Max Annunziata | Shared governance is on the brink

Faculty emerged from this past academic year sorely weakened. The new balance of power, which now favors powerful donors with the ear of a strong central administration, will hurt students. So we need our faculty to fight back, with a combination of boldness and pragmatism that they failed to summon last semester. 

At least I didn’t bury the lede. But you might need some context; let's wind back the clock to, say, December 2023. 

On Tuesday, Dec. 5, former Penn President Liz Magill gives a creepily academic answer to Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) not-so-tough question: whether calling for genocide counts as “bullying or harassment.” On Saturday, Dec. 9, she resigns under immense pressure from donors and congresspeople, and without a peep from faculty. 

The following Tuesday morning, Marc Rowan, billionaire donor and mastermind of Magill’s fall, types up a Penn equivalent to Trump’s “Project 2025” and sends it to Penn trustees under the über-corporate subject line “Moving Forward.” Ever the fat-trimming private equity bro, Rowan asks — quite innocently, he later insists — whether trustees should consider reviewing hiring practices and axing some departments.

Now, I’m guessing here, but I imagine the mood is bleak in the Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge. Suddenly, Magill and her one-sided emails don’t look so bad. Suddenly, the months of AAUP-Penn messages attacking her for buckling to donor pressure start to look a bit shortsighted. Harun Küçük, who had resigned his position as Director of the Middle East Center following Magill’s attempt to cancel Penn Chavurah’s November screening of “Israelism,” tells The Philadelphia Inquirer, “you wonder if she could have done any better, if anyone could have done better.”

Oopsies. 

Fine, lesson learned: It's time to show trustees and administrators who’s in charge. Küçük himself, characterizing Magill’s ouster as a “putsch,” calls for a “counter-putsch.” In December, the Faculty Senate circulates a petition opposing donor interference, and passes a January resolution affirming professors’ control over academics. And AAUP-Penn puts out an academic freedom-focused op-ed in The Nation, which ends with some fighting words: “We intend to see that Penn’s next president lives up to these responsibilities.”

Yes! Square up, Rowan! The faculty is back!

Okay, we’re back in the present. Obviously, it didn’t quite work out that way. Rather than a “counter-putsch,” the spring term offered a series of embarrassing displays of faculty weakness. 

As administrators massaged the Guidelines on Open Expression to accommodate their attempts to suppress the encampment, our faculty-composed Committee on Open Expression found itself unable or unwilling to lift a finger. Later, COE member Eric Orts told The Daily Pennsylvanian that some members of the committee believed it should be not just advisory but “should be able to tell the VPUL what to do.” Administrators responded by rewriting the guidelines, apparently without faculty input, to make the COE irrelevant. A power play indeed. 

There were some feeble attempts at resistance. AAUP-Penn led a single January protest in front of College Hall intended to “reassert” academic freedom and faculty governance, according to English professor David Kazanjian. The following day’s press release announced the start of a “campaign by faculty” — as far as I can tell, the next public installment in that “campaign” was a rain-soaked, dejected “press conference” the afternoon after the encampment was cleared. 

Granted, throughout the past semester, AAUP-Penn tried to counter Interim Penn President Jameson’s panicky, one-sided characteristics of the encampment; unfortunately, their rebuttals were equally one-sided, and were thus easy to attack or, worse, ignore. (Never did an AAUP-Penn post concede that Jewish students might feel a tad uncomfortable in the vicinity of an encampment which featured the chant, “You wanna know what we say about Israelis? They're pigs.”)

Even more frustrating has been the complacency of the Faculty Senate — professors’ official representative body, and a group with real weight. From February on, their contributions to the cause amounted to some “executive committee” meetings during which professors, though harboring deep concerns, sagely decided to do absolutely nothing. 

Now, a student might ask themselves why they should prefer a powerful, independent faculty to trustee or administration control. Our professors do, after all, occasionally fall short of perfect judgment and benevolence in the classroom. 

I’d respond, broadly, that what matters to faculty — more than the opinions of donors and, yes, sometimes more than the immediate wellbeing of students — is the advancement and transmission of knowledge. When faculty are enabled in that pursuit, we students are the first to benefit. And as much as my Republican friends might scoff at this premise, academics at large universities will often fight for their independence against infringement from both the right and left. Just look at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Sally Kornbluth, president of the latter institution, survived the same hearing that felled Magill with broad faculty support. There, faculty had secured University of Chicago-esque neutrality principles after a scientist who had spoken out against affirmative action was disinvited from giving an astronomy lecture. Professors saw their president sticking to those principles on Dec. 5.

Harvard professors, like their Penn counterparts, felt usurped after their president's ouster. But Harvard professors, unlike ours, had organized to stick up for Claudine Gay (until the whole plagiarism thing). And Harvard professors, unlike ours, have since struck back in dramatic fashion.

After a board of Harvard administrators imposed a range of sanctions on pro-Palestinian protesters and prevented a number of them from receiving their diplomas, Arts and Sciences faculty voted to give those students diplomas anyway. The head of the “admin board,” Dean Rakesh Khurana, “was defensive and visibly upset” after the vote, according to The Harvard Crimson — the kind of picture I’m sure populates the dreams of AAUP-Penn members. Administrators sheepishly reduced the punishments they had previously meted out. 

I’d be remiss to too closely analogize the situations at those institutions and dear old Penn. But I do think that the faculties at those schools might have some teaching for our professors: Harvard’s on the power of bold strokes, and MIT’s on building a winning coalition. 

I don’t pretend to understand the inner workings of our Faculty Senate. But I do know that several graduating seniors were unilaterally prevented by the vice provost for University Life from walking the stage at graduation. I know that four Penn students remain suspended for their parts in protests characterized, at least by AAUP-Penn and a chair of the Faculty Senate, as peaceful. 

I also know that a chair of the Faculty Senate can call a special meeting, or can be compelled to do so by a letter from 20 faculty members. Professors could then conceive and vote on a resolution to address administrative overreach. Granted, such a resolution would only be advisory, but it would be the kind of in-your-face move that Harvard professors stunned administrators with, and would make things exceedingly awkward for Jameson.

In the long run, faculty will need allies in their “campaign” to restore shared governance and the freedoms of inquiry and expression. They’ll need faculty unity. They’ll need student and student government support; heck, it’d be nice to have some alumni buy-in as well. 

That can only happen if faculty are able to articulate an apolitical campaign — a push to protect speech, inquiry, and faculty power without reference to the right or left, Israel or Palestine. 

For AAUP-Penn members and their allies, that will be a difficult compromise: I’ll be the first to admit that it’s an icky thing to treat anti-woke backlash and student protest with the same detachment. 

But those protesters won’t regain their rights otherwise: An apolitical take on free speech, however imperfect, is what united faculty and alumni at MIT. Our professors’ end goal need not be absolute institutional neutrality (as alumni have apparently been pushing for). But if faculty can muster the pragmatism to organize around the simple protection of our basic freedoms, they just might build some momentum, and reclaim their University. 

MAX ANNUNZIATA is a College junior studying economics from San Francisco. His email is annunziata@thedp.com.