Category: News

By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

December 12, 2023

Today, unelected trustees with no academic expertise are evidently attempting a hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania—functions related to curriculum, research, and the hiring and evaluation of faculty. A letter circulated to trustees asks, “Should any of the existing academic departments be closed?” It seems to propose unilateral changes by trustees to “instruction of students,” changes in “criteria for qualification and admission for membership in the Faculty,” and a “Code of Conduct” to constrain campus speech. And it raises the possibility that the university might discipline faculty for “promoting a particular viewpoint.”  

The questions being considered by the trustees represent an assault on the principle of academic freedom, which was first articulated a century ago to safeguard the educational mission of universities.  Academic freedom ensures that professionally qualified researchers and educators, not donors or politicians, make decisions about curriculum and scholarship. It also ensures that the hiring, promotion, and discipline of faculty members are based on their fitness to do the work of research and teaching, and that fitness is determined by members of the academic profession.  These norms are necessary to ensure that the university can serve its fundamental purpose: to foster free and open inquiry that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society.  They prevent institutions of higher education from being turned into instruments that serve private and political interests. Over the course of a century, these principles have been endorsed by over 250 scholarly and educational organizations and written into the faculty handbooks of universities nationwide, including Penn’s.

Unelected billionaires without scholarly qualifications are now seeking to control academic decisions that must remain within the purview of faculty in order for research and teaching to have legitimacy and autonomy from private and partisan interests. Any attempts on the part of Penn’s trustees to close academic departments, constrain hiring, discipline faculty members for political reasons and without due process, censor faculty’s intramural or extramural speech, or impose new McCarthyite speech codes on faculty and students would constitute the most flagrant violations imaginable of the core principles of academic freedom and faculty governance. Those principles are not negotiable.

The transparent purposes of the questions being considered by the trustees are to restrict legitimate, long-established areas of study, to silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree, and to turn back the clock on gains in diversity and equity.

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee first sounded the alarm on such threats to academic freedom in October.  We issued the following recommendations, and we stand by them today.

  • It is likely that donors and administrators will attempt to respond to the present crisis by creating new academic programming—whether new hiring, curricular offerings, or research initiatives. Faculty must design and control any such effort rather than allow donors to set the terms.
  • When interacting with the university and its members, Penn’s trustees, alumni, and donors must be held to the same university policies that govern the rest of us, particularly policies prohibiting threats, coercion, retaliation, and intimidation. The statutes of the Board of Trustees and all university policies should be revised to reflect that expectation.
  • Those trustees and members of advisory boards who have made coercive threats against members of the university and academic programs within Penn have already violated the Guidelines on Open Expression, to which they are expressly bound. We recommend that they be removed from all university advisory and governance boards.

Trustees who neither understand nor respect the purpose of the university and who threaten its educational and research mission should not govern these institutions.

Tagged with: , , ,

By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

December 9, 2023

In recent months, trustees, donors, lobbying organizations, and members of Congress have repeatedly misrepresented the words and deeds of Penn faculty and students who have expressed concern for Palestinian civilians and criticized the war in Gaza, going so far as to suggest that faculty who have publicly condemned Hamas were Hamas supporters and that groups protesting genocide were calling for genocide. These distortions and attacks on our colleagues have not addressed the scourge of antisemitism—a real and grave problem. Instead, they have threatened the ability of faculty and students to research, teach, study, and publicly discuss the history, politics, and cultures of Israel and Palestine. These attacks strike at the heart of the mission of an educational institution: to foster open, critical, and rigorous research and teaching that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society.

The ability of donors, lobbying groups, and members of Congress to destabilize the University of Pennsylvania reveals the need to restore a strong faculty voice in the governance of the institution. The next president must defend the principles of shared governance and academic freedom, which protect the educational mission of the university. And they must correct what has become a dangerous myth suggesting that the defense of academic freedom and open expression is in any way contradictory to the fight against antisemitism. We intend to see that Penn’s next president lives up to this responsibility.

For further information, please see past statements of the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee:

  1. Statement on Threats to Academic Freedom, University Governance, and Safety at the University of Pennsylvania, October 28
  2. Letter on Targeted Harassment, November 20
  3. Urgent message regarding film screening and threats to academic freedom, November 28
  4. Message on the Dec. 5 Congressional hearing, Dec. 6
Tagged with:

By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

December 6, 2023

Dear Members,

In recent weeks, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee has called on President Liz Magill to publicly condemn the targeted harassment of faculty members who have been subject to defamation and threats of personal violence for participating in the Palestine Writes Literature Festival and for expressing support for Palestinian civilians.  Campaigns of targeted harassment threaten core rights protected by academic freedom, including the rights of faculty to make academic decisions within their areas of expertise and to speak publicly on issues of general concern.  It is a fundamental duty of university administrators to condemn such attacks on academic freedom.

At yesterday’s Congressional hearings, some lawmakers contributed to the targeted harassment of faculty and subjected President Liz Magill to a line of questioning that revealed their contempt for academic freedom and for truth itself.  Unfortunately, in the face of their questions, President Magill failed once again to fulfill her responsibility to condemn targeted harassment.  During the hearing, Republican Congressmen Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Jim Banks (R-IN) breathed new life into a months-old campaign of targeted harassment by making false and inflammatory claims about individual Penn faculty members’ political views, affiliations, and activities.  They called on the University to commit flagrant violations of academic freedom: they suggested that Penn fire faculty members for protected extramural speech and challenged one faculty member’s right to teach classes and make curricular decisions within their area of scholarly expertise.  These were threats to the academic freedom of Penn faculty members made by members of Congress, broadcast live to international audiences and covered in major media outlets.  Such threats imperil the right of all faculty members to full freedom in research, teaching, and extramural speech.  At a time when the individual faculty members named by Congressmen Wilson and Banks have faced months of threats to their personal safety, often fueled by viral online misinformation, these comments also increase the serious risk of violence against members of our community.

President Magill failed to respond to these instances of targeted harassment that unfolded before her eyes.  While she was denied adequate time to respond, and while her testimony paid lip service to academic freedom, she did not challenge the Congressmen’s misleading claims about Penn faculty members. Nor did she challenge the legitimacy of the organized campaign of targeted harassment that has circulated these claims online and in the media for months.

Elsewhere in her testimony, President Magill accurately acknowledged “rising harassment, intimidation, doxing, and threats toward students, faculty, and staff based on their identity or perceived identity as Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab.” But she gave the inaccurate impression that the University has already taken effective action to address the problem of targeted harassment: “We are investigating all allegations, even when threats have come from outside our campus. We are providing resources and advice to assist individuals with online doxing, harassment, and threats. Safety and security for individuals and places of worship has been increased across the board, and we are deploying all necessary resources to support any member of our community who is the target of hate.”

In fact, as AAUP-Penn has documented, university policies have exhibited a pattern of discrimination against faculty and students—including Jewish members of our community—who have articulated criticisms of Israeli government policies or of the current war.  While offering free, enhanced security to some Jewish institutions, faculty, and students on campus, the university administration has failed to defend the safety and academic freedom of faculty and students who have voiced concern for Palestinian civilians.  These include Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim members of our community, Jewish students in Penn Chavurah, and faculty from other religious, national, and ethnic backgrounds.

As yesterday’s hearing made clear, the same groups outside the University that are threatening faculty members are attacking President Magill.  For the sake of the academic mission of our university, and for her own sake, she must refute their claims rather than accept their dangerous misrepresentations.  As the AAUP has explained, the attempts we are seeing at Penn and in Congress to conflate all research and teaching about Palestine and all criticism of Israeli government policies and warfare with antisemitism represent a direct threat to academic freedom.  They are designed not to fight antisemitism—a real and grave problem—but to suppress research and teaching on the histories, politics, and cultures of Israel and Palestine.  These are not only legitimate areas of scholarly inquiry; they are precisely the kinds of areas where searching, critical, and rigorous scholarly inquiry is needed to serve the public good in a democratic society.

President Magill has spent the last several months fruitlessly attempting to placate donors, trustees, members of Congress, and lobbying organizations that neither understand nor respect the principles of academic freedom—principles that the AAUP set out a century ago to safeguard the academic mission of the university.  President Magill has recapitulated their dangerous conflations of antisemitism with an overly broad range of academic programming and political speech and has tolerated and even contributed to the targeted harassment of faculty.  In doing so, she has not protected herself from criticism, but has emboldened attacks on faculty members, on academic freedom, and on the basic academic functioning of the University of Pennsylvania.  Yesterday’s Congressional hearing provided the clearest evidence yet that President Magill has committed a grave error in casting her lot with those who have threatened and humiliated her in order to instrumentalize her in a campaign against scholarship and teaching.  It is past time for the president of our university to stand up to these attacks by supporting in word and deed Penn’s faculty, the principles of academic freedom, and the fundamental scholarly mission of the university.

— AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

The AAUP–Penn Executive Committee issued the following message (also linked here as a PDF) today, November 28:

Dear Members,

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee is deeply concerned to learn that the Penn administration has refused to allow a Jewish student organization, Penn Chavurah, to reserve a room this semester to screen Israelism, a documentary film about young Jewish Americans who have traveled to Israel and Palestine and developed critical perspectives on Israeli government policies. The administration’s refusal to allow students to screen a documentary film on campus is one more expression of our university leadership’s failure to uphold the principles of academic freedom—principles enshrined in Penn’s policies and essential to the mission of a university. Academic freedom entails the freedom of students to learn, and to encounter and critically examine multiple interpretations of the world. Students’ freedom to learn also entails their right to political speech and association, which are essential aspects of education and learning. In denying students these freedoms, the university administration violates its own policies and endangers the principles of academic freedom that are essential to the research and teaching mission of a university.

The Executive Committee commends our colleagues at the Middle East Center for reserving a room for the film screening, which as of now will take place tonight, November 28 at 6:30 p.m. in Meyerson Hall Room B1. We encourage all faculty members to attend to demonstrate their support for academic freedom. Should the screening site be moved, we will do our best to notify members. 

We are also gravely concerned by reports that administrators have allegedly told the Middle East Center to cancel the screening, and have allegedly informed Penn Chavurah that the group might lose its status or funding if tonight’s screening occurs. 

We are alarmed to learn that in response to this inappropriate pressure from administrators, the director of the Middle East Center submitted his resignation today. His resignation underlines the gravity of the crisis, and the responsibility the President and Provost have for creating and exacerbating it.  

We condemn in the strongest possible terms any pressure by administrators, donors, and trustees to prevent the Middle East Center from reserving a room to screen a documentary film that falls squarely within the Center’s area of expertise. It is the right of faculty members to make academic programming decisions.  We are particularly concerned that the Middle East Center has already lost its federal funding because the university failed to provide adequate support for its activities. Any further threats to the Center’s ability to fulfill its academic mission will only hurt our university, our faculty, and our students.

We have reported these concerns about academic freedom to the national office of the AAUP. We encourage departments, programs, and the Faculty Senate to speak out against this effort to suppress academic freedom.

— AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

AAUP-Penn Nov 28 Message on MEC Film Screening and Further Threats to Academic Freedom

Tagged with:

By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

This spring, we have been inspired by the growth of union organizing at Penn. Resident advisors who work in the dorms filed for a union election in March; graduate research assistants and teaching assistants in GET-UP went public with their organizing drive in April; and residents at Penn Medicine won their union election in May. Meanwhile, Penn Museum Workers United is pushing ahead with their campaign to win a first contract.

The university administration has launched anti-union campaigns in response to all these mobilizations and is now trying to enlist faculty in anti-union activity.  Just last week, all standing faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences received an email from administrators directing us to websites that present anti-union talking points for us to pass along to graduate student workers.  It is wrong for the administration to attempt to make us conduits for anti-union messages. Moreover, it is wrong for the administration to run anti-union campaigns at all.

Our Response

This week we delivered a letter to administrators calling on them to take down all anti-union websites and end the anti-union campaigns. We hope you’ll read and share it.

Together over the next several months, we will work to educate colleagues about anti-union campaigns to make sure that we do not pass along anti-union messages. As many of us know, anti-union campaigns can be subtle: employers present their communications as purportedly neutral answers to frequently asked questions.  As a result, even faculty who support unions might not immediately recognize these websites for what they are.  

To educate ourselves and our colleagues, we have created an annotated version of the Provost’s guidance to faculty. Please read it, share it with colleagues, and stay tuned for upcoming information sessions and opportunities to get involved. 

Letter-on-Antiunion-Campaigns-1Download
Tagged with: , , , , , ,

By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

Our friends and colleagues in Penn Museum Workers United (AFSCME DC47 Local 397) are currently negotiating their first contract. They have waited long enough to do so (having organized in May 2021 and endured a relentless anti-union campaign), and there is a lot at stake: above all, wages that would allow them to live in dignity in Philadelphia. A third of PMWU members earn between $15.75 and $20 per hour; they are underpaid compared with their counterparts at other museums, as well as with Penn library workers who perform similar types of work and with Penn housekeeping workers in Teamsters Local 115. If the Museum can afford to spend $100 million on capital projects, it seems clear that it can also afford to pay its workers fairly. In fact, we believe that it can’t afford not to do so. It is in the interest of the institution to retain talented staff and prevent the high rates of turnover and instability that currently result from inadequate pay.

On June 4th, AAUP–Penn’s Executive Committee sent a letter to Penn President Liz Magill, Penn Museum Director Chris Woods, and Penn Museum Chief Operating Officer Genny Boccardo-Dubey calling on Museum management to accept the reasonable wage proposals of our colleagues in PMWU. You can read our letter below.

We stand in solidarity with Penn Museum workers, and we are committed to seeing that the University and the Museum meet their demands and negotiate a fair contract.

Tagged with: , , , ,

By Posted on Posted in News

Penn housekeepers, grounds workers, and transportation workers in Teamsters Local 115 are celebrating a hard-fought contract victory. A campaign led by rank-and-file members won an end to the inequitable two-tier wage system that pays different hourly rates for the same work. Their new contract will phase out two-tier pay over a 5-year period, with annual raises between 3.5–4% putting all housekeepers on a progression to the top-level wage ($28.68/hr) by 2026.

This is a tremendous win in a fight taking place at so many workplaces for equal pay for equal work. Bargaining surveys, rallies at the union hall and on campus, flyers and messaging in multiple languages, outreach to new members, and the determination to vote no if necessary made it happen. Member-led organizing gets the goods! Our warmest congratulations to the Teamsters 115 members who didn’t back down on their core demand and showed us all what’s possible. Solidarity!

Tagged with: , , ,

By Posted on Posted in Events, News

Members of Teamsters Local 115 (representing Penn housekeeping, maintenance workers and more) and the Philly Security Officers Union rallied together in front of College Hall today (June 2, 2022) for a fair contract with wage increases, no givebacks of their benefits, and an end to the racist two-tier wage system that pays different hourly rates for the same work. AAUP–Penn members came out to rally in support of this coalition of more than 700 essential workers who have kept our campus running through a pandemic and whose work deserves respect. We stand in solidarity with them as they demand equal pay for equal work at Penn and a fair contract now.

Tagged with: ,

By Posted on Posted in Events, News

This Thursday 6/2 at 11am, there will be a labor solidarity rally on our campus in support of university workers (maintenance and housekeeping workers, building security workers, and more) in Teamsters Local 115 and the Philly Security Officers Union. This recently forged Coalition of Essential Workers United for a Fair Contract represents more than 700 campus workers at Penn who are fighting against harassment from management and for a fair contract that protects their benefits and puts an end to the racist two-tier wage scale.

Let’s give them our support by joining the rally on College Green. Wear your AAUP shirt or button and make a sign if you can, but either way please come out and show your solidarity with everyone who works at Penn!

Tagged with: , ,

By Posted on Posted in News
  • Indiana Graduate Workers (who organized in a right-to-work state!) are still on strike for recognition. The University relies on their teaching, yet grad workers in many departments are paid stipends of less than $18,000 a year—well below the cost of living. They have the endorsement of the Bloomington Faculty Council, the IU Graduate and Professional Student Government, more than 25 academic departments, nearly 600 individual faculty and staff, and AAUP, but their university refuses to recognize them. If you wish to support those walking the picket line, you can do so by contributing to the ICWC-UE strike fund.
  • And here in Philly, PJB Workers United (representing Starbucks workers at multiple stores as well as café workers at Old City Coffee, Good Karma Café, and Korshak Bagels) will be rallying against union-busting TODAY, May 1 at 5pm on the north side of City Hall. Come out and stand with them if you can!
Tagged with: , , , , ,