Category: Uncategorized

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

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.

NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) is going on strike starting today, 4/26/21. AAUP–Penn supports the rights of grad student employees at NYU and everywhere to organize, collectively bargain for a living wage and a fair contract, and strike when the university refuses to bargain. You can join their virtual picket line here, and materially support those on strike by contributing to the hardship fund here.

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.