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July 7, 2025

Larry Jameson, President
John L. Jackson, Jr., Provost
Marta Bartholomew, Director of Postdoctoral Affairs

Dear President Jameson and Colleagues,

We write on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-Penn) to ask that you implement a policy of neutrality in all union organizing drives at Penn. In particular, we ask you to end the anti-union campaign against Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP), take down the anti-union website https://facts4pennpostdocs.org/, and respect the results of the upcoming union election on July 16 and 17.

The website presents talking points that have been part of anti-union campaigns in the United States since the 1970s, crafted by anti-union law firms and consultants. When workers launch organizing drives in the United States, over three-quarters of employers hire such firms to design anti-union campaigns for them.[1] Penn currently uses the law firm Cozen O’Connor in its campaign against postdocs and RAs.

Anti-union campaigns target workers with a standard set of messages, delivered through phone calls, text messages, emails, websites, mailers, posters, and meetings with supervisors:

  • They depict unions as third parties that supposedly interfere with workers’ individual relationships with their employers. In fact, unions are organizations of workers themselves. Workers make up the bargaining committees that negotiate contracts, they vote on contracts, and they participate in grievance procedures as stewards. Workers organize unions precisely because individuals do not have effective negotiating power with large institutions. Collective bargaining is a way to make workers’ voices heard.
  • They warn workers about union dues, implying that they might be worse off if they form a union. This is not a credible argument. Workers do not pay dues until they vote to ratify their first contract, and workers have no reason to ratify contracts that leave them worse off. Furthermore, according to the US Department of Labor, unionized workers in the United States earn 18% more than non-union workers do;[2] union dues are generally less than 2% of wages.
  • They issue threats, often couched as expressions of concern. For instance, employers warn workers that even if they vote to form a union, it might take them years to negotiate a first contract, and the terms of that contract might fall short of their expectations—they might even be worse than their current terms of employment. These are threats indicating the employer intends to fight workers in contract negotiations.
  • They warn that unions will impose rigid rules inappropriate to their workplace. This argument presents a distorted picture of union contracts, which take many forms. Unionized workers, including those in US universities, have long negotiated contracts protecting some forms of flexibility while establishing guarantees that workers need. This argument also obscures the fact that workers in non-union settings are already subject to rules; having a union simply allows them a voice in determining and enforcing those rules. Finally, this argument loses its luster when one realizes that all employers make it: big-box stores, manufacturers, and institutions of higher education all claim that they are uniquely flexible workplaces where unions could not operate.
  • They present positive workplace policies as evidence that workers don’t need unions. This obscures the fact that current policies are often products of past mobilizations. For instance, in recent decades, union organizing drives by postdocs and research associates have led universities nationwide to improve pay and benefit packages. Penn’s website now presents those improvements as evidence that organizing is needless or destructive.
  • They advise workers who signed cards to change their minds and vote no in the election. They tell workers to give management one more chance.

All of these talking points appear on the website above. We understand that the university administration is deploying other standard anti-union tactics as well. Lawyers from Cozen O’Connor representing Penn challenged the right of postdocs and research associates to organize before the NLRB, based on the false argument that they are only “temporary” employees.[3] The NLRB rightly rejected this argument. In addition, Penn has illegally deployed the Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations—now in effect for over a year—to repress union gatherings on campus in violation of federal labor law. Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, workers have the right to engage in concerted activity—that is, collective action to address shared workplace concerns—and on college campuses, concerted activity routinely takes the form of rallying on campus.[4] Yet on June 12, when RAPUP members gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the Button, they were forced off campus. The Penn administration knows that such measures are illegal: in August 2024, Penn security prevented medical residents in CIR/SEIU from gathering in the courtyard of Pennsylvania Hospital for a union event. This violation of federal labor law resulted in an Unfair Labor Practice charge against Penn.[5]

These messages and tactics have no place in our community. Their fundamental purpose is to interfere with workers’ right to organize, guaranteed in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. That law established that the decision to form a union—or not to do so—belongs to workers themselves. It is theirs alone to make; employers do not get a vote in certification elections, and their views are simply irrelevant. Penn’s anti-union campaigns convey an unwillingness to accept those facts. They aim to sow doubt, fear, and confusion among workers to sway the outcome of elections. Their legal maneuvers seek to strip workers of their right to organize and prevent an election from happening at all.

We further object to recent attempts to enlist faculty members in anti-union activity. The anti-union website has been shared with faculty in a clear attempt to instrumentalize our relationships of mutual respect and trust with postdocs and research associates. In setting us up to deliver intimidating and misleading messages, they threaten to corrode those very relationships and compromise our integrity.

Finally, we object to these anti-union tactics because they are inconsistent with the research and teaching mission of the university. Paying law firms and consultants to fight our own postdocs and research associates is not a productive use of Penn’s resources in any situation, and it is particularly egregious given that Penn has cited federal funding cuts as the reason for hiring freezes, cuts to graduate training, contract nonrenewals for non-tenure-track faculty, and other austerity measures that compromise the university’s core mission. As over 1,100 of us demanded this spring, the administration must use its resources to uphold research and teaching, and to uphold the rights of all members of the Penn community; it should not use those resources to disenfranchise our own colleagues. Nor is Penn’s anti-union campaign a rational defense of institutional interests. The improved working conditions that unionization might yield would not harm the university; rather, they would make Penn a better place for all of us to teach, learn, and conduct research.

The proper posture of an employer during an organizing drive is neutrality: management should simply step back and allow workers to make their decision. Neutrality not only respects the original spirit of the National Labor Relations Act, but it lays the groundwork for a productive, mutually beneficial relationship with a union should workers vote to form one.

For all these reasons, we ask that you take down the https://facts4pennpostdocs.org/ website, end the anti-union campaign under way, and refrain from such activity in the future. We also ask that you respect the results of the upcoming RAPUP union election. We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Executive Committee, AAUP-Penn

[1] John Logan, “The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States,” British Journal of Industrial Relations vol. 44, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 651-675; Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[2] US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, News Release USDL-23-071, January 19, 2023.

[3] NLRB Case 04-RC-364372, https://www.nlrb.gov/case/04-RC-364372

[4] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/concerted-activity

[5] “Penn Med residents seek unfair labor practice charge after attempt to deliver petition,” Daily Pennsylvanian, September 2, 2024, https://www.thedp.com/article/2024/09/penn-medicine-union-rally-petition-mahoney-krajewski

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We stand with our colleagues in Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP) as they prepare to win their union in the upcoming NLRB election on July 16 and 17. As faculty, we know that postdocs and research associates play essential roles in advancing the research and teaching mission of the university. In building a union together, they are organizing to make Penn a better, fairer, and more democratic institution. They are part of a growing movement of higher education workers, including Penn’s graduate research and teaching assistants in GETUP, organizing with the UAW to improve their working conditions, and by extension, the University as a whole. All of us who do the work that sustains Penn’s research and educational mission 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. We stand in solidarity with postdocs and research associates in their efforts to achieve those goals.

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the University administration has responded to RAPUP’s organizing drive by launching an anti-union campaign, following the same playbook it has used to fight recent union organizing drives by Penn museum workers, medical residents, resident advisors, graduate research and teaching assistants, and librarians. Designed by the anti-union law firm Cozen O’Connor, the fundamental purpose of these expensive campaigns is to sow fear and confusion to sway the outcome of union elections, and to interfere with workers’ legal right to organize.

In its efforts to suppress RAPUP’s unionization efforts, the Penn administration first attempted to strip postdocs and research associates of their right to organize at all: they argued to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that these workers were supposedly “temporary” employees ineligible to unionize. In a recent hearing, the National Labor Relations Board rebuked the administration’s arguments, clearly affirming that postdocs and research assistants are employees with the right to unionize. Second, the administration has created an anti-union website and circulated it by email and text to postdocs, research associates, and faculty. As RAPUP’s website makes clear, Penn’s website is laden with misleading and intimidating claims; it is in no way a trustworthy source of information. By sending faculty this material, the administration is asking us to transmit misinformation, threatening our integrity and our relationships of mutual trust and respect with research associates and postdocs. Faculty, chairs, and deans should refuse to transmit these messages on behalf of Cozen O’Connor.

The final element of Penn’s anti-union campaign has been to repress union gatherings in plain violation of federal labor law. Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, workers have the right to engage in concerted activity—that is, collective action to address shared workplace concerns—and on college campuses, concerted activity routinely takes the form of rallying on campus. Yet on June 12, when RAPUP members gathered for a peaceful demonstration at the Button, they were forced off campus. The Penn administration knows that such measures are illegal: in August 2024, Penn security prevented medical residents in CIR/SEIU from gathering in the courtyard of Pennsylvania Hospital for a union event. This violation of federal labor law resulted in an Unfair Labor Practice charge against Penn.

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee has written to the Penn administration calling on them to end the anti-union campaign against RAPUP, take down the anti-union website, and pledge to respect the results of the upcoming election; we await their response. Only by taking these measures can the university administration demonstrate respect for the principles of democracy.If these last several years have 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. As over 1,100 of us demanded this spring, the administration must use its resources to uphold research and teaching, and to uphold the rights of all members of the Penn community; it should not use those resources to attempt to strip those of us who make the university run of our rights to organize, 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 postdocs and research associates play a crucial part, we need to create legitimate forms of democratic decision-making within our universities to resist abuses of power and external interference. In building a union together, our postdoc and RA colleagues are showing us the way.

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This spring, more than 1100 workers at Penn signed a petition demanding that Penn uphold research and counter funding cuts, affirm sanctuary and legal rights of immigrants, maintain commitments to DEIA, and stand up for equal treatment for LGBTQ+ members of our community. Yesterday’s announcement of a resolution agreement between the University and the Department of Education over a Title IX investigation is a painful reminder that Penn’s administration will not adhere to these values. By following a path of political expediency at the expense of trans athletes, Penn makes all trans students, faculty, staff, and community members less safe, exposing them to renewed and emboldened harassment and discriminatory treatment.

Penn’s Latin motto, Leges Sine Moribus Vanae, is usually translated to “Laws Without Morals are Useless.” Rather than putting these principles into practice, Penn has put a price tag on our values, showing the Department of Education that it can use funding freezes to hold us hostage. This outcome is fundamentally about two things: (1) a failure to commit to a campus where everyone can thrive, and (2) the lack of input that key stakeholders have in making decisions that affect how people learn, teach and work at Penn.

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee calls on all members of the university community to recognize the urgency of this moment. Those who work and study at Penn must together hold this institution accountable to its professed ideals, including the freedom to teach, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to engage in shared decision-making for the future of Penn. The need for all workers at Penn to join together and fight for the principles we share has never been more critical.

For further information, please see the following resources:

  1. Penn labor coalition petition “Penn must uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA, nondiscrimination, and the rights of all members of our community”
  2. AAUP policy statement “On Academic Freedom and Transphobia” 
  3. AAUP “Statement on Professional Ethics”
  4. AAUP policy statement “The Role of the Faculty in the Governance of College Athletics”
  5. AAUP Academe article “The Assault on Transgender Students”

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On May 9, 2025, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee gave the following testimony at a Philadelphia City Council Hearing on Attacks against DEI at Penn.

We are proud to testify today to amplify a message sent by Penn employees across the university this spring: the Penn administration must end its backtracking on racial and social justice. It must uphold basic principles of equity, and it must reaffirm that diversity and open inquiry are essential to research, teaching, and the advancement of knowledge. In March, over 1,100 Penn employees signed their names to these demands in a petition to the administration, and hundreds of us demonstrated on campus.  We are proud that the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-Penn) was one of six campus labor organizations that cosponsored this petition, and we are proud to stand together in this work with unions representing Penn graduate workers, postdocs, medical residents, library workers, and museum workers.  These are consensus issues among those of us who work at Penn. 

It is important to understand that the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are in fact attacks on the gains of the civil rights movement and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  It is also important to understand that those movements won institutional changes that improved the quality of US universities. During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, US universities were relatively closed, segregated institutions with little tolerance for critical thought and open inquiry.  Faculty were purged for participating in the civil rights and labor movements, and those purges impoverished the intellectual life of our entire society: they drove out scholars in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and they chilled the speech of faculty, staff, and students who remained.  Just as important, those purges compounded the effects of decades of racial, gender, and ethnic discrimination that had already put higher education out of reach of most people in the United States.

In many ways, we owe the revitalization of our universities to the Black freedom movement and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which broke through the repressive atmosphere of the early Cold War and opened US higher education to people, ideas, and entire fields of knowledge that had been shut out.  We have those movements to thank for the very existence of African-American studies, ethnic studies, the study of gender and sexuality, and critical research on racism, colonialism and imperialism.  It is no accident that those are precisely the areas of study under attack today at Penn and across the country. And it is no accident that attacks on those fields are going hand-in-hand with assaults on diversity, on racial and social justice, and on our colleagues and students who are people of color, noncitizens, trans and LGBTQ+ who have every right to be at Penn and without whose knowledge and insights our university and our society would be impoverished. For many of us the DEI initiatives that existed were only a step in the right direction as they often did not address the structural and systemic inequities and power dynamics built into the institutions of higher education, learning processes and means of knowledge production that have led to the reproduction of the status quo. If they had been successful, we would not have been in this place so soon.  Now even those overtures and attempts at change are under attack, leading to further regression.  

So we stand against executive orders that would return us to the days of segregation. We stand against politicians, donors, and lobbying organizations that would like to control what can be taught and studied in the United States. And we believe that it is time for the Penn administration to stand with us.

To this point, Penn’s administration has failed to do so. In the wake of Donald Trump’s executive orders attacking DEI, we are proud that the national AAUP sued the Trump administration, arguing that the orders were unlawful and unconstitutional.  By contrast, Penn’s central administration began directing faculty and staff to scrub websites and censor academic programming.  Some colleagues were told by supervisors that Penn’s General Counsel had a list of prohibited words. Other colleagues were told that really, they could keep teaching and researching whatever they wanted, but just change all the words.  As these colleagues noted, this is not possible.  Censorship threatens the very existence of many fields of study: it is not possible to conduct research or teaching on racism, gender, or sexuality when those terms, concepts, and issues are deemed unspeakable.  It is not possible to hold a workshop for faculty on how to make classes accessible to students from diverse backgrounds when you can’t circulate an announcement using any of the words that would tell people what the workshop is about.  Censorship fatally undermines the freedom of faculty to teach, as well as the freedom of students to learn.  It destroys the conditions of free and open inquiry that are necessary for universities to fulfill their mission—to produce and disseminate new knowledge that can serve the public good in a democratic society.

For these reasons, 1,100 Penn employees have called on Penn’s administration to end its backtracking on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.  The Penn administration must cease instructing faculty, staff, and students to censor programs, funding proposals, and websites. It must restore policies, websites, and programming that were in place to make the University open and accessible to all before the publication of executive orders.  It must retain staff who implement those policies and programs.  It must vigorously defend researchers and instructors who face targeted harassment for their scholarship and teaching on racism, disability, gender, and sexuality.  And all future decisions on these issues must be made by the affected members of the University, not handed down unilaterally by the central administration.

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This Thursday, as part of a national day of action for higher education, join colleagues and students at two events sponsored by AAUP-Penn: a know-your-rights training and a screening of the documentary film The Encampments.

1. AAUP-Penn Know-Your-Rights Training: Thursday, April 17, at 4 p.m. in Fisher-Bennett Hall 135 and by Zoom. Organized by AAUP-Penn members, this training is open to all Penn faculty, staff, and students, whether you are concerned for your own status and safety, or whether you want to learn how to support and uphold the rights of international and noncitizen colleagues and students who may be targeted. An immigration attorney will be present to answer your questions.

Know Your Rights Training poster: Tuesday, April 17, 4pm, Fisher-Bennett 135 (or via zoom)

2. Film Screening of The Encampments: Thursday, April 17, 6-8 p.m. in Annenberg 110.

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AAUP-Penn is proud to co-sponsor this documentary film screening as an expression of our chapter’s commitment to academic freedom. 

Academic freedom includes the right of faculty members to make programming decisions within their areas of expertise. The decisions of the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE), the Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center, and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) to cosponsor this film screening are straightforward exercises of academic freedom.

Academic freedom also includes the right of faculty members to freedom in extramural speech (speech made as a member of the public on topics of general concern) and freedom in intramural speech (speech about the university itself, including criticism of the university). The decision of Penn Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine (Penn FSJP) to cosponsor this film screening is a straightforward exercise of those freedoms.

Academic freedom further entails the freedom of students to learn—to encounter and critically examine multiple interpretations of the world, and to engage in political speech and association, which are essential aspects of education and learning. The decision of Penn Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) to cosponsor this film screening is a straightforward exercise of students’ right to freedom in learning.

Since the fall of 2023, the Penn administration has repeatedly violated its own policies on academic freedom and open expression by denying faculty and students the opportunity to hold film screenings and teach-ins exploring critical perspectives on Israeli government policies and the war in Gaza. In light of the Penn administration’s record of suppressing open discussion of the issues at the heart of this documentary film, we feel it is important and appropriate for all faculty who believe in academic freedom to say clearly that this film screening is a legitimate event that belongs on our campus. For a university to fulfill its mission, there must be institutional space for open discussion of difficult and controversial topics, and faculty and students must vigorously exercise the rights that are ours under the principles of academic freedom. We encourage faculty members to attend this screening of The Encampments to demonstrate their support for academic freedom and to engage in dialogue on issues important to the future of our university, higher education as a whole, our democracy, and our world.

—AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

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Today, executive orders and federal funding cuts are threatening life-saving research at Penn; the principles of racial justice, equity, accessibility, and nondiscrimination that are necessary to higher education for the public good; and the rights of faculty, staff, and students, including those who are international or noncitizens, people of color, and trans and LGBTQ+.

On Thursday, March 20 at noon at 34th and Walnut, join Penn employees, students, community members, and elected officials to send a message: Penn must not obey in advance! The Penn administration must uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA, nondiscrimination, and the rights of all members of our community.

This demonstration is co-sponsored by 6+ Penn labor organizations representing faculty, medical residents, graduate workers, postdocs, museum workers, and library workers.  For more on our coalition and goals, read our recent op-ed. If you work at Penn, sign the coalition petition in support of these principles.

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2.20.25

AAUP-Penn’s Committee on immigrant employees and the Executive Committee signed on to the following statement to Penn’s administration urging more material support for undocumented, immigrant, and international students, faculty, and staff. The statement was drafted collectively with the Penn Undergraduate Assembly (UA), IDEAL Student Council of GAPSA (Graduate and Professional Student Assembly), and the Penn Carey Law Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG).

To: Interim President Larry Jameson, Provost John Jackson, and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee

As faculty, staff, grad workers, postdocs, students, and community members of the University of Pennsylvania, we write to express our concern about Penn’s commitment to its undocumented, immigrant, and international students and employees.

Recent Executive Orders issued by the White House that threaten the safety of immigrants and minorities in the name of “protecting the American people,” “protecting women and girls,” or “combating anti-Semitism” raise grave concerns and necessitate a clear, principled stance from university leadership. Although your message to the community on Tuesday, January 28, took some positive steps toward “protecting each other,” it did not go far enough in addressing the climate of fear and uncertainty these orders have created. Our community is reeling—students, faculty, and staff alike in fear for themselves and their neighbors. In this moment, it is imperative that university leadership offer unequivocal reassurance and a concrete commitment to protecting those most vulnerable. Specifically, the university must publicly clarify its stance and the steps it will take regarding cooperation with the federal government in the enforcement of these executive orders.

We ask for clarification on these questions:

  1. What is campus policy with regard to working with federal immigration authorities?
  2. Whom should faculty contact in the event that they are approached by ICE agents?
  3. What private/limited-access spaces can you make available where ICE agents cannot enter without a valid warrant?
  4. Are you planning to communicate with students, staff, and faculty about their privacy rights and about whom to contact if approached by ICE? 
  5. What legal support and representation will the university provide for people who are faced with visa or deportation problems?

In 2016, Penn declared itself a “sanctuary” for undocumented students, affirming that it “will not allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) / Customs and Border Protection (CBP) / U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on our campus unless required by warrant” and that it “will not share any information about any undocumented student with these agencies unless presented with valid legal process.” This commitment aligns with the protections afforded under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which strictly limits the disclosure of student records, including immigration status, without explicit student consent. FERPA mandates that institutions safeguard the privacy of student information, and any deviation from this standard—such as compliance with federal requests for student data absent a legal warrant—would not only violate Penn’s stated values but also risk breaching federal privacy laws. 

President Trump’s order to “Combat Anti-Semitism” also directs the Secretaries of State, Education, and Homeland Security to provide “recommendations…[to] monitor and report activities by alien students… [that] lead to investigations… and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” This vague and open-ended directive amounts to an attack on academic freedom. Using civil rights protections as pretext, it allows administrators to target student activists and silence criticism of a foreign state. Historically, university campuses have served as the conscience of the nation, leading movements against war and oppression—whether opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, or challenging institutional complicity in human rights violations. Now, in this moment of heightened risk, we call upon you to reaffirm Penn’s commitment to freedom of expression and to expand its commitment to include protections of undocumented staff and workers as well as those community members on F-1, J-1, and H1-B visas—and to make clear that Penn will not cooperate in any way with these unjust policies of intimidation and deportation.

Signed,

AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

Penn Undergraduate Assembly (UA)

IDEAL Student Council of GAPSA (Graduate and Professional Student Assembly)

Penn Carey Law Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG)

GET-UP (UAW)

3.8.25 Sanctuary statement to adminDownload

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Mark your calendars and spread the word to your colleagues!

This Wednesday, February 19 at 12 p.m., join colleagues and coworkers from across Penn outside Senator Dave McCormick’s office (2000 Market Street) to say no to federal funding cuts to essential research, teaching, and healthcare. Register here to attend!

The Trump administration’s attempts to freeze federal research funding, slash NIH and NSF resources, and impose a debilitating cap on indirect costs in NIH grants all threaten life-saving scientific and medical research. They endanger the future of higher education, research, and healthcare that serves the public good. They could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in our city.

Wednesday’s demonstration is part of a national day of action against federal funding cuts, organized by faculty, graduate workers, postdocs, healthcare workers, and other higher ed workers in AAUP, AFT, UAW, CWA, and other higher ed unions. Across the country, higher ed workers will stand together to say: Hands Off Our Healthcare, Research, and Jobs! 
Join the demonstration this Wednesday at noon, and bring a colleague with you. Everyone is welcome. Register here to attend!

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The University of Pennsylvania’s Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations constitute an attempt by the central administration to strip faculty, staff, and students of our rights to assemble, speak, and engage in protest—activities that are protected by the principles of academic freedom because they are necessary to education and to democracy itself. These new regulations exemplify what the national AAUP has rightly denounced as a coast-to-coast “wave of administrative policies intended to crack down on peaceful campus protest.”

The unilateral and secretive decision-making that produced these policies is indicative of Penn’s unaccountable system of governance, and it underscores the need for faculty, staff, and students to work together to create legitimate, transparent, and democratic forms of decision-making. Those of us now subject to these rules had no part in creating them; indeed, we learned of them when administrators sent a university-wide email in June simply announcing that they were in force, apparently overriding at least parts of the Guidelines on Open Expression. While the Guidelines on Open Expression describe procedures for changing the Guidelines, involving public hearings and votes to be taken at the level of the Committee on Open Expression and University Council, even these minimal required forms of consultation seem to have been set aside unilaterally. Faculty, staff, and students do not know how the task force now charged with permanently rewriting the Guidelines on Open Expression was composed or when public hearings will be held. Based on the recent record of the central administration, as well as the University Council and the Committee on Open Expression, we have little reason to believe that those hearings would be anything more than window-dressing. All these facts make a mockery of the principle of shared governance. 

The rules themselves are in no way viewpoint-neutral: their timing and content both indicate that they are meant to silence speech critical of Israeli government policies and of the war on Gaza that the administration simply does not want to hear. They prohibit precisely the forms of nonviolent mobilization involved in last year’s antiwar protests—from projecting images on campus buildings to camping out overnight. They grant administrators precisely the powers to surveil protesters that the Guidelines on Open Expression denied them last spring, but which they nevertheless attempted to deploy against participants in the Gaza solidarity encampment.

While they target antiwar protest and criticism of the Israeli government, these rules pose a much broader threat to all of us, no matter our political views. They all but ban assembly and protest on our campus by erecting a thicket of unreasonable restrictions:

  • Temporary Standards Part V bans the use of amplified sound, and thus effectively prevents rallies and demonstrations, at precisely the campus locations standardly used for those activities—green spaces and plazas located near administrative buildings—during the times when most people are on campus. 
  • Part V gives the administration the right to deny the use of space “If noise resulting from an event in an outdoor space may at times interfere or conflict with library, office, and classroom activities” (emphasis added). Given the administration’s unilateral power to interpret and enforce these policies, they could define any and all noise as something that “may at times interfere or conflict” with these activities.
  • The requirement (Temporary Standards III.d, III.e, III.f) that we submit applications to the administration 48 hours to 2 weeks in advance to hold any kind of event makes the right to assemble and demonstrate conditional on prior administrative approval. This grants the administration unacceptable latitude to deny permits based on the substance of the views expressed—latitude that we can reasonably expect this administration to abuse, given that it spent the last year attempting to suppress antiwar protest on the basis of its substantive content, in violation of the Guidelines on Open Expression. 
  • This same rule requiring application prohibits timely responses to crises. If a worker is killed or injured on the job, coworkers have every right to walk off the job and protest on the spot—except, apparently, at the University of Pennsylvania, where the administration would like two weeks to review the idea. Protest is frequently a response to urgent situations and rapidly developing events, and a two-week permit procedure quashes expression at the moment when it is often most necessary and effective. 
  • Requiring us to apply to hold a demonstration further constitutes a form of surveillance (in that it requires those engaged in dissent to identify themselves to administrators) and interrogation (equivalent to requiring us to sit down with administrators and tell them what we or our organizations plan to do in the future). These elements of the policy can be expected to have a chilling effect, discouraging faculty, staff, and students even from attempting to protest. The silence on our campus this fall suggests that these policies are already having a chilling effect.
  • Temporary Standards XIII.b allows the administration to engage in another form of surveillance: demanding to see IDs at demonstrations. Not only does this intimidate those in attendance, but it can also be expected to dissuade faculty, staff, and students from attending a demonstration at all. It is important to note that before this rule was written, the original Guidelines on Open Expression (which superseded all other university policies) only authorized administrators to request IDs in circumstances where the Guidelines were being violated. This new rule is expressly designed to eliminate that constraint, and it therefore allows much broader surveillance of the identities of people who are not violating any university policy but simply attending a demonstration. The problem of surveillance is not resolved by the administration’s claim (Temporary Standards XIII.b.i) that “Checking Penn IDs for safety concerns ordinarily does not involve making a record of the information for purposes of future disciplinary actions.” First, how do members of the University know whether a given situation is considered ordinary, and what recourse do we have to challenge administrative abuse, given that the administration has the exclusive authority to interpret and enforce these rules (Temporary Standards XIII.c, XIII.d)? Second, whether or not a record is made, requiring people to show their IDs makes their identities known to the administration immediately, and that knowledge can be used with or without written records.
  • Temporary Standards X interferes with our ability to communicate the message of a demonstration to those not in attendance, trampling our rights to open expression as well as basic press freedoms. It specifically bans livestreaming “except in limited circumstances where reaching a wider audience is appropriate and approved by the Vice Provost for University Life” and stipulates that news media “may be asked to limit filming to specific areas of campus, especially during demonstrations.” A central purpose of a demonstration is to communicate concerns not just to those in attendance but to wider publics. These provisions undermine the efficacy of demonstrating at all and may dissuade members of the campus community from even attempting to do so.

Clearly these policies threaten the ability of any organization to hold a public demonstration on Penn’s campus. And indeed, the administration may already be using these rules to repress labor organizing at Penn. On August 27, for example, Penn Medicine residents—who voted last year to form a union with CIR/SEIU and began negotiating their first contract—were prevented from holding a union event. According to the DP, residents gathered during their lunch break in the courtyard of Pennsylvania Hospital to mark a milestone in their contract campaign: they had organized a petition signed by a supermajority of members calling on management to meet their demands for fair pay. As is their right under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, they came together to celebrate that achievement and distribute copies of the petition among the union’s members (along with burritos to go, as residents’ 80-hour work weeks often do not enable them to eat lunch). In response, Penn security did exactly what the Temporary Standards would prescribe: they shut down the gathering. 

The Temporary Standards further open the door to academic freedom violations by requiring that speech on social media be “circumscribed by principles of…civility” (Part IX.a). The national AAUP has repeatedly warned against such vague demands for “civility” in intramural and extramural speech. The AAUP’s website offers extensive analysis of this issue, and we quote Henry Reichman, former chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure:

“[A]dministrative demands for civility may endanger academic freedom when applied to the extramural expression of faculty members… UCLA historian Michael Meranze wrote,

‘The demand for civility effectively outlaws a range of intellectual, literary, and political forms: satire is not civil, caricature is not civil, hyperbole and aesthetic mockery are not civil nor is polemic. Ultimately the call for civility is a demand that you not express anger; and if it was enforced it would suggest that there is nothing to be angry about in the world… We don’t need to pretend that all debates are friendly ones or that there are not real interests in conflict. If universities…are going to model intellectual discourse and life for the country, it is not going to be by imposing some rule of tone; it is going to be by demanding of people that they argue with reasons.’” (Henry Reichman, Understanding Academic Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), 97-98.)

Part VII.iv raises similar concerns, as it requires that members of the University “be respectful to University employees involved in ensuring…compliance with these guidelines.” This could prevent faculty, staff, and students from expressing dissent or protest against administrators who enforce these guidelines. The administration has exclusive power to interpret and enforce this policy, and is therefore at liberty to define protest and dissent themselves as disrespectful. Among other things, this would violate the academic freedom of faculty—specifically the right to freedom in intramural expression, which includes the right to criticize the University itself.

When one reads the Temporary Standards closely, it appears that their enforcement would not only trample on open expression, labor rights, and Penn’s written policies on academic freedom, but would interfere with the basic academic functioning of the University. We question whether these standards are enforceable at all or whether, either by design or by necessity, they can only be enforced in a discriminatory manner. For example:

III.b. Events are presumed to be private, that is, limited to members of the Penn community, unless specifically stated otherwise.

This provision reverses an element of the Guidelines on Open Expression, which stated that events were considered to be public (Guidelines II.b). The new rule appears to be inspired by the administration’s frustration that it could not expel community members from the Gaza solidarity encampment last spring. Yet the original rule regarding the public nature of campus events was a functional and necessary one for a university committed to fostering intellectual life: departments and centers routinely organize talks, conferences, and other academic programming featuring invited speakers, and academic events are often attended by colleagues and students from other institutions as well as interested members of the public. Today, it seems entirely possible that most programming at the University is not in compliance with the Temporary Standards, since few announcements for academic events “specifically state” that they are open to the public. Does the administration intend to crack down on academic events that are not in compliance—whether a dissertation defense attended by the candidate’s family, a department workshop featuring an invited scholar from outside Penn, or a film screening attended by colleagues from nearby institutions? Shutting down such events or retroactively punishing faculty and departments that host them would clearly harm the intellectual life of the University and violate the right of faculty to make academic programming decisions. Or does the administration intend to use this rule only to target specific, disfavored individuals and organizations on the basis of the substantive content of their speech?

IV.a. Schools, departments, institutes, individual faculty, students, and staff may not serve as “individual fronts” or “proxies” for non-Penn affiliated organizations who may solicit them in order to gain access to or use of Penn venues to organize or host an event on their behalf.

Faculty members and academic departments, centers, and schools routinely bring the conferences of professional and scholarly organizations to Penn. This enriches the intellectual life of our university, enhances Penn’s reputation, and is an expression of faculty members’ right to freedom in research and teaching. For instance, in 2023, when the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) held its annual meeting in Philadelphia, Penn Carey Law hosted the plenary lecture and a reception, and an ASLH pre-conference symposium also convened at Penn—a tribute to the University’s status in the field of legal history. To prohibit such activity would impoverish the intellectual life of the University, violate faculty members’ academic freedom, and professionally marginalize Penn faculty, preventing us from performing service to our scholarly communities.

If the administration intends to enforce these rules, it threatens the core research and teaching mission of the University, the labor rights of every campus employee, and all aspects of academic freedom and open expression.

If the administration plans instead to be selective and does not intend to enforce these rules consistently, then it must acknowledge that they are discriminatory in nature, aimed at suppressing mobilization against Israeli government policies and warmaking, and possibly other forms of activity including labor organizing, on the basis of the content of the views expressed and participants’ substantive goals.

No matter the administration’s intentions, it is up to all of us to use and defend the rights that remain ours under the principles of academic freedom and open expression that Penn’s written policies have long protected, to reject the illegitimate attempt to overhaul them, and to organize to win real governing power within the University to ensure that rights that exist on paper can be practiced in reality. If the last year has taught us anything, it is that the University of Pennsylvania, and the United States itself, desperately need legitimate, democratic forms of decision-making to defend the freedom to learn, teach, research, assemble, speak, and dissent.

Statement on Temporary StandardsDownload
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By Posted on Posted in News, Statements

Today, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee issued the following public statement regarding the recent police raid on Penn undergraduate students:

October 26, 2024

We are alarmed by the Penn administration’s escalating use of police action against Penn students. So too are we alarmed by the University’s pattern—established last year and extended this year—of treating all protest by faculty, staff, and students against Israeli government policies and warmaking chiefly as a security concern, rather than an expression of students’ rights to assemble and engage in political activity, and faculty’s right to freedom in extramural speech.

On October 18, members of the University of Pennsylvania Police Department and Philadelphia Police Department raided the home of a group of Penn undergraduates in the middle of the night, reportedly wearing “full tactical gear, including riot helmets, and armed with assault rifles and handguns.” According to The Intercept, the police were executing a warrant investigating a victimless act of vandalism: on September 12, red paint had been poured on the Ben Franklin statue. According to the same reporting, “the police threatened to break down the door with a battering ram and pointed a gun at a neighbor before storming the residence.” They reportedly “trained guns” on students in the house and “refused to provide their names or badge numbers.”

No reasonable person can believe that a student suspected of pouring paint on a statue should be subject to this dangerous and traumatizing treatment. But the university administration has shown itself willing to threaten students with potentially deadly physical violence and terrorize them in their homes. Authorizing an armed police raid on students in these circumstances is abhorrent, and it gives the lie to the university administration’s pretension to be acting to protect students from harm. On October 18, based on what has been reported, the university administration and the police appear to have been the preeminent threats to safety in our community.

This escalation is part of a pattern. Just four days earlier, on October 14, the administration needlessly disrupted the intellectual life of the university by responding to a non-violent demonstration with draconian measures: barricading campus, inhibiting access to academic buildings, and broadcasting fear-inducing security alerts that mischaracterized political speech and peaceful assembly as threats to safety. As it has done repeatedly over the past year, the administration unjustly depicted Penn faculty, staff, and students who were grieving the deaths of Palestinians as outsiders to our community and threats to others. The administration’s actions, not the protest itself, were threatening to members of our community and disruptive to the research and teaching mission of the university. Moreover, they represent clear violations of Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, which prohibit the administration from restricting demonstration on the basis of the substance of the views expressed.

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