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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.

AAUP Members Jessa Lingel and Dustyn Roberts’s guest column in the Daily Pennsylvanian

The University of Pennsylvania prides itself on being a leading institution of higher education, committed to fostering a supportive and inclusive environment for its faculty. Yet this support almost always skews towards tenure-track faculty. One of the most glaring discrepancies for tenure-track versus non-tenure track (NTT) faculty involves the exclusion of NTT faculty from some parental leave benefits. This blatant discrepancy undermines the personal and professional well-being of these essential educators and hampers the University’s reputation as a progressive and equitable workplace. 

It’s time for Penn to provide transparent and consistent parental leave for NTT faculty. Non-tenure track faculty are the backbone of undergraduate education at Penn, representing 62% of our instructors. These faculty members teach courses, mentor students, and conduct research that is crucial to the core mission of our university. Without them, the University couldn’t function. Despite these pivotal contributions, too often NTT faculty are treated as second-class citizens, with fewer benefits compared to their tenured counterparts. In addition to lower pay, less job security, and fewer protections around academic freedom, NTT faculty are subjected to vague, subjectively enforced parental leave policies.

The lack of employer support for caregiving is increasingly driving people out of higher education. Most often, it’s women and gender-nonconforming people who are faced with choosing caregiving over their careers. Tenure-track faculty at Penn receive up to a full year of parental leave from teaching. For NTT faculty, leave policies vary wildly. Some receive teaching relief while others do not. The lack of consistent, transparent policies creates immense financial and emotional strain. It forces them to make impossible choices between their careers and their families. It reduces their ability to plan courses and conduct research. And it sends a clear message that their contributions to the university are less valued than those of tenured faculty.

Currently, workload relief for NTT faculty is determined on a case-by-case basis, resulting in inequity and placing undue burden on individual faculty and department chairs. In contrast, peer institutions have standardized policies guaranteeing at least one semester of workload relief for all new parents (and often two for birth parents). Family-friendly policies improve employee wellbeing and morale, reduce turnover, and help recruit top talent. By committing to the well-being of its NTT faculty, Penn will enhance its reputation as an employer of choice and create a more stable and productive environment for multiple stakeholders, including students, staff, administrators, and faculty.

The School of Arts and Sciences offers a model policy that clearly defines parental leave for both standing and non-standing faculty. The SAS policy includes leave and teaching relief for the birth parent and the spouse or partner of the birth parent. It also specifies leave and teaching relief for adoptive parents and extends the tenure probationary period (standing faculty) or appointment term (non-standing faculty). In contrast to many other policies around the University, it also describes what happens in the case of a summer birth and explicitly lists the type of NTT faculty eligible for these policies. The SAS policy promotes equity and inclusion by offering equal treatment for teaching relief across a diversity of faculty roles. The extension of workload relief to NTT faculty without teaching duties (e.g., research faculty) would make the policy even more comprehensive. 

We urge Penn to expand the SAS policy across the entire University and provide parental leave benefits to all full-time faculty.

So far, we have focused on parental leave policies, but it’s important to note that there are many kinds of caregiving responsibilities that require support from employers. Families can require many types of care, from school-age kids with chronic illnesses to aging parents or an injured spouse. Ensuring fair and consistent policies around parental leave is an important step, but it’s also part of a much larger conversation about supporting workers who provide many different kinds of caregiving.

Penn administration regularly holds up “in principal and in practice” as a framework for institutional priorities and decision-making. It’s time for Penn to put its principles of faculty support and equity into practice for NTT faculty. By committing to equitable and transparent parental leave policies for all faculty members, the University will show it truly values equity, inclusion, and the work-life balance. We encourage you to show your support by signing our petition here.

JESSA LINGEL is an associate professor of Communication, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. Her email is lingel@upenn.edu.

DUSTYN ROBERTS is a practice associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. Her email is dustyn@seas.upenn.edu.

Original Link Here

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.

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.

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.