Over 70 Penn Profs Oppose Punishing Students Who Protested Convocation
“We, the undersigned faculty, are deeply concerned about the efforts of the Center for Community Standards and Accountability to deny or curtail the rights of Penn students to articulate their opinions as part of public protests on campus”
Do you think these professors would feel the same way if a bunch of students in MAGA hats had led a protest?
The College Fix reports:
More than 70 Penn professors oppose punishing students who disrupted convocation
Seventy-three University of Pennsylvania professors signed a letter opposing the university’s disciplining of students who disrupted its back-to-school Convocation in August, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported Monday.
Students, alongside local residents, were protesting a local property owner’s eviction of residents from local low-income housing and demanding that the university “get involved” to help the residents stay, The College Fix reported on September 1.
“Upset about the looming eviction of residents in a nearby affordable housing complex, protesters descended on..convocation at the University of Pennsylvania, interrupting President Liz Magill and accusing Penn of gentrifying neighborhoods near campus—or ‘Penntrification,’ as they called it,” Inside Higher Ed reported on September 1.
Penn does not own the nearby University City Townhomes complex that was the focus of the protest, Inside Higher Ed reported.
However, the student activists believed the university should step to stop the eviction given how the school’s presence has contributed to gentrification, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Letter from faculty asserted students’ right to protest without censure
“We, the undersigned faculty, are deeply concerned about the efforts of the Center for Community Standards and Accountability to deny or curtail the rights of Penn students to articulate their opinions as part of public protests on campus,” the faculty members wrote in the letter.
“In this instance, two students have been issued notices stating that they have been in ‘violation of the University’s Guidelines on Open Expression … and Code of Student Conduct,’ ostensibly because they had protested at the 2022 Penn Convocation on College Green,” the authors wrote. “The charges against them are incorrect, in fact, as can be demonstrated even by a casual review of video shot during that protest.”
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Comments
35 of those professors were probably protesters themselves!
The question is whether it was a peaceful non-disruptive protest. There is a conflict between the free speech rights of the University President and the convocation audience vis a vis the housing protestors. People who deliberately break the rules expect to be punished and martyred for their cause. That is the whole idea.
The answer is rarely found in a copy+pasty from Mike Lechance.
Let’s face it though, if someone beneath the role of President were otherwise harassed by this pile of crybabies then the school wouldn’t bat an eye about it.