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December 12, 2023

Today, unelected trustees with no academic expertise are evidently attempting a hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania—functions related to curriculum, research, and the hiring and evaluation of faculty. A letter circulated to trustees asks, “Should any of the existing academic departments be closed?” It seems to propose unilateral changes by trustees to “instruction of students,” changes in “criteria for qualification and admission for membership in the Faculty,” and a “Code of Conduct” to constrain campus speech. And it raises the possibility that the university might discipline faculty for “promoting a particular viewpoint.”  

The questions being considered by the trustees represent an assault on the principle of academic freedom, which was first articulated a century ago to safeguard the educational mission of universities.  Academic freedom ensures that professionally qualified researchers and educators, not donors or politicians, make decisions about curriculum and scholarship. It also ensures that the hiring, promotion, and discipline of faculty members are based on their fitness to do the work of research and teaching, and that fitness is determined by members of the academic profession.  These norms are necessary to ensure that the university can serve its fundamental purpose: to foster free and open inquiry that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society.  They prevent institutions of higher education from being turned into instruments that serve private and political interests. Over the course of a century, these principles have been endorsed by over 250 scholarly and educational organizations and written into the faculty handbooks of universities nationwide, including Penn’s.

Unelected billionaires without scholarly qualifications are now seeking to control academic decisions that must remain within the purview of faculty in order for research and teaching to have legitimacy and autonomy from private and partisan interests. Any attempts on the part of Penn’s trustees to close academic departments, constrain hiring, discipline faculty members for political reasons and without due process, censor faculty’s intramural or extramural speech, or impose new McCarthyite speech codes on faculty and students would constitute the most flagrant violations imaginable of the core principles of academic freedom and faculty governance. Those principles are not negotiable.

The transparent purposes of the questions being considered by the trustees are to restrict legitimate, long-established areas of study, to silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree, and to turn back the clock on gains in diversity and equity.

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee first sounded the alarm on such threats to academic freedom in October.  We issued the following recommendations, and we stand by them today.

  • It is likely that donors and administrators will attempt to respond to the present crisis by creating new academic programming—whether new hiring, curricular offerings, or research initiatives. Faculty must design and control any such effort rather than allow donors to set the terms.
  • When interacting with the university and its members, Penn’s trustees, alumni, and donors must be held to the same university policies that govern the rest of us, particularly policies prohibiting threats, coercion, retaliation, and intimidation. The statutes of the Board of Trustees and all university policies should be revised to reflect that expectation.
  • Those trustees and members of advisory boards who have made coercive threats against members of the university and academic programs within Penn have already violated the Guidelines on Open Expression, to which they are expressly bound. We recommend that they be removed from all university advisory and governance boards.

Trustees who neither understand nor respect the purpose of the university and who threaten its educational and research mission should not govern these institutions.

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December 9, 2023

In recent months, trustees, donors, lobbying organizations, and members of Congress have repeatedly misrepresented the words and deeds of Penn faculty and students who have expressed concern for Palestinian civilians and criticized the war in Gaza, going so far as to suggest that faculty who have publicly condemned Hamas were Hamas supporters and that groups protesting genocide were calling for genocide. These distortions and attacks on our colleagues have not addressed the scourge of antisemitism—a real and grave problem. Instead, they have threatened the ability of faculty and students to research, teach, study, and publicly discuss the history, politics, and cultures of Israel and Palestine. These attacks strike at the heart of the mission of an educational institution: to foster open, critical, and rigorous research and teaching that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society.

The ability of donors, lobbying groups, and members of Congress to destabilize the University of Pennsylvania reveals the need to restore a strong faculty voice in the governance of the institution. The next president must defend the principles of shared governance and academic freedom, which protect the educational mission of the university. And they must correct what has become a dangerous myth suggesting that the defense of academic freedom and open expression is in any way contradictory to the fight against antisemitism. We intend to see that Penn’s next president lives up to this responsibility.

For further information, please see past statements of the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee:

  1. Statement on Threats to Academic Freedom, University Governance, and Safety at the University of Pennsylvania, October 28
  2. Letter on Targeted Harassment, November 20
  3. Urgent message regarding film screening and threats to academic freedom, November 28
  4. Message on the Dec. 5 Congressional hearing, Dec. 6
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December 6, 2023

Dear Members,

In recent weeks, the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee has called on President Liz Magill to publicly condemn the targeted harassment of faculty members who have been subject to defamation and threats of personal violence for participating in the Palestine Writes Literature Festival and for expressing support for Palestinian civilians.  Campaigns of targeted harassment threaten core rights protected by academic freedom, including the rights of faculty to make academic decisions within their areas of expertise and to speak publicly on issues of general concern.  It is a fundamental duty of university administrators to condemn such attacks on academic freedom.

At yesterday’s Congressional hearings, some lawmakers contributed to the targeted harassment of faculty and subjected President Liz Magill to a line of questioning that revealed their contempt for academic freedom and for truth itself.  Unfortunately, in the face of their questions, President Magill failed once again to fulfill her responsibility to condemn targeted harassment.  During the hearing, Republican Congressmen Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Jim Banks (R-IN) breathed new life into a months-old campaign of targeted harassment by making false and inflammatory claims about individual Penn faculty members’ political views, affiliations, and activities.  They called on the University to commit flagrant violations of academic freedom: they suggested that Penn fire faculty members for protected extramural speech and challenged one faculty member’s right to teach classes and make curricular decisions within their area of scholarly expertise.  These were threats to the academic freedom of Penn faculty members made by members of Congress, broadcast live to international audiences and covered in major media outlets.  Such threats imperil the right of all faculty members to full freedom in research, teaching, and extramural speech.  At a time when the individual faculty members named by Congressmen Wilson and Banks have faced months of threats to their personal safety, often fueled by viral online misinformation, these comments also increase the serious risk of violence against members of our community.

President Magill failed to respond to these instances of targeted harassment that unfolded before her eyes.  While she was denied adequate time to respond, and while her testimony paid lip service to academic freedom, she did not challenge the Congressmen’s misleading claims about Penn faculty members. Nor did she challenge the legitimacy of the organized campaign of targeted harassment that has circulated these claims online and in the media for months.

Elsewhere in her testimony, President Magill accurately acknowledged “rising harassment, intimidation, doxing, and threats toward students, faculty, and staff based on their identity or perceived identity as Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab.” But she gave the inaccurate impression that the University has already taken effective action to address the problem of targeted harassment: “We are investigating all allegations, even when threats have come from outside our campus. We are providing resources and advice to assist individuals with online doxing, harassment, and threats. Safety and security for individuals and places of worship has been increased across the board, and we are deploying all necessary resources to support any member of our community who is the target of hate.”

In fact, as AAUP-Penn has documented, university policies have exhibited a pattern of discrimination against faculty and students—including Jewish members of our community—who have articulated criticisms of Israeli government policies or of the current war.  While offering free, enhanced security to some Jewish institutions, faculty, and students on campus, the university administration has failed to defend the safety and academic freedom of faculty and students who have voiced concern for Palestinian civilians.  These include Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim members of our community, Jewish students in Penn Chavurah, and faculty from other religious, national, and ethnic backgrounds.

As yesterday’s hearing made clear, the same groups outside the University that are threatening faculty members are attacking President Magill.  For the sake of the academic mission of our university, and for her own sake, she must refute their claims rather than accept their dangerous misrepresentations.  As the AAUP has explained, the attempts we are seeing at Penn and in Congress to conflate all research and teaching about Palestine and all criticism of Israeli government policies and warfare with antisemitism represent a direct threat to academic freedom.  They are designed not to fight antisemitism—a real and grave problem—but to suppress research and teaching on the histories, politics, and cultures of Israel and Palestine.  These are not only legitimate areas of scholarly inquiry; they are precisely the kinds of areas where searching, critical, and rigorous scholarly inquiry is needed to serve the public good in a democratic society.

President Magill has spent the last several months fruitlessly attempting to placate donors, trustees, members of Congress, and lobbying organizations that neither understand nor respect the principles of academic freedom—principles that the AAUP set out a century ago to safeguard the academic mission of the university.  President Magill has recapitulated their dangerous conflations of antisemitism with an overly broad range of academic programming and political speech and has tolerated and even contributed to the targeted harassment of faculty.  In doing so, she has not protected herself from criticism, but has emboldened attacks on faculty members, on academic freedom, and on the basic academic functioning of the University of Pennsylvania.  Yesterday’s Congressional hearing provided the clearest evidence yet that President Magill has committed a grave error in casting her lot with those who have threatened and humiliated her in order to instrumentalize her in a campaign against scholarship and teaching.  It is past time for the president of our university to stand up to these attacks by supporting in word and deed Penn’s faculty, the principles of academic freedom, and the fundamental scholarly mission of the university.

— AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

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The policies of the University of Pennsylvania protect academic freedom, which is essential to the research and teaching mission of universities and to students’ freedom in learning. The concept of academic freedom was first articulated during the early twentieth century by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and its canonical definition is found in the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles and 1970 Interpretive Comments. This statement has been endorsed by over 250 scholarly and educational organizations in the United States, and its principles are written into faculty handbooks nationwide, including Penn’s.

The principles of academic freedom were established to protect the integrity of research and teaching from interference by donors, trustees, politicians, and others who might seek to make universities serve private and political interests. They are founded on the idea that a university’s purpose is to generate new knowledge that can serve the common good in a democratic society, and that generating new knowledge requires free and open inquiry. To safeguard the university’s public mission, academic freedom entails the following rights for all faculty members—whether tenure-track or non-tenure track, and including graduate research and teaching assistants—and for students:

  • The right of faculty members to full freedom in research and teaching. This means that decisions about research and curricular matters are the province of faculty, who are hired on the basis of their professional qualifications in those areas. It also means that decisions about the hiring, promotion, and discipline of faculty members are to be made on the basis of their fitness to do the work of research and teaching, and determinations of fitness are made through formal, careful reviews by faculty members with the scholarly training to make informed evaluations. Academic decisions do not belong to trustees, donors, administrators, politicians, or others who lack academic expertise.

    Faculty members’ rights to freedom in research and teaching are not individual rights to say whatever one pleases in publications or in the classroom: a historian of Europe who espouses Holocaust denial or a biologist who teaches intelligent design is not protected by academic freedom because the academic profession in those fields has rejected those ideas as groundless and intellectually indefensible.  The rights to freedom in research and teaching are best understood as collective rights of the academic profession to determine the fitness of scholars to do the work of research and teaching within their areas of expertise, and they protect scholars who meet that standard from inappropriate pressure that would constrain free and open inquiry.

    Freedom in research and teaching is not a guild privilege: it is essential to students’ right to freedom in learning. It ensures that students take courses designed by qualified researchers and educators, not by donors, trustees, administrators, politicians, or others acting on the basis of non-academic preferences.

  • The right of faculty members to freedom in extramural speech—that is, speech on issues of general concern made as a member of the public. This right is necessary to protect freedom in research and teaching, as it prevents “pretextual” discipline—that is, cases in which trustees or administrators target a faculty member because they disagree with the substance of their scholarship, but rather than say so, they find a controversial statement that the professor has made in public and use that as the basis of discipline. This right protects speech made as a member of the public both within and beyond a faculty member’s area of expertise. According to the principles of academic freedom, extramural speech is not in itself grounds for discipline except in the rare case that it demonstrates unfitness to do the work of research and teaching. Such a determination must be made through a formal, careful review of evidence by faculty members.
  • The right of faculty members to freedom in intramural speech—that is, speech about the university itself that professors make as members of the institution. Faculty members have the right and responsibility to participate in the governance of their universities, and this right protects their ability to do so.  It establishes that faculty may not be disciplined for criticizing the university, as such threats of discipline would make it impossible for faculty to have a meaningful, independent institutional voice.
  • The right of students to freedom in learning. Codified in the AAUP’s 1967 Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students, this protects students’ freedom of expression and association, including the freedom to engage in political activity, all of which are essential aspects of learning and education. It also establishes that students are entitled to freedom of inquiry in the classroom. Finally, it stipulates that faculty do not evaluate students on the basis of their own or their students’ political views or activities. That ensures that faculty members and students can participate in public and political life without their speech threatening students’ freedom in learning.

These rights did not originate in the Constitution or in legislation, and they are not self-enforcing. Academic freedom is only as strong as the institutions, procedures, and professional norms that faculty members established over the last century to protect it:

  • Faculty governance institutions. Faculty across the United States incorporated AAUP principles into faculty handbooks, and they created Faculty Senates and faculty unions to enforce these policies.
  • Due process.  Written into Faculty Handbooks and union contracts, due process procedures protect all faculty members from unjust discipline or termination by requiring formal processes of review and appeal.
  • Tenure. The institution of tenure was created in order to protect academic freedom, on the understanding that job insecurity is the greatest threat to freedom in research and teaching.
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The AAUP–Penn Executive Committee issued the following message (also linked here as a PDF) today, November 28:

Dear Members,

The AAUP-Penn Executive Committee is deeply concerned to learn that the Penn administration has refused to allow a Jewish student organization, Penn Chavurah, to reserve a room this semester to screen Israelism, a documentary film about young Jewish Americans who have traveled to Israel and Palestine and developed critical perspectives on Israeli government policies. The administration’s refusal to allow students to screen a documentary film on campus is one more expression of our university leadership’s failure to uphold the principles of academic freedom—principles enshrined in Penn’s policies and essential to the mission of a university. Academic freedom entails the freedom of students to learn, and to encounter and critically examine multiple interpretations of the world. Students’ freedom to learn also entails their right to political speech and association, which are essential aspects of education and learning. In denying students these freedoms, the university administration violates its own policies and endangers the principles of academic freedom that are essential to the research and teaching mission of a university.

The Executive Committee commends our colleagues at the Middle East Center for reserving a room for the film screening, which as of now will take place tonight, November 28 at 6:30 p.m. in Meyerson Hall Room B1. We encourage all faculty members to attend to demonstrate their support for academic freedom. Should the screening site be moved, we will do our best to notify members. 

We are also gravely concerned by reports that administrators have allegedly told the Middle East Center to cancel the screening, and have allegedly informed Penn Chavurah that the group might lose its status or funding if tonight’s screening occurs. 

We are alarmed to learn that in response to this inappropriate pressure from administrators, the director of the Middle East Center submitted his resignation today. His resignation underlines the gravity of the crisis, and the responsibility the President and Provost have for creating and exacerbating it.  

We condemn in the strongest possible terms any pressure by administrators, donors, and trustees to prevent the Middle East Center from reserving a room to screen a documentary film that falls squarely within the Center’s area of expertise. It is the right of faculty members to make academic programming decisions.  We are particularly concerned that the Middle East Center has already lost its federal funding because the university failed to provide adequate support for its activities. Any further threats to the Center’s ability to fulfill its academic mission will only hurt our university, our faculty, and our students.

We have reported these concerns about academic freedom to the national office of the AAUP. We encourage departments, programs, and the Faculty Senate to speak out against this effort to suppress academic freedom.

— AAUP-Penn Executive Committee

AAUP-Penn Nov 28 Message on MEC Film Screening and Further Threats to Academic Freedom

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We invite all faculty to attend our third and final faculty conversation on unionization at Penn on Friday, October 20, at 12 noon on Zoom. This is a chance to learn about unionization and about how anti-union campaigns operate, and to discuss questions and concerns that faculty might have and/or to equip yourself to answer colleagues’ questions about GET-UP. 

Please register here for the meeting link or use the final QR code below. Hope to see you there!

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This Wednesday, October 4th, Penn graduate student workers in GET-UP will publicly announce that they are filing for an NLRB election to officially win their union, now that a majority have signed authorization cards. This exciting news comes close on the heels of an overwhelming 142-22 win by RAs United in their own union election.

GET-UP members will be calling on the Penn administration to remain neutral and to agree to a fair election process. They are counting on a strong show of support from faculty, staff, and students across Penn and allies in the Philly community to amplify that call. So, can you come out to rally with GET-UP on Wednesday at 12 noon at the Button in front of Van Pelt?

Hope to see you there!
AAUP–Penn Executive Committee

P.S. To discuss any questions you or your colleagues may have about grad unionization and about what a fair election would look like (as distinct from the anti-union campaigns Penn has been running against GET-UP, RAs United, and other recently organized unions), please join us for a faculty information session Tuesday at noon in Fisher-Bennett 135 or October 20th at noon on zoom (register via the QR code below for a meeting link).

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Our campus is in the midst of an extraordinary wave of organizing, with RA’s United holding an election next week and GET-UP preparing to file the following week. Since Penn’s central administration has launched anti-union campaigns against student workers (crafted by the law firm Cozen O’Connor) and is attempting to enlist faculty in their anti-union messaging, this is an important time for faculty to educate ourselves and each other about unionization.

To that end, AAUP–Penn is holding a series of fall conversations with faculty to offer some background on the nature of unions in higher ed and on the process of unionization, address any questions or concerns you may have (or that you’ve heard expressed by colleagues), and clarify some misleading information coming from the administration. The next two sessions will take place on October 3 at noon in Fisher-Bennett 135 and on October 20 at noon on zoom (register via the QR code on the flyer below for the meeting link). Please come to one and bring a colleague!

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