targeting speech critical of the war in Gaza, is itself a violation of Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression. And it raises serious questions about Penn’s adherence to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. 

Compounding this violation of the Guidelines on Open Expression, the Provost appears to have abused his power and violated due process protections in imposing mandatory leaves on students. Under part III.D of the Charter of the Student Disciplinary System, the Provost may only impose such leaves when a student’s presence on campus threatens “order, health, safety, or the conduct of the University’s educational mission.” These students’ presence represented no such threat. It is indicative of the Orwellian nature of university governance, however, that the university administration holds the exclusive power to make this determination, which allowed the Provost to characterize the protest as threatening by fiat. Meanwhile, the Provost appears to have violated another part of the charter: Part III.D. requires the Provost to consult the students’ Dean or Associate Dean before imposing a mandatory leave. As far as we know, the Provost flouted that requirement.  

In the immediate term, we reiterate that all charges must be dropped, and the administration must reverse the mandatory leaves and other sanctions imposed on students.  It must end its abuse of the student disciplinary system to silence and punish anti-war protest, first by withdrawing all cases against students that are currently being processed by the Center for Community Standards and Accountability (CSA).

In the longer term, our university needs an entirely new system for enforcing its Guidelines on Open Expression—the university policy that defines and defends the right to participate in demonstrations. Currently, the Vice Provost for University Life, an arm of the central administration, has the exclusive power to interpret and enforce the Guidelines, and as a result, the university administration has repeatedly violated the Guidelines in its treatment of student protest, with no consequences whatsoever. The power to interpret and enforce the Guidelines on Open Expression must be taken away from the central administration and transferred to a new elected body consisting of faculty (tenure-track and non-tenure-track), staff, and students, all elected at large.

This should be the beginning of a thorough redesign of university governance to provide faculty of all ranks, staff, grad workers, and students with real democratic power to write and enforce university policies. Only then will we be able to defend our rights to academic freedom and open expression, including the right of students to assemble and engage in nonviolent protest.

Across the country, university administrations have called in armed police to clear encampments by force, but they have failed to silence peaceful protest against the war in Gaza. We stand with our students and colleagues who have displayed moral courage and discipline in the face of threats and police aggression. Peaceful protest is a necessary part of education and of democracy itself. We stand with all those working to defend the university as a democratic institution and as a space of free and critical research, teaching, learning, and expression.

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