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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!

In the past week it has come to light that the University of Pennsylvania Museum has for over 35 years held, studied, and at times displayed the human remains of a child named Tree Africa, a member of West Philadelphia’s MOVE organization. The bones of 14-year-old Tree Africa, and possibly also 12-year-old Delisha Africa, were reportedly handed over by the medical examiner’s office to Penn and Princeton anthropologists for forensic study in the 1980s after the May 13, 1985 killing of eleven West Philadelphia residents, when Philadelphia Police dropped an aerial bomb on the MOVE residence and let fires destroy over 60 homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood adjacent to our university. 

For decades, neither Penn nor Princeton contacted the MOVE organization and the Africa family about the existence of these remains. Instead, the bones were in the possession of two anthropology professors, Princeton emeritus professor Alan Mann (who worked at Penn until 2001) and Penn adjunct professor and museum curator Janet Monge. The Penn Museum has stated that both anthropologists were attempting to determine the identity of the remains for over three decades. During this time the bones were used for student research, as in the case of at least one Penn undergraduate senior thesis. Recently Monge has been using them as teaching props in a public online course, “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,” hosted by Princeton. While the course has now been removed by the distance learning platform Coursera, just last week over 4,000 students were enrolled. The remains have been repeatedly passed between Penn and Princeton, including Penn Museum Director Christopher Woods’ hasty return of the bones to Dr. Mann on Sunday April 18, 2021.

AAUP–Penn stands with the Africa family as they mourn and absorb this devastating news. From our commitment to community and racial justice, we support their demands, which include the immediate return of their children’s remains. 

AAUP–Penn likewise stands with Princeton faculty who have called for university accountability to the Africa family, and calls on Penn to do better than issue an online apology.

On April 26, 2021 the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Museum issued an online apology to the Africa family and stated the institution’s intentions of returning the remains and reviewing the Museum’s “practices of collecting, stewarding, displaying, and researching human remains.” This is a first step toward recognizing and repairing the harm done to the Africa family, but the process continues to be flawed, as this apology was communicated to the family via the media at the same time that the family was holding its own live press conference.

Any earnest commitment to community justice begins with showing respect toward and building trust with those who have been harmed. Building trust entails acknowledging the long history of the university’s racism and experimentation on Black and Indigenous bodies by social scientists as well as medical doctors. From Penn Anthropology to Penn Medicine, this history spans from the nineteenth-century Morton cranial collection to the use of the MOVE family remains and the recent medical experimentation conducted by Penn dermatologist Albert Kligman upon the incarcerated people of Holmesburg Prison between 1951-1974, people whose families also remain uncompensated.

Beyond hiring lawyers to investigate how and why the MOVE family remains were used by University researchers, President Amy Gutmann and the Board of Trustees need to commit to a full and transparent process of repair and financial compensation, beginning with direct community involvement in the investigative process. The University, including its senior administrators and the Board of Trustees, cannot move forward from decades, even centuries, of disavowal via closed-door investigations. A transparent process is integral to any just outcome. It is not only faculty who are to blame for such a travesty of scholarly procedure and social justice; that responsibility must be shared across the hierarchy of “overseers” and administrators.

AAUP–Penn further supports efforts to account for the University’s broader effects on and its responsibility to West Philadelphia’s Black communities, including the payment of PILOTs to the public school system. 

AAUP–Penn also calls for a thorough review of all the holdings of the Penn Museum, and transparency around past and current pedagogical, curatorial, and research practices. A commitment to anti-racism requires more than simply teaching about medical ethics or the federally mandated Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It involves collaborative decision-making in consultation with affected community members around the Museum’s and the University’s legacies of slavery and colonial violence.

On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old white man murdered eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, six of whom were Asian immigrant women: Daoyou Feng, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon C. Park, Xiaojie Tan, and Yong A. Yue. AAUP-Penn condemns anti-Asian violence and all forms of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, and it stands in solidarity with Asian and Asian American communities at Penn and everywhere. The white supremacist rhetoric and policies of the former Trump administration have incited a torrent of intimidation, bullying, assault, and murder of countless Asian American women and men. At the same time, these attacks are grounded in long histories of anti-immigration discrimination, scapegoating, and hate. To make things worse, racial violence against Asian Americans is systematically rendered invisible: mainstream society consistently refuses to acknowledge racism against Asian Americans even when it is in plain sight to see.

We mourn the tragic loss of Asian American lives in Atlanta, even as we celebrate our Asian American activists and leaders who have been at the forefront of anti-racist and revolutionary action. We demand that the Penn Administration support Asian American and ethnic studies through the programmatic hiring of many more faculty and staff in these critical areas of thought. We demand that the Penn administration increase the scarce course offerings in Asian American and ethnic studies at the University at least to match those of our peer institutions. While we appreciate the Administration’s recent statement about being “proud of the myriad contributions of our Asian community” at Penn, words are not enough. Unless the University commits material resources to an anti-racist pedagogy, and unless it offers an equitable curriculum to its underserved Asian American and BIPOC communities, long histories of white supremacy and racism cannot be fully recognized, let alone undone.

AAUP–Penn stands in solidarity with Columbia University’s graduate workers union (GWC-UAW local 2110) and its members’ decision to go on strike, beginning on March 15, 2021. Columbia’s graduate workers voted to unionize in 2016 and still do not have a contract. The American Association of University Professors has long supported the right of graduate workers to unionize—a right reconfirmed in the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) 2016 decision on the Columbia graduate workers’ unionization vote. We call on the Columbia University administration to cease violating its legal obligation to bargain with the union in good faith, to retract its threats to dock past pay for those participating in the strike, and to respect the rights of graduate workers to unionize. To support our colleagues striking at Columbia, you can sign up to join a digital picket line, or contribute to their hardship fund.