At yesterday’s Faculty Senate Webinar, Chief Wellness Officer Benoit Dubé described the coming semester of (mandatory) in-person work during an ongoing pandemic as learning to “dance in the rain.” It was not lost on us when, less than an hour later, our phones lit up with flash flood and tornado warnings. 

We hope you are safe and well. If you attended the webinar too, you will have noticed that the administrators present evaded most of the questions asked. The Q&A chat during the event registered mounting frustration from faculty and staff with the prepared remarks being read.

Meanwhile, as we seek clarity on policies apparently being written and rewritten throughout the day, we note that those of us who have requested exemptions from face-to-face teaching have yet to hear anything back. We find it disturbing that while this opaque review process is pending, Penn would require instructors with medical risks and vulnerable family members to continue going into crowded classrooms for however long it takes for their requests to be approved (in some cases, with copious documentation required first). As a basic measure of trust and respect, in our view, faculty and staff with pressing health risks to themselves or to loved ones should be automatically approved on an emergency basis prior to review if such review cannot be completed promptly. 

AAUP–Penn will continue to press Penn administrators to prioritize the health of the community over other interests and to recognize the autonomy of instructors (as experts in the fields they teach) to determine what modes of instruction are appropriate to their courses. The chapter’s leadership has explained our widely shared views in a short contribution to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Suvir Kaul and other members have spoken with a DP reporter as well.

Since this chapter is a collective effort by Penn colleagues and a member-led organization, further steps we take will rely on your involvement. For now, as a small starting point on the next statement we plan to make to the administration, we are asking you to help identify which safety measures and policy changes would be high priority on your list of demands for the current semester. To do that, we’ll be circulating a brief poll to our contact list and hope you will respond. If you are not on the list and would like to join, you can do so here.

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AAUP–Penn recognizes that the Covid situation continues to develop and change, and that administrators at Penn and elsewhere have difficult decisions to make in the weeks ahead. Having said that, we believe that crucial principles are at stake here, and that policy decisions must stem from them.

At Penn, as a global institution with local, regional, national, and international responsibilities, the Covid pandemic remains a powerful challenge to institutional functioning. Given this challenge, AAUP–Penn remains very concerned about the health and wellbeing of our students, staff, faculty, and community. To take one instance, even vaccinated faculty are very worried that they may carry infection to unvaccinated young children in their homes or neighborhoods.

While the pandemic rages, health and safety must come before all other institutional concerns. Many faculty at Penn and other universities are rightly concerned about university requirements that they must hold in-person classes during Fall 2021 term. We understand that our academic responsibilities are primarily to meet the educational needs of our students, but we also recognize the necessity of protecting each other in dangerous times. Thus, the Executive Committee of the Penn chapter of AAUP calls for the University to endorse a policy permitting all faculty (including graduate student instructors and all categories of contingent faculty) to conduct some or all of their classes online, in-person, or in a hybrid mode. Of course, if it becomes necessary for public health reasons to return to the prior academic year’s model of exclusively online teaching, we will endorse such a policy.

AAUP–Penn warmly congratulates our friends in Penn Museum Workers United on winning their NLRB election and gaining certification for their union in August 2021. Non-professional Museum employees in PMWU voted in favor of joining AFSCME District Council 47, together with the recently formed Philadelphia Museum of Art Union in the Museum and Cultural Workers Local 397. We wish them all the best!

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AAUP–Penn supports the right of workers at the Penn Museum to unionize. We further insist that the management of the Museum must maintain neutrality in this election process. As a chapter of the American Association of University Professors we stand unequivocally for workplace democracy and for the right to organize, and we are disturbed by what we hear from allies of the organizers quoted here:

“Workers at the Penn Museum recently filed for an NLRB election to unionize and join AFSCME DC47, Museum and Cultural Workers Local 397. Although a supermajority of eligible staff signed cards authorizing DC47 as their collective bargaining agent, the Penn Museum and University administration have been conducting an aggressive anti-union campaign: bombarding staff with emails full of misleading information; repeatedly encouraging union-eligible employees to vote no; and holding captive-audience meetings with managers to spread anti-union talking points. The University of Pennsylvania prides itself on studying and advocating for democracy, but Museum Workers also have the right to democracy in their workplace.”

Such anti-union activity must cease, and workers at Penn and everywhere must be allowed to organize without interference or intimidation.

Watch the video recording of AAUP–Penn’s 4/23 event, “Community Justice and the Ivory Tower,” featuring Davarian L. Baldwin (author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities, Bold Type Books, 2021), in conversation with Krystal Strong, Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, and Jolyon Baraka Thomas. This panel discussion with faculty and community activists addressed the university’s role in gentrifying and policing neighborhoods in cities across the country, with a focus on Penn and West Philly.

Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut

Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad is a Philadelphia-born organizer, writer, and co-founder of the Black and Brown Workers Co-op

Jolyon Baraka Thomas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Penn and an organizer with Penn for PILOTs

Krystal Strong is Assistant Professor of Education at UPenn and an organizer with BLM Philly

Organized by AAUP-Penn, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors

Sponsors: Civic House, Wolf Humanities Center, SNF Paideia

Penn Co-sponsors:  Penn for PILOTS; Police Free Penn; Fossil Free Penn; Latinx Coalition; Asian Pacific Student Coalition; Penn Association for Gender Equity; Lambda Alliance; United Minorities Council; UMOJA Coalition; Penn Community for Justice; GET-UP; University of Pennsylvania YDSA

Community Co-sponsors:  The Paul Robeson House; Scribe Video Center; Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture; People’s Emergency Center

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AAUP–Penn joins colleagues across the profession in protesting Linfield University’s firing of Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. All reporting on this decision suggests a clear violation of due process. Professor Pollack-Pelzner’s firing is especially troubling as it appears to be the institution’s response to his speaking out about multiple student and faculty allegations of sexual misconduct by Board Members and about antisemitic comments made to him by the University President and by the Chair of the Board when he attempted to raise these concerns internally as a faculty trustee.

Linfield University’s statement of April 27th, 2021, which characterizes this abrupt firing of a tenured faculty member as the result of his “insubordinate” conduct toward administrators, only adds to the appearance of retaliation against a whistleblower speaking up for students and colleagues. Inside Higher Education reported on April 27th that the University shut down its faculty listserv to prevent discussion of this action, a disturbing development in itself. No university can be permitted simply to terminate the employment of a faculty critic without a hearing and then to silence all further discussion of the matter.

We invite those who share our concern to sign this letter in support of Pollack-Pelzner against the Linfield University administration’s decision to fire him.

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In the past week it has come to light that the University of Pennsylvania Museum has for over 35 years held, studied, and at times displayed the human remains of a child named Tree Africa, a member of West Philadelphia’s MOVE organization. The bones of 14-year-old Tree Africa, and possibly also 12-year-old Delisha Africa, were reportedly handed over by the medical examiner’s office to Penn and Princeton anthropologists for forensic study in the 1980s after the May 13, 1985 killing of eleven West Philadelphia residents, when Philadelphia Police dropped an aerial bomb on the MOVE residence and let fires destroy over 60 homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood adjacent to our university. 

For decades, neither Penn nor Princeton contacted the MOVE organization and the Africa family about the existence of these remains. Instead, the bones were in the possession of two anthropology professors, Princeton emeritus professor Alan Mann (who worked at Penn until 2001) and Penn adjunct professor and museum curator Janet Monge. The Penn Museum has stated that both anthropologists were attempting to determine the identity of the remains for over three decades. During this time the bones were used for student research, as in the case of at least one Penn undergraduate senior thesis. Recently Monge has been using them as teaching props in a public online course, “REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,” hosted by Princeton. While the course has now been removed by the distance learning platform Coursera, just last week over 4,000 students were enrolled. The remains have been repeatedly passed between Penn and Princeton, including Penn Museum Director Christopher Woods’ hasty return of the bones to Dr. Mann on Sunday April 18, 2021.

AAUP–Penn stands with the Africa family as they mourn and absorb this devastating news. From our commitment to community and racial justice, we support their demands, which include the immediate return of their children’s remains. 

AAUP–Penn likewise stands with Princeton faculty who have called for university accountability to the Africa family, and calls on Penn to do better than issue an online apology.

On April 26, 2021 the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Museum issued an online apology to the Africa family and stated the institution’s intentions of returning the remains and reviewing the Museum’s “practices of collecting, stewarding, displaying, and researching human remains.” This is a first step toward recognizing and repairing the harm done to the Africa family, but the process continues to be flawed, as this apology was communicated to the family via the media at the same time that the family was holding its own live press conference.

Any earnest commitment to community justice begins with showing respect toward and building trust with those who have been harmed. Building trust entails acknowledging the long history of the university’s racism and experimentation on Black and Indigenous bodies by social scientists as well as medical doctors. From Penn Anthropology to Penn Medicine, this history spans from the nineteenth-century Morton cranial collection to the use of the MOVE family remains and the recent medical experimentation conducted by Penn dermatologist Albert Kligman upon the incarcerated people of Holmesburg Prison between 1951-1974, people whose families also remain uncompensated.

Beyond hiring lawyers to investigate how and why the MOVE family remains were used by University researchers, President Amy Gutmann and the Board of Trustees need to commit to a full and transparent process of repair and financial compensation, beginning with direct community involvement in the investigative process. The University, including its senior administrators and the Board of Trustees, cannot move forward from decades, even centuries, of disavowal via closed-door investigations. A transparent process is integral to any just outcome. It is not only faculty who are to blame for such a travesty of scholarly procedure and social justice; that responsibility must be shared across the hierarchy of “overseers” and administrators.

AAUP–Penn further supports efforts to account for the University’s broader effects on and its responsibility to West Philadelphia’s Black communities, including the payment of PILOTs to the public school system. 

AAUP–Penn also calls for a thorough review of all the holdings of the Penn Museum, and transparency around past and current pedagogical, curatorial, and research practices. A commitment to anti-racism requires more than simply teaching about medical ethics or the federally mandated Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It involves collaborative decision-making in consultation with affected community members around the Museum’s and the University’s legacies of slavery and colonial violence.

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

We are glad that AAUP–Penn’s petition objecting to the extension of teaching time under the unilaterally decided course schedule change has pressured the central administration to state directly that the new schedule will not require instructors to teach the ten additional minutes per class session. The Associate Vice Provost’s response, however, does not specify that the length of each class period should remain as it is at present (despite being officially extended to all appearances) and ostensibly leaves it up to instructors whether to use the extra ten minutes per class. This does not resolve the concern that some instructors—particularly lecturers with heavier teaching loads and grad instructors—may be pressured to teach longer by their departments and programs in the absence of formal guidelines on the length of class sessions. AAUP–Penn is therefore proposing a set of best practices on course stopping times that we recommend all departments and programs follow, in the interest of faculty and students alike.

Read our 4/20/21 guest column in the Daily Pennsylvanian here:
https://www.thedp.com/article/2021/04/upenn-aaup-faculty-union-course-time-length-schedule

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Please join us on Friday, April 23, 2021 at 5:30pm for
Community Justice & The Ivory Tower: A Conversation with Davarian L. Baldwin
(register here): tinyurl.com/community-justice-423 

This remote panel discussion will focus on the university’s role in gentrifying and policing neighborhoods in cities across the country, with a focus on Penn and West Philly. The event will feature the new book of scholar Davarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021). Professor Baldwin will be in conversation with Penn faculty and community activists. All university members and Philadelphia residents are invited to attend.

Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut

Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad is a Philadelphia-born organizer, writer, and co-founder of the Black and Brown Workers Co-op

Jolyon Baraka Thomas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at UPenn and an organizer with Penn for PILOTS

Krystal Strong is Assistant Professor of Education at UPenn and an organizer with BLM Philly

Organized by AAUP–Penn, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors

Sponsors: Civic House, Wolf Humanities Center, SNF Paideia

Penn Co-sponsors: Penn for PILOTS; Police Free Penn; Fossil Free Penn; Latinx Coalition; Asian Pacific Student Coalition; Penn Association for Gender Equity; Lambda Alliance; United Minorities Council; UMOJA Coalition; Penn Community for Justice; GET-UP; University of Pennsylvania YDSA

Community Co-sponsors: The Paul Robeson House; Scribe Video Center; Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture; People’s Emergency Center

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