Earlier this spring, I visited the University of Pennsylvania’s College Green. I saw smiling students innocently chatting with each other as they hurriedly walked between classes. I eavesdropped on doe-eyed high schoolers on their college tours being lectured by undergrads on the grandeur of Penn. And, upon gazing up at the stately Ben Franklin statue that sits in front of College Hall, I absentmindedly bumped into a passing professor, who laughed off my attempts at apology. “No harm, no foul,” he pleasantly said before peaceably continuing on his way.
The scene was both exceedingly collegiate and exceedingly collegial. In fact, the only evidence that two years prior this had been the site of a notorious pro-Palestinian protest encampment—a source of deep discord and division that drew the ire and rebuke of both President Donald Trump and Governor Josh Shapiro, and ultimately police in riot gear—was a metal sign stating that “Demonstrations, rallies, protests, and large gatherings require prior university approval,” and that “Overnight occupation” was strictly prohibited.
“And that right there, that peaceful and anodyne scene that you witnessed, is the ‘chilling effect’ in action,” a Penn faculty member in the humanities department told me. “College students are the most likely people to be activists. They have strong political passions. And since Trump was reelected, there’s been plenty to protest: the White House’s attacks on science, people being scooped off the street and sent to a gulag in El Salvador, ICE raids in Minneapolis and protesters there being executed in the street, and war in Iran. The list goes on. And yet there hasn’t been a single protest on campus. Not a peep. Professors and students alike are exhausted; exhausted by the threat of doxxing, by the threat of blacklisting, by the threat of being investigated, by the threat of your present and future livelihood being put in jeopardy.”
Over this past winter and spring, I spoke to some 20 current and former faculty and staff at the vaunted Ivy League institution, some of whom refused to be quoted by name for fear of reprisals by Penn administrators, donors, and funders, or fear of harassment from far-right-wing agitators. They all report that diversity, equity, and inclusion, academic freedom, and free speech are under attack on the Penn campus. And it’s not just the absence of protest on College Green that concerns them. DEI language has been scrubbed from university websites and programming scaled back. Trans athletes have been barred from women’s sports. Put up an anti-ICE flyer, and it gets taken down. Attempt to organize a screening or a panel discussion deemed critical of Israel, and a call from campus security says you won’t be accommodated. Lecture on the plight of Palestinians and be accused of antisemitism. Basically, these professors say, anything deemed offensive to the Trump administration, which could thereby put federal funding to the university at risk, can elicit unwanted attention from Penn’s Office of General Counsel. Faculty in the School of Medicine even told me that efforts to urge Congress to preserve science funding were suppressed by Penn administrators. The pursuit of science, they were effectively told, is now categorized as partisan politics. (Penn’s Office of General Counsel declined my requests for an interview.)
The first sign that Penn aimed to play ball with an authoritarian White House came in February 2025, when, in response to a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education, or DOE, threatening to revoke federal funding if Penn didn’t terminate DEI programs, the university introduced drastic changes to its nondiscrimination and affirmative action policies. Overnight, in addition to its central DEI website being wiped off the internet, words like “underrepresented,” “minorities,” and “racism” seemingly disappeared from official Penn vocabulary. Committee on Diversity and Equity? Better change that to Committee on Community and Equal Opportunity, lest the Trump White House puts you on its Naughty List.
But to many of the faculty I spoke to, Penn’s capitulation to Trumpism became official on July 1 of last year, when, following closed-door negotiations, it was announced that the university would fully comply with Department of Education demands to ban transgender women athletes from women’s sports, which included stripping trans swimmer Lia Thomas of her swimming awards and records from the 2021–2022 season.
It started on March 19, 2025, when the White House announced it would freeze more than $175 million in federal funds to Penn for defying Trump’s executive order on transgender athletes. A little more than three months later, in addition to agreeing to the erasure of Thomas, Penn promised to write letters of apology to “each impacted female swimmer” and to “adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ pursuant to Title IX and consistent with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” In exchange, the aforementioned $175 million in federal funds was restored. According to my sources, members of Penn’s Office of General Counsel shared with faculty that they were happy with the deal, implying they had reason to believe the Trump administration would leave Penn alone in the future.
Jonathan Katz, a professor in Penn’s gender, sexuality, and women’s studies department, said that Penn made a “strategic decision” with Thomas. “Penn saw the Lia Thomas affair as a necessary sacrificial lamb,” Katz told me. “They thought they could fend off the Trump administration this way. But I think they made a frankly bad decision.” Since Penn’s deal with the DOE, the Trump administration continues to harass the university: The White House targeted Penn for the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which aims to induce universities into adopting conservative priorities, and Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continues to investigate the university for allegedly creating an antisemitic work environment. (More on those later.) Beyond all this, Katz believes the strategic error was to “not reassure the university community that the first principles of academic freedom are sacrosanct.”
Katz said that Mark Trodden, the dean of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, assured him privately that the newly adopted policy on gender would not extend past athletics—that academic freedom would be preserved. And so far, at least in Katz’s classroom, it has been. But Katz added that Dean Trodden’s failure to make those assurances publicly has left students and faculty feeling vulnerable. And it appears to have already cost the gender studies department an endowment.
“We had one funder express concern after the Lia Thomas deal,” said Katz. “They basically said that universities in this day and age really can’t be trusted to do the right thing because the pressures on them from the Trump administration are so great. That funder has decided not to invest in universities.”
Nevertheless, Katz said, he understands the thinking behind Penn administrators declining to publicly declare Penn’s independence from the Trump administration when it comes to gender issues in the classroom. “I think they’re worried that this would become Trump bait,” he said. “They’re trying to hoe this very narrow row. They really are in an impossible position, and I think they really are trying their best. I just think that, had they resisted Trump’s threats from the beginning, Penn would have been so much stronger all the way around.”
In December 2024, shortly after Trump was reelected, Carter J. Carter, who uses they/them pronouns, was called into a meeting with the director of Penn’s doctorate in clinical social work program and another administrator over a complaint that was made to the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, or OREI, a.k.a. the Title VI Office. Formally opened that same month in response to claims that antisemitism had spun out of control on the campus, the OREI’s stated mission is to handle charges of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias, and to ensure that Penn is in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on religious identity, ethnicity, race, color, or national origin at any institution receiving federal funding. But multiple sources at Penn tell me the OREI’s mission appears to be legitimizing and weaponizing spurious claims of antisemitism in an effort to discourage teaching and speech at the university that’s critical of the Israeli government and the war in Gaza. It’s an effort, these critics say, spurred on by a handful of conservative and powerful donors, a U.S. House committee’s investigation into antisemitism at Penn, and the Trump administration, who have all appeared to adopt an overly broad and false definition of antisemitism. (My interview request with the OREI was declined. When I asked via email for specific metrics on the Title VI Office, including the ratio of alleged instances of antisemitic conduct versus other forms of bias, I received a vague response that appeared to merely reiterate the broad mission statement found on the OREI website.)
“We say Kafkaesque too often, but that is some Kafkaesque shit that happened to me,” said Carter, after showing me a recording of the Zoom meeting they had with supervisors regarding the Title VI complaint.
The complaint came from a student in a class Carter was teaching in the fall of 2024 in the doctorate in clinical social work program at Penn’s School for Social Policy & Practice. A course on the history of psychoanalysis, it was essentially a class on the history of Jewish intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it covered such thinkers as Anna and Sigmund Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Heinz Kohut, who all fled Nazi persecution, and Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, key figures of the Frankfurt School who provided foundational theories on the rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. Carter is also of Jewish heritage. But Carter assigned one reading about a Palestinian father named Amjad being treated for a “globus hystericus”—a sensation of a ball in the throat. In the reading, the therapist, also Palestinian, concludes that the source of Amjad’s symptom is a traumatic experience he endured with his young daughter at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank. As Amjad and his daughter, who was just seven years old at the time, were being detained in their car, Amjad’s daughter urgently needed to pee. When Amjad asked if his daughter could use a bathroom, a soldier said she could “piss herself in the car.” And so Amjad held his daughter, who moments before had been singing a made-up song about a “bouncy ball” bouncing “over the wall,” as she wet herself.
The teaching, Carter told me, was meant to have universal application. The patient is presenting in a very classically Freudian fashion, but the Palestinian therapist’s supervisor, an Israeli Jew, fails to see it. “It’s a really good illustration of neurosis,” said Carter. “But it’s also a really good illustration of how clinician bias can get in the way of seeing certain kinds of people in a fully accurate light. The larger lesson is that we all need to be interested in those kinds of dynamics no matter where we live. No matter who we are or where we are, we’re gonna be inhabiting a different version of that dilemma. But that dilemma is everywhere.”
Following the class, one of Carter’s students reported to the Title VI Office that, as a Jewish person, they felt alienated by the reading and the discussion. In the Zoom meeting addressing the complaint, Carter asked the supervisors—Jacqueline Corcoran (the director of the doctoral program) and Phyllis Solomon (a professor in administration)—to explain where the complaint was reported. “It’s a new initiative ... a university office that now handles this kind of thing,” said Corcoran, who then proceeded to tell Carter that the Title VI Office’s guidance was for Carter to provide balance in their course.
“What does that mean?” asked Carter, with a look of confusion.
“So, there’s stuff about colonialism, and Palestine,” said Corcoran. “Then offering something about how psychodynamic theory also explains antisemitism. You know, for an example, that you just want to offer a counterbalance to different positions on where certain beliefs have come from.”
“Who defines balance though?” asked Carter, incredulous, before stating that, if anything, the balance in their syllabus “very substantially favors Jewish intellectual history, and the history of antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. So I guess what I’m suggesting is that the premise of the complaint is not legitimate.”
“Well, I mean, we’re just telling you what our advice is,” said Corcoran. “It might help students understand it more if it was current, like if you were talking about antisemitism as it plays out today.”
Carter then takes issue with being accused of bias without being presented with any evidence.
“I don’t know if they’ve accused you,” said Solomon. “All they’re saying is for the legislation …”
“What legislation?” asked Carter.
“Title VI,” said Corcoran.
“But Title VI doesn’t tell me what to teach,” said Carter.
“No, but it’s about issues of bias, so that’s why it came to that office,” said Corcoran.
“I trust that you can see, though, how we overuse this phrase ‘chilling effect’ to the point that it becomes not very meaningful,” said Carter. “But this is precisely the sort of thing that has a chilling effect on academic freedom, particularly for an adjunct faculty member.”
“We can tell them that was your response, that’s fine,” said Corcoran coldly.
“We’re in a climate in this institution where it can feel like any invocation of the existence of Palestinian people is seen by some people as ‘unbalanced,’” said Carter. “But I can’t possibly help that.”
“Mhmm,” Corcoran coldly responded.
“That this thing that I did that wasn’t a thought crime but could, nonetheless—” said Carter. “I should be really careful not to do any thought crimes. Like, this is a problem.”
“Well, yeah, I don’t know what else to say about it,” said Corcoran, poker-faced.
“... I don’t imagine it’s difficult for you to empathize with why that would really impinge upon my feeling of having academic freedom,” said Carter.
“OK, well I’m hearing what you’re saying,” said Corcoran, again very coldly. “And we can relay that as well [to the Title VI Office].”
Six months later, in June 2025, Carter received an email from Corcoran informing them that they would not be reappointed. (When I asked the Penn administration about Carter’s departure, a spokesperson said they were unable to comment on personnel matters.)
“It’s pure McCarthyism,” Carter told me after we finished viewing the recording, a more complete transcript of which can be read on Carter’s Substack. “And this behavior by administrators, by fellow professors, no less, just cannot co-exist with the normal exercise of academic freedom. And unfortunately, I think I was the canary in the coal mine for this.”
It’s true: In the time that has elapsed since Carter’s unceremonious departure from Penn, several more professors have been questioned by Penn’s Title VI Office for baseless claims of antisemitism. According to the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP—an organization that advocates for faculty, with a particular focus on academic freedom, shared governance, and working conditions—one was questioned over their peer-reviewed, scholarly research that referenced a third-party resource that a complainant claimed, without evidence, was antisemitic; another was summoned to the Title VI Office for appearing at an off-campus event wearing a stole bearing the Palestinian flag; while others were questioned about political statements made on their personal social media accounts.
“The message I keep trying to send is that when you hear about one high-profile case, you know there are a thousand more that we never hear about,” said Lorena Grundy, a professor in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and vice president of the university’s chapter of the AAUP. “Not to mention those instances where a professor just avoids teaching on a certain topic altogether.”
Grundy then recounted the example of a colleague who spent an inordinate amount of time and effort agonizing over how to frame one bullet point that touched on Israel in a lecture. The colleague even sent Grundy the slide so that she could help bulletproof it against any potential misinterpretation.
“Like, you just don’t do that,” said Grundy. “That’s just not how a college campus should be.”
According to a survey conducted this year by researchers at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, such self-censorship among Middle East scholars is rampant. In the United States, 77 percent of respondents reported feeling the need to censor themselves when speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an academic or professional capacity. Of that 77 percent, 81 percent said they self-censored their criticism of Israel, compared with just 11 percent who said they self-censored their criticism of Palestine.
As an AAUP advocate, Grundy has helped members accused of antisemitism navigate the Title VI Office. Her contention, and fear, is that many of the complaints originate outside the university—a concern that’s echoed in the above-mentioned survey, in which 58 percent of U.S. respondents said they limited their speech on Israel-Palestine due to pressure from external advocacy groups.
“One thing that has certainly happened is complainants who aren’t affiliated with the university see something that upsets them,” she said. “And then they start calling colleagues, and chairs, and deans. Then that well-meaning chair or dean or whatever goes to the Title VI Office, saying, ‘Hey, I got this harassing email from someone upset about this thing that my colleague posted on social media. What do I do?’ And then that’s now taken as a complaint from someone inside the university. That’s how these external complaints, some from far-right-wing activists, get laundered as internal.”
Ian Lustick, a professor in Penn’s department of political science and one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has been dealing with these sorts of issues for more than 50 years. An American Jew himself who supports full equality between Israelis and Palestinians, he’s well-acquainted with the ways in which conservative forces try to suppress critical or even nuanced voices on Israel and Palestine. He has also been accused by some right-wing groups of having an anti-Israel bias. The Title VI Office, Lustick said, is a vital tool for the suppression of open debate.
“The Title VI Office incentivizes right-wing activists to make accusations because as soon as they make an accusation, it has to be investigated,” he told me. “Because if the institution doesn’t investigate, that in itself makes the institution look antisemitic. Out of 100 complaints, 99 might be bullshit, but it doesn’t matter because it’s going to create the climate they want—a climate of anticipatory compliance. And Trump is using it.”
It’s a strategy that Lustick observed in Kenneth Marcus’s op-ed in The Jerusalem Post back in 2013. Lustick writes extensively about it in a forthcoming book called Israel’s Lobby. Marcus is the founder and chairman of the Washington-based Brandeis Center, whose main cause is tackling antisemitism and anti-Israelism on university campuses. As Marcus wrote in his op-ed, “These cases [alleging unlawful antisemitic harassment]—even when rejected—expose administrators to bad publicity.” He added that, regardless of the cases’ outcomes, they create “a very strong disincentive” for those who want to speak out against Israel: “Israel-haters now publicly complain that these cases make it harder for them to recruit new adherents. Apparently students are being told not to get mixed up in Jewbaiting, rather to focus on their studies and get their degrees. Needless to say, getting caught up in a civil rights complaint is not a good way to build a resume or impress a future employer.” Marcus concluded that merely filing these cases produces the desired result, “even when we see some or most rejected.”
Marcus would later bring his ideas to Trump’s first presidential administration as assistant secretary of education in the Office of Civil Rights—the same federal office responsible for investigating alleged Title VI violations on college campuses. And in 2026, the second Trump administration appears to be continuing Marcus’s strategy with its investigation of Penn for allegedly creating an antisemitic work environment. The evidence is apparently so thin that Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has resorted to subpoenaing Penn for a list of its Jewish faculty and students in what appears to be a fishing expedition.
But according to Lustick and others I spoke to on the Penn campus, the current iteration of this “antisemitism witch hunt” predates Trump’s return to power, and even predates 10/7 and the outbreak of war in Gaza. It started, they say, on the weekend of September 22, 2023, when the Penn campus hosted the Palestine Writes Literature Festival.
Huda Fakhreddine is a professor of Arabic literature at Penn. She was born and raised in Lebanon. Since September 2023, when she co-organized the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on the Penn campus, she’s been doxxed and subjected to death and rape threats both at her office and at her home; she’s been offered police escorts on campus and had police patrolling outside her home; members of the Penn community have called for her firing and deportation; she’s been investigated by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for charges of antisemitism; and called out by name in a congressional hearing as dangerous. “I keep reminding myself that this is happening to me because I was involved in a literature festival,” Fakhreddine told me. “And I insist it was a literature festival. It was a cultural event. There was music, food, children’s literature, poetry….”
“It was one of the most beautiful conferences,” said Eve Troutt Powell, a professor of history and Africana studies at Penn who was also investigated by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on charges of antisemitism. “It wasn’t about victimization. No one talked about Israel. It was all about Palestinian culture.”
But critics of the event pointed to the inclusion of Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd who’s been an outspoken critic of Israel and accused of repeated antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League, and Marc Lamont Hill, a professor with the CUNY Graduate Center and a news commentator who was fired from CNN for statements concerning Israel and Palestine, as evidence that the festival was offensive and hostile to Jewish members of the Penn community.
At the time, Liz Magill, then Penn’s president, defended the festival on the grounds of academic freedom. While the festival had its detractors, it went on as scheduled and without incident. But then, the next month, October 7 shocked the world, and powerful donors at Penn conflated the horrors that Hamas perpetrated in Israel with the festival on the Penn campus. Marc Rowan—the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management, chair of the Wharton School Board of Advisors, and a Wharton graduate himself—published an op-ed calling the festival on the Penn campus a “tragically prescient preview of the horrific events just two weeks later.” He called on his fellow donors to send Penn $1 in place of their usual hefty sums as protest, and said Magill should step down for allowing antisemitism to flourish at Penn. Ronald Lauder, the heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, who’s also a Wharton graduate (and, like Rowan, very conservative), made similar statements in an open letter to Magill, in which he demanded that any instructor who was involved in the festival be barred from teaching at Penn’s esteemed Lauder Institute.
“Penn lives in an ecosystem where its highly attracted to private donations,” said Tulia Falleti, a professor of political science at the school who resigned as chair of the Penn Faculty Senate in protest after administrators broke up the pro-Palestinian encampment by force. “All universities choose to develop these very strong ties with donors. But Penn also has a very quasi-symbiotic relationship with the financial sector of New York. It’s partially because of Wharton. There’s this class of very wealthy alumni who donate, and who provide high-paying jobs to Penn graduates. They have outsized influence, and from time to time they exert their pressure on Penn.”
Rowan and other donors continued to call for Magill’s resignation over the fall of 2023, with Rowan leading the pressure campaign on the board of trustees. According to The New York Times, he “sent daily emails to trustees to protest the school’s direction, taking care to number each email to drive his point home.” And then Magill testified at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s hearing on campus antisemitism on December 5, 2023. When asked by Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated Penn’s rules on bullying and harassment, Magill’s probably accurate but politically very tone-deaf response was that it was a “context-dependent decision.” The next day, Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro called her testimony “shameful,” and three days later Magill resigned.
That same fall, Penn administrators started to take a harder stance against programming that could offend its donors. The progressive Jewish student group Penn Chavurah was barred from screening Israelism, a documentary by Jewish American filmmakers critical of the Israeli government. When they screened the film anyway, the vice provost of university life threatened disciplinary action. Meanwhile, donors started singling out professors by name. After Anne Norton, a political science professor, was called out by pro-Israel activists for her pro-Palestinian tweets, the private equity investor Henry Jackson and his wife, Stacey, pulled funding from Norton’s professorship. Fakhreddine alleges that the following month, January 2024, television producer Dick Wolf, whose name adorns Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center, used her as the basis for an antisemitic and homicidal professor on an episode of Law & Order. And on March 28, 2024, a group of alumni and students sent a letter to Magill’s successor, current Penn president J. Larry Jameson, demanding sanctions for eight professors—including Fakhreddine and Norton—citing alleged antisemitic conduct.
What many of the embattled professors I spoke to have in common is twofold. First, they’ve been doxxed by Canary Mission, a website that acts as a blacklist of sorts for professors it deems antisemitic and pro-Hamas. As a result of being profiled on the site, the professors say they’ve been subjected to death threats. More troubling is that, as first reported on The Intercept, Canary Mission received $100,000 in 2023 from the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, whose treasurer is Jaime Peisach, the husband of Penn trustee Cheryl Peisach. Second, many of the same professors were also named in the lawsuit alleging that Penn allowed its campus to become a hotbed of antisemitism. The lawsuit was brought by Eyal Yakoby, a Penn student at the time and a fervent pro-Israel activist, who’s known for doxxing professors he views as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. Many of the professors I spoke to believe Yakoby’s lawsuit was funded by a Penn donor. They point to Rowan, who’s been represented by Kasowitz LLP, which is the same law firm that represented Yakoby in his lawsuit against Penn. (The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge last June on the grounds that the plaintiffs “failed to plead any facts showing either intentional discrimination or deliberate indifference on the part of Penn.” The law firm has not responded to my request for comment.) “Donors and trustees funding these sorts of bullying campaigns undermines the academic integrity of the institution and violates academic freedom,” said Fakhreddine.
When I asked Fakhreddine if the scrutiny and harassment has affected her teaching, she was defiant. “I teach poetry, and I will always teach it the way it needs to be taught,” she told me. “I will not censor myself because there’s somebody on the other side who’s ignorant and racist and bigoted.”
Many of the professors I spoke to said they haven’t changed the way they teach, but they say the chilling effect can express itself in other ways. Troutt Powell recalled a course she taught in the fall semester of 2025, called the History of the Modern Middle East, which touched on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Troutt Powell, out of 45 students, 30 were Arab, and four or five students were very vocal and self-identified as Jewish.
“The Palestinian students were very quiet in class,” she said. She asked them why. “They told me they were afraid that the self-identifying Jewish students would report them to the Title VI Office for antisemitism, and then that could result in Marco Rubio taking their visa away.”
Troutt Powell said she developed ways for those students to express themselves in private. And during that same semester, she brought up the issue of academic freedom to Mark Trodden, the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Trodden had been addressing the history department, and there were other professors who were complaining about the chilling effect taking hold in their classrooms. Trodden assured the assembled professors that the campus was “safe,” and that they could “talk about anything.”
“Even the Middle East?” Troutt Powell asked him.
“Yes,” Trodden responded, before carefully adding, “It depends how you talk about it.”
Troutt Powell said that afterward Trodden came up to her, and she said, “Mark, that’s crazy!”
Via email, I asked Dean Trodden to explain what he meant by “it depends how you talk about it.” He did not address the point directly, and the Penn School of Arts and Sciences’ communications office offered the following statement on his behalf: “Academic freedom is fundamental to the School of Arts & Sciences’ work. Faculty must be able to teach, research, and discuss difficult and contested subjects, including topics that are politically or socially charged. We have confidence in our faculty to approach difficult questions with intellectual rigor, without bias, and with care for students. That is the spirit in which I have spoken with faculty about academic freedom and classroom discussion.”
While other universities are having similar challenges, what sets Penn apart is Marc Rowan’s relationship with Trump, who is also a graduate of Penn’s Wharton School. According to The New York Times, Rowan was the chief architect of the White House’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The compact was sent to nine of the nation’s top universities—Penn included—last fall; benefits including federal research funds were promised to those institutions that signed on to its conservative priorities. Among those priorities: limiting the number of foreign students and vetting those students for “noxious values such as antiSemitism”; “abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”; and adopting a heavily restrictive policy on campus protests. Many of the ideas in the compact were taken directly from a document Rowan circulated to Penn’s board of trustees amid the campus furor over antisemitism in the fall of 2023.
While Penn ultimately rejected the compact, many of the professors I spoke to feel the university has already adopted many of its proposals. They point to the dismantling of DEI programming, the suppression of free speech and protest in the name of campus security, and, more broadly, the climate of fear that has many opting to avoid engaging in controversial or left-coded material.
“People now are extremely careful about what they say and what they have in class,” said Norton. “Not just junior professors and not just adjuncts. Everybody from top to bottom is scared.”
Grundy, the AAUP advocate, points to Penn’s Guidelines on Open Expression, which were temporarily revised to be more restrictive two years ago in response to the pro-Palestinian protest encampment—revisions that may soon be made more restrictive and permanent. “Neither Trump’s compact nor Penn’s Open Expression Guidelines protect open expression,” she said. “So much of it is couched in the need to be open to all views on campus. But, if you read between the lines, it’s a protection of conservative views, given how much pro-Palestinian views are suppressed. There’s a pattern here.”
Many of the professors I spoke to also allege that, through attrition, the Penn administration appears to be slowly but surely ridding its curriculum of courses that its donors and the Trump administration may find offensive. Norton, who taught Muslim political thought, told me she officially resigned this past fall under pressure from alumni and the board of trustees. She’s skeptical that the university will replace her expertise. Troutt Powell is also due to retire soon and doubts she will be replaced. “I’m very worried about what’s going to happen to the field of Middle East studies,” said Troutt Powell, adding that, with war in Iran, their expertise is needed now more than ever.
Lustick is also worried that Middle East studies in the United States are in danger. “But Penn is doing what so many schools are doing,” he said. “They’re compromising academic freedom and integrity in the hope of avoiding the wrath of this tyrant. In the hope of avoiding the wrath of Trump.”
“I know Penn is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Troutt Powell. “I get that, you know, they’re trying to deal with this crazy president. What in God’s name are you supposed to do? But one thing you do, I think, is you take a breath and remember that your responsibility is to your university community.”
