Every time Interim President Larry Jameson’s name shows up in my inbox, I sigh, brace myself, and read. The latest from the top: a significant move towards institutional neutrality. While I’m glad that blatantly one-sided statements from an amorphous “Penn” will no longer be hitting my feed, I’m less convinced that the administration’s motivations are to “amplify the expertise and voices” of students and faculty “within.”
In every recent instance that Penn’s commitment to freedom of student speech has been tested, it has failed. In the past year, we’ve seen the greatest push by students to make themselves heard in recent history, and that wave of enthusiasm was met with crushing repudiation.
In July 2023, the Undergraduate Assembly and its graduate counterpart, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, were denied requests for a single voice each on the University Board of Trustees, Penn’s highest governing body. The request was perfectly reasonable; Cornell University, for one, has been doing it for over 50 years. The Board of Trustees cited “existing avenues” to student representation in their rejection — which must totally work, right?
In April 2024, Penn Student Government’s Nominations & Elections Committee followed established convention to run a referendum on disclosure of investments, divestment from Israel, and termination of partnership with Ghost Robotics, a Penn affiliate that supplies weapons to Israel. Despite a majority of voting students supporting all three calls, students were met with a curt refusal of all three possibilities. Contempt for student democracy, check.
Okay, so if "legitimate" methods within the bounds of institutional policy fail, there is the long tradition of student activism to draw on, from encampments against South African apartheid to marches against the Vietnam War. To this end, in April 2024, Penn’s activists launched an encampment to protest Penn’s complicity and involvement in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Instead of hearing out the students as administrations at peer institutions like Brown University did, our administrators repeatedly pushed city officials to deploy police in riot gear to demolish the encampment. Penn also weaponized a policy for students experiencing psychological mental episodes to place six pro-Palestinian activists on involuntary leaves of absence. I refuse to pretend as if this was somehow an actual act of addressing conduct concerns, and not for the express purpose of chilling contemporaneous and future student dissent.
To top it all off, Penn’s updated Guidelines on Open Expression have forced dissenting student speech to jump through a number of hurdles, including absurd volume level requirements, University approval for spaces, and most egregiously, limited press access to University grounds. Contempt for student activism, check.
The escalation to these more dramatic methods came only after a refusal to consider previous calls by activists. A Jewish student group’s screening of an anti-Israeli film was canceled in November 2023. A peaceful, silent study-in at Van Pelt-Dietrich Library was shut down in February 2024. Penn’s desire to silence students who disagreed with those at the top only led to escalation as students became desperate to be heard.
While pro-Palestinian activism is a particularly incisive example of student resistance, Penn’s anti-speech efforts are not remotely limited to that. Despite a national right to unionize, the University has challenged any attempts to form unions here at Penn. In each union election, Penn did not willingly recognize any of the constituent groups and has made repeated attempts to delay or diminish union power. The National Labor Relations Board has had to rule against Penn for its attempts to union bust. Contempt for student labor, check.
Time and time again, when Penn needs to live up to its commitment to listening to student speech, it doesn’t just fall short. It actively sprints sternward. Somersaults towards silence. Subscribes to the status quo. It doesn’t matter that our status quo is careening towards a second Gilded Age, voicing assent to genocide and imperialism, or contributing to the plights of our neighbors west of 40th Street.
Our neoliberal sociopolitical order relies on replacing dissent with complacency, and Penn is a vanguard of this system. Penn’s treatment of student speech shows a clear intent of creating orderly citizens, not good ones. There is not a conspiracy by top Penn brass to consciously generate the next soldiers and victims of the top one percent, but the effects of their actions lend themselves to this result. When members of the capitalist class are granted decision making power over institutions of learning and research, this result should hardly be surprising.
Penn needs to actualize its potential. This University, its alumni, and its affiliates are, or will one day be, some of the most powerful people in the world. The changes the world desperately needs will never come from within walls of silence.
NIHEER PATEL is a College sophomore studying history and English from Atlanta. His email is niheerp@sas.upenn.edu.
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