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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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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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What should you do—and what shouldn’t you do—when a colleague is subject to targeted harassment?

What are the responsibilities of administrators, chairs, departments, faculty senates, and individual faculty members?

Over the past decade, targeted harassment has grown as one key component of organized, well-funded, rightwing attacks on higher education. Learn about the organizational networks that generate outrage-baiting stories about faculty members, proven strategies for dealing with them, and ways that you and your colleagues together can defend the rights of faculty members who are defamed, doxxed, or threatened.

Targeted harassment is a problem for all of us, not just individuals in the crosshairs—and addressing it requires you to be informed and prepared. Targeted harassment threatens the academic freedom of all faculty members; it aims to isolate faculty from each other; and it aims to incite rash reactions from colleagues and administrations—public denunciations, unilateral discipline, and more—that undermine due process procedures necessary to protect academic freedom.

This workshop will feature Professors Isaac Kamola and Heather Steffen of Faculty First Responders, who are also contributors to the new Researcher Support Consortium. These are the preeminent national organizations that have studied targeted harassment and advised faculty and administrations nationwide.

If you are experiencing targeted harassment, please contact AAUP-Penn. You are also welcome to attend.

If you are NOT experiencing targeted harassment, this workshop is for you.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/95978727174?pwd=uQrO74PJ69y9n1dQBeAhoIVnOVNYVj.1

Meeting ID: 959 7872 7174

Passcode: 257673

Dial by your location

• +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)

• +1 646 931 3860 US• +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) *ASL Interpretation provided through this number – For Deaf and Hard of Hearing participants who use ASL, please call your VRS (Video Relay Service), and give the interpreter this number in order to access interpretation for the Zoom meeting. Contact us at aaup.penn@gmail.com if you have any questions or need further information about this.

Targeted Harassment Workshop Flyer 10-25-24_V2Download
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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

AAUP Rally Speeches 1.22.24Download

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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.

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On May 10, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee issued the following statement on the Penn Administration’s Decision to Arrest Students and Faculty and the University’s Imposition of Mandatory Leaves of Absence on Six Students.

May 10, 2024

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the decision of the Penn administration to call in riot police early this morning to arrest students and faculty engaged in nonviolent antiwar protest on our campus. This repressive action was a violation of the University’s Guidelines on Open Expression and a cowardly, shameful attempt to silence and punish speech that administrators simply do not want to hear.  We further condemn the administration’s abuse of the student disciplinary system in summoning numerous students to disciplinary meetings on specious grounds.  And we condemn the decision of Penn’s Provost, John Jackson, to impose mandatory leaves of absence on six students involved in the encampment on May 9. Provost Jackson abused the student disciplinary system, using it not to punish violations of university rules—there are none here that we know of—but simply to silence criticism of Israeli government policies and of the war on Gaza. Bowing to pressure from donors, politicians, and lobbying organizations that would like to control what can be taught and studied in the United States, and which have consistently misrepresented the character of a peaceful antiwar encampment, Penn’s administration has violated a core principle of academic freedom: the right of students to freedom in learning, which includes their right to assemble and engage in political activity.  

We demand that all charges be dropped, that the university reverse the mandatory leaves and other sanctions imposed on students, that the university dismiss all disciplinary cases against students targeted for their participation in the encampment, and that the university cease its pattern of threatening students with discipline and arrest for nonviolent antiwar protest.

Those of us who have spent time on College Green in recent weeks know that the encampment was an example of nonviolent protest. It complied with Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, and it embodied a form of protest that is utterly familiar and ordinary on college campuses: students slept in tents, hung banners, hosted talks and teach-ins, created art, read, studied, and chanted. Heeding the advice of groundskeepers, student protesters even periodically repositioned their tents so as not to harm the grass. Classes, exams, meetings, research, and education on our campus have proceeded. In fact, with support from faculty and staff, the encampment hosted educational events that were in desperately short supply this year, as donor pressure and administrative repression undermined the ability of faculty, staff, and students to organize events on the history, culture, and politics of Israel and Palestine.  While the university administration repeatedly mischaracterized the encampment as a threat to safety, the only threats of violence that occurred here were threats against the students in the encampment, including one from a man armed with a hunting knife and the other from a man who sprayed tents and food with a chemical agent.

It was not the encampment but the university administration that created a crisis.  Mimicking the response of university administrations across the country, administrators spent weeks whipping up fear by misrepresenting peaceful protest as a threat to safety, threatening the students with discipline, and accusing them of violating unnamed rules without any evidence, all in an apparent attempt to legitimate a crackdown or intimidate protesters into leaving.  When protesters stayed, as was their right, the administration turned to flagrant violations of due process, summarily imposing mandatory leaves of absence on six students on May 9—silencing them by removing them from campus. These acts of escalation were in no one’s interest. They have imperiled the futures of students who were exercising their rights to assemble and to engage in political activity—rights protected by the principle of academic freedom and by the university’s own policies. They were forms of incitement and acts of intimidation. They were intolerable responses to a nonviolent student demonstration. This is not the kind of university our students deserve.

The administration’s acts of escalation were also violations of the university’s own policies.  Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression are framed to protect the right to protest specifically in situations like this one, where there is disagreement. For that very reason, in case of conflict between university policies, the Guidelines on Open Expression explicitly take precedence over all other policies. The Guidelines prohibit the University from restricting assembly or demonstration on the basis of the substance or nature of the views expressed. Yet that is exactly what the administration has done for months. Since last fall, the university administration has established a pattern of silencing, threatening, and punishing speech critical of the war in Gaza and of Israeli government policies. In futile attempts to appease donors, lobbying organizations, and politicians who neither understand nor respect the principles of academic freedom and open expression, the administration has restricted a Jewish student group’s ability to screen a film critical of the state of Israel; it has banned the student group Penn against the Occupation; it has failed to show adequate concern for the harassment of Palestinian, Muslim, Iranian, and Arab students and faculty; it has issued public statements that have contributed to that harassment; and it has repeatedly abused the student disciplinary system to punish nonviolent antiwar activity. This pattern of discrimination, in every instance targeting speech critical of the war in Gaza, is itself a violation of Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression. And it raises serious questions about Penn’s adherence to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. 

Compounding this violation of the Guidelines on Open Expression, the Provost appears to have abused his power and violated due process protections in imposing mandatory leaves on students. Under part III.D of the Charter of the Student Disciplinary System, the Provost may only impose such leaves when a student’s presence on campus threatens “order, health, safety, or the conduct of the University’s educational mission.” These students’ presence represented no such threat. It is indicative of the Orwellian nature of university governance, however, that the university administration holds the exclusive power to make this determination, which allowed the Provost to characterize the protest as threatening by fiat. Meanwhile, the Provost appears to have violated another part of the charter: Part III.D. requires the Provost to consult the students’ Dean or Associate Dean before imposing a mandatory leave. As far as we know, the Provost flouted that requirement.  

In the immediate term, we reiterate that all charges must be dropped, and the administration must reverse the mandatory leaves and other sanctions imposed on students.  It must end its abuse of the student disciplinary system to silence and punish anti-war protest, first by withdrawing all cases against students that are currently being processed by the Center for Community Standards and Accountability (CSA).

In the longer term, our university needs an entirely new system for enforcing its Guidelines on Open Expression—the university policy that defines and defends the right to participate in demonstrations. Currently, the Vice Provost for University Life, an arm of the central administration, has the exclusive power to interpret and enforce the Guidelines, and as a result, the university administration has repeatedly violated the Guidelines in its treatment of student protest, with no consequences whatsoever. The power to interpret and enforce the Guidelines on Open Expression must be taken away from the central administration and transferred to a new elected body consisting of faculty (tenure-track and non-tenure-track), staff, and students, all elected at large.

This should be the beginning of a thorough redesign of university governance to provide faculty of all ranks, staff, grad workers, and students with real democratic power to write and enforce university policies. Only then will we be able to defend our rights to academic freedom and open expression, including the right of students to assemble and engage in nonviolent protest.

Across the country, university administrations have called in armed police to clear encampments by force, but they have failed to silence peaceful protest against the war in Gaza. We stand with our students and colleagues who have displayed moral courage and discipline in the face of threats and police aggression. Peaceful protest is a necessary part of education and of democracy itself. We stand with all those working to defend the university as a democratic institution and as a space of free and critical research, teaching, learning, and expression.

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