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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

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AAUP–Penn chapter President Amy Offner and Vice President Emily Steinlight contributed a guest column to the Daily Pennsylvanian, published on August 31 during the first week of classes, calling on faculty not to allow themselves to be used in Penn’s anti-union campaigns against student workers in GET-UP and United RAs at Penn. You can read our op-ed here.

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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
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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.

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Yesterday, March 15, 2022, the Penn administration announced significant policy changes that eliminate indoor masking and other Covid-19 safety measures on our campus. To express the concerns and objections of many of our colleagues, AAUP–Penn’s Covid Response Task Force and the AAUP–Penn Executive Committee immediately drafted the following joint statement, which we sent to the Interim Provost and Interim President as well as the Faculty Senate Tri-Chairs today, March 16th:

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Dear Interim President Wendell Pritchett, Interim Provost Beth Winkelstein, and Faculty Senate Tri-Chairs William W. Braham, Vivian L. Gadsden, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson,

Having heard from colleagues alarmed by the University’s March 15th announcement regarding policy changes that remove Covid-19 safety measures, the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP–Penn) writes to share our collective concerns, and to ask the administration to reconsider these policies and provide clarification.

These abruptly announced policy changes are troubling and unsubstantiated by public health science:

  • Screening testing is now required only for those who are unvaccinated, are not yet fully vaccinated, or have not uploaded their booster information.
  • Masking is now optional in most indoor public spaces on campus, with the temporary exception of classrooms
  • Masking will no longer be required in classrooms after March 28.
  • Visitors to campus are no longer required to be fully vaccinated. 

March 28th is less than a month from the end of the academic year. We are unclear as to why there is such a rush to unmask at this late date in the semester, and these new guidelines raise a number of concerns. In particular:

Our students travel widely during spring break, including to countries with rapidly rising Covid-19 rates such as the UK (despite very high vaccination rates) and other countries that have considerably lower vaccination rates. In addition, wastewater testing shows case rates in the U.S. rising at 38% of testing sites over the past two weeks; 15% of wastewater sites tracked by the CDC showed an increase in Covid-19 levels up to 1000%. This data suggests, despite a temporary lull, that the pandemic is not over. Why eliminate screening testing altogether, rather than modify testing policy and wait to gather data about infection rates on campus? Penn claims to rely on its own scientific expertise, yet the findings of its clinical group that supposedly meets regularly to assess OpenPass guidelines and other Covid-19 policies are never shared. Relying for guidance on the city of Philadelphia, which may be basing its decisions on political pressure as much as public health information, seems out of keeping with the knowledge-driven mission of a research university like Penn.

Booster effectiveness has been shown to drop dramatically after 4 months, causing Pfizer to seek approval for fourth boosters for those 65 and older, a population that includes a significant number of faculty members. Although Penn may have set a deadline of January 2022 for boosters, many faculty, graduate students, and staff received their booster shots when they were first available in October 2021. Such personnel are likely much more vulnerable to the new BA.2 variant. Additionally, students who are immunocompromised or not comfortable going maskless may feel self-conscious about wearing masks in class once they are no longer required. The welfare of our students is a top priority for faculty, and we are concerned for vulnerable members of our classes. We are equally concerned for the safety of staff and campus workers, particularly those who work in densely populated indoor spaces.

In light of the above, many of our colleagues ask for and urgently need further explanation and reconsideration: 

  • Will instructors have the option to require students to wear masks in the classroom, even if Penn’s guidelines make masks optional?
  • Will faculty, grads, and staff with caregiving responsibilities for those in high risk categories, such as the elderly and children under 5 who cannot be vaccinated, be able to shift their teaching or work online if they can no longer expect students and those around them in their workplaces to wear masks? 
  • What steps are being taken to ensure that all students feel safe in common spaces, including immunocompromised, disabled, and other high-risk students? 
  • What steps are being taken to protect the health of staff in high-traffic spaces? 

We realize that some members of the Penn community may be eager to go “back to normal,” and we sympathize deeply with that wish. But we cannot wish away the recurring risks or the impact of the pandemic on the lives of faculty, grads, students, and staff. Some of us have lost family members to Covid, and many of us currently care for elderly parents. Some of us live with partners or family members who are immunocompromised, or are older or otherwise medically vulnerable ourselves, and a very large number of faculty and staff have children under 5 who are still unable to be vaccinated. A non-trivial proportion of contingent faculty who teach Penn students and an even higher proportion of subcontracted campus workers may not even have employer-provided medical coverage if they get sick while working on our campus; what will Penn do to keep them safe? From the start of the pandemic our chapter has asked the University to prioritize the wellbeing of the most vulnerable in our community. Removing even the most minimal forms of mitigation such as masking in our shared spaces now feels like organized abandonment. 

In the interest of our entire community, we urge Penn’s central administration to rethink and reverse these premature policy changes.

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Yesterday, the AAUP–Penn Executive Committee issued this statement in a joint proposal with the LGBT Faculty Diversity Working Group to the Faculty Senate to extend parental leave policies to those bringing foster children into their homes:

On behalf of the American Association of University Professors chapter at Penn, we write to express our support for the proposed revisions to the faculty handbook regarding foster care. We agree with our colleagues in the LGBT Faculty Diversity Working Group that the current faculty handbook contains an oversight regarding foster care, which should be treated equally to other forms of bringing a child into the home in terms of parental leave. Correcting this oversight will have a positive impact for faculty of any identity who wish to bring a foster child into their home. But addressing this omission is even more important given that foster care affects some faculty more than others. In particular, the omission has a marked impact on LGBTQ+ faculty, who are up to 15 times more likely to be fostering a child than cis heteronormative faculty.

We urge the Faculty Senate to take action addressing this inequality and provide support for faculty who choose to become foster parents. At the same time, we would push the Faculty Senate and Penn Administration to address the egregious disparities in parental leave policies–for adoption, birth, and fostering–between standing and contingent faculty, as well as graduate students.  We believe that the benefits Penn offers to tenured and tenure-track faculty should be available to everyone who teaches and works at Penn.

In solidarity,
AAUP–Penn Executive Committee

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AAUP–Penn stands with the many graduate student workers at Harvard who walked out of classes on February 14th in solidarity with their colleagues Margaret G. Czerwienski, Lilia M. Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava, whose harassment complaints against Professor John L. Comaroff are now the subject of a lawsuit against Harvard. The details of the case are outrageous; you can read the full text of the lawsuit here. Not least stunning is the disclosure that Harvard allegedly obtained confidential records from the private therapist of one of the complainants and gave this private mental health information to her harasser. The failures of the Title IX system are evident in that office’s apparent complicity in Harvard’s mishandling of complaints. This is why HGSU-UAW has called for neutral, third-party arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination at Harvard—a key provision that SWC successfully won in their recent first contract with Columbia. 

The circling of wagons around Comaroff by 38 prominent senior faculty who signed an ill-informed letter in his defense was deeply disheartening. We take more encouragement from the thousands of people at Harvard and elsewhere who signed this letter denouncing it and supporting the complainants, and from this earlier statement signed by over 100 Harvard faculty in solidarity with grads (in November 2021, prior to the current suit) supporting HGSU’s demand for real recourse. This case bears out the need for it, and the student editors of the Harvard Crimson make the same argument in this editorial.

These issues are pervasive, often entrenched in status hierarchies that make graduate students vulnerable—especially in cases of harassment by an advisor on whom their careers may depend and about whom they cannot complain without serious professional and personal consequences. Gendered and racial inequity and power imbalances exacerbate these problems for grads and, indeed, for faculty on and off the tenure track as well. In the politicized climate of the past six years, threats against the academic freedom of women and LGBTQIA faculty, and faculty of color, often take the form of sexual harassment. Graduate students and student workers, faculty, and staff at Penn are justifiably concerned about how our own University handles cases of workplace harassment, sexual and otherwise. An op-ed from last spring by Penn students on national Title IX review and the need for Penn to take more active steps to prevent sexual assault and harassment attests that this concern is longstanding. Anecdotally, too many of us know of complaints of discrimination and workplace harassment that have been swept under the rug. An overreliance on the often dysfunctional Title IX apparatus is part of the problem. We need assurance from the Penn administration that the University is committed both to preventing harassment, assault, and discrimination in the first place and to pursuing complaints in a serious and impartial manner.

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AAUP–Penn strongly endorses the faculty request, signed by more than 150 colleagues, that Penn support our international and especially Chinese/Chinese American colleagues facing racial profiling by the U.S. Department of Justice under the China Initiative. The increasing restrictions on international scholars’ and students’ visas and on international scientific collaborations as well as the unfounded accusations against U.S.-based researchers all pose threats to Asian and Asian American faculty members’ research, employment, and safety. (See, for example, the fabricated charges against Temple University professor Xiaoxing Xi.) 

On February 8th, AAUP–Penn’s Executive Committee asked the Faculty Senate to agree to present the Penn Faculty Letters on the China Initiative to the University administration on behalf of the entire Penn faculty. Members of Penn’s central administration have now agreed to meet with the letter’s primary authors to answer questions. We hope that a more public statement of the University’s support of the seven requests outlined in the letter to the Faculty Senate will follow, since Penn’s response to the China Initiative is a matter of concern to our entire community. Our colleagues deserve the full support of the University, and we encourage all members of the Penn community to voice their own support by signing and sharing these letters.

We also encourage all our colleagues and students to read this article in the Daily Pennsylvanian about the faculty letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling on the DOJ to overturn this highly discriminatory and harmful policy.

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