UPenn Faculty Warn of ‘Hostile Takeover’ as Trustees and Donors Take Action Over Anti-Semitism on Campus
“The undersigned faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania unambiguously reject the view that the Board of Trustees, the Schools’ Boards of Advisors, alumni, or donors should determine Penn’s academic priorities or governance policies.”
Some faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania are under the impression that the school is experiencing a ‘hostile takeover’ as alumni and donors withhold support due to the anti-Semitism scandals at the school and trustees attempt to fix the problem.
The resignation of former President Liz Magill was apparently a tipping point for many of these folks.
The Daily Mail reports:
UPenn staff warn of ‘hostile takeover’ by trustees and donors after billionaire investor Marc Rowan called on all alumni to cease donations in the wake of anti-Semitism scandal on campus before President Magill’s resignation
Staff at the University of Pennsylvania have expressed concern about a ‘hostile takeover’ by trustees and donors after billionaire alum Mar Rowan asked the school’s board to consider its policies.
More than 900 members of the Ivy League’s faculty have accused alumni and donors of meddling with the school’s academic policies in an open letter to the University Board of Trustees.
The letter by the Faculty Senate comes after Wharton Board of Advisors Chair Rowan sent an email where he described a campus ‘culture’ that ‘distracted from UPenn’s core mission of scholarship, research, and academic excellence.’
In his email titled ‘Moving Forward,’ Rowan asked trustees to consider whether the school should eliminate certain unnamed departments and examine ‘the general policies for the admission of membership into the Faculty,’ as reported by The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Rowan was one of the alumni who called on president Liz Magill to resign after she failed to say calls for a genocide of Jews violated UPenn’s policies. He also led a campaign to end donations to the school over its response to anti-Semitism on campus.
The letter Marc Rowan sent in October said, “The antisemitic rot in academia is unmistakable.” and he was right. If that weren’t true, the school wouldn’t be in need of a hostile takeover.
Here is the text of the letter these faculty members just sent to the board of trustees via the Daily Pennsylvanian:
Penn Faculty Letter to Trustees (December 2023)
To the Members of the Board of Trustees:
The undersigned faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania unambiguously reject the view that the Board of Trustees, the Schools’ Boards of Advisors, alumni, or donors should determine Penn’s academic priorities or governance policies. The Faculty Handbook makes abundantly clear that the Board of Trustees delegates the management of the University to the President and the decision-making process to the shared governance of faculty, staff, and students (Section 1.A.). The current efforts of some members of the broader Penn community to reverse our longstanding governance structure threatens the freedom of the faculty to conduct independent and academically rigorous research and teaching. Penn’s academic excellence is built upon decades of shared governance in which the faculty play a central role in crafting policies around teaching, research, and all other aspects of our University’s academic mission, grounded in the principles of academic freedom and open expression. These principles and policies strengthen our process of knowledge creation and dissemination, while making our institution one of the foremost leaders in higher education in the U.S. and globally. We oppose all attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.
As I noted in a recent quick take on a related topic, it’s fascinating how many people in academia are suddenly discovering the importance of academic freedom and free speech on campus.
Would any of these faculty members defend a student who was disciplined or mobbed for using the wrong pronouns?
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These so called academic defenders of “free speech” and “academic freedom” are the worst suppressors of merit, and the search for the truth in academia
Faculty are gobsmacked to learn that the Trustees actually hold the power, and not them.
Film at 11.
Note to faculty – “It’s not a hostile takeover, it’s a counter hostile takeover and we are figuring out who really has the clout here. So do you feel lucky?”
The ivory tower faculty needs to address this:
“These principles and policies strengthen our process of knowledge creation and dissemination, while making our institution one of the foremost leaders in higher education in the U.S. and globally. We oppose all attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.”
What does the rampant, apparently systemically virulent antisemitism, including attacks and censorship, on campus have to do with “academic policies and academic freedom?”
It is the same ignorance of their own failings that permeates the faculties of this and most other universities. Remember: most, if not all, of these people have never had a real job. The “ivory tower” is very, very real. The echo chamber of higher ed needs to be demolished before it destroys our country through our children.
So, the Board of Governors should not set governance policies?
‘Governance policies do nothing but perpetuate the racist misogyny of Penn’s slave-holding founder, Benjamin Franklin.’
-UPenn academic, soon.
We need to start a business that specializes in statute removal from liberal college campuses, Democrat-controlled city-owned public spaces, and cemeteries, charging a premium in all phases of the removal process, invoicing the DNC, and then allocating a percentage of revenues back to conservative candidates.
Start with ALL the George Floyd statues and paintings
They make me want to vomit
Most of the George Floyd paintings I have seen look like they were drawn by R. Crumb. It’s not the fault of the artist, it’s just that George actually resembles an R. Crumb character.
Drugs will do that to you.
Gee. Why would all these faculty members and students want to be associated with such a place?
It’s the wrong reason but reformation is welcome. The problem is no opposing voices are allowed. It would be nice if the reform were devoted to fixing that rather than suppressing another voice.
The “Faculty Handbook”?
Yes, the faculty handbook: https://catalog.upenn.edu/faculty-handbook/
The letter by the Faculty Senate comes after Wharton Board of Advisors Chair Rowan sent an email where he described a campus ‘culture’ that ‘distracted from UPenn’s core mission of scholarship, research, and academic excellence.’
Yeah. That does sound threatening.
There is disconnect between university faculty who have spent their entire lifetime in academia, and alumni who have become successful in the private sector. The academics just don’t get it. They are treated with high honor as long as they remain on their campus. However, once they step off the campus that feeling can change.
Tes, and this phrase, “…faculty have accused alumni and donors of meddling with the school’s academic policies…” is a telling accusation. The faculty has their noses bent out of joint and are angry that alums and donors have the nerve to protest with their checkbooks. This is the way the capitalist system is supposed to work, but these woke snowflake professors don’t like having their spaces disturbed. Wonderful!
This.
In every SF novel or program I’ve encountered where people discover that they are living inside a bubble, the plot always centers around how they can get out to rejoin the world outside.
These yutzes want to hunker in and keep everyone else out.
This sounds so much like those 40+ White House interns who thought they weren’t being listened to by the staff.
This is a great example of what should happen, will the same occur at other universities?
Likely not any in Californica or New York…
Conservatives are battering the walls, man the battlements, raise the drawbridge, load the trebuchet.
The alumni have a remedy. “Faculty, if you want full independence from alumni views of university government, you can have it, along with full independence from our continued financial support.”
Of course, there is a remedy. Please tell the woke and hurt faculty that they control their employment destiny. They can resign from their vaunted UPenn positions and look for a job elsewhere.
Since most of them are white leftists riddled with “white guilt,” they can give up their esteemed positions for a preferred class of minority.
I knew Robin D’Angelo, fabricator of the “white guilt” phenomenon, and I can tell you that bat guano had nothing on her.
Because the idea that, “Who pays the piper calls the tune” is an antiquated idea rooted in whiteness and capitalism and must be decolonized from the … Hey! Who turned off my mike?
The Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules
So, management should not have any power to make any decisions, correct?
This is not how it works in the real world.
Where do you think the student protestors who think they control legislatures, the edgy artists who think they decide Disney content, the whizkids who usurped Busch’s marketing programs, and the interns who thought they owned Twitter got those ideas from?
College is soooo far removed from the real world, it isn’t even funny anymore.
It is a giant womb in which students are fed false ideas and incubate for four year. Or more if they are “super seniors.”
this is NOT the real world
this is academia ….
Their “governance” of themselves is what put them in this situation. The situation where they cannot tell right from wrong. Where they cannot tell good from evil. Where they do not know, or simply care to ignore, the history of the Israel/Palestinian conflict. They have lost their right to govern.
I always thought the idea of “student government” and “Faculty Senate” to be akin to stuffed teddy bear to make you feel better when it hurts.
LOL! Now that teddy bear is used to have a self proclaimed “victim” tell you “where the bad man touched you!”
Gosh, for a second I thought that the faculty owned the school. My bad. So, both the faculty and students control the school they don’t own. Unionize!!
“Penn’s temporary replacement for ousted president Magill . . . Penn’s trustees chose J. Larry Jameson, now dean of Penn’s medical school. . . . As soon as Jameson took over the medical school in 2011, he placed diversity hiring and indoctrination at the core of his administration.”
As soon as Jameson took over the medical school in 2011, he placed diversity hiring and indoctrination at the core of his administration. He created the school’s first vice dean for Inclusion and Diversity and first associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion. Naturally, an Office of Inclusion and Diversity followed, which rolled out endless diversity initiatives and mandates, including Health Equity Weeks, the Transgender Patient Advocate program, and the LGBT Student-Trainee-Faculty Mentorship program. In 2021, Jameson initiated what the Penn press office called a “new institution-wide program aimed at eliminating structural racism.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-academy-at-the-crossroads-part-two
Dear God
And that’s what you get when you let the Marxist faculty pick the replacements (after picking the initial president).
What is the definition of insanity again?
The alumni should stop meddling with the university by giving it money.
Or sending their children
“What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?”
According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous people/First Nations people and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia) and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of anti-Black racism on all previously mentioned systems.”
https://archive.is/Fe24g#selection-663.0-663.529
Good grief. School of Social Work sounds like a summer beach party in the South Pacific. After reading that, I’m in need of Dr Jameson’s patented “anti racism enemas”.
Social work, like any of the soft “sciences,” is a joke, a literal major in basket weaving for students that can’t handle real courses but need a diploma for some reason.
They were silent and remain silent while this goes on all around them. They are blinded by politics
“Tracking Cancel Culture in Higher Education”
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/tracking-cancel-culture-in-higher-education#caseslist
Since the takeover is in defense of the school’s integrity and core mission, perhaps it should be labeled a friendly takeover.
The scream of the leeches. “how dare you stop the blood”
Far more accurate than you may realize; tenure is like letting tapeworms have permanent residence in your gut.
Eventually, it severely weakens you or kills you.
The second amendment was contemplated as a bulwark against tyranny, not self-defense per se
Tyranny needs to be codified, the degrees defined and permissible use-of-force (and impermissible) delineated
Case law is mostly settled for the law of self defense (Ask Mr. Branca…) but likely is absent in cases of tyranny.
That’s because it is not subject to law, law being whatever the tyrant says it is. Instead, it is subject to metalaw, the rule of “none dare call it treason” and “If you attack the king, be sure not to miss.”
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
–THOMAS JEFFERSON
A bulwark against tyranny IS self defense.
Penn’s so-called “academic excellence” is what’s in question, here.
And I like how the sooper-geniuses behind this letter talk about “decades” when Penn’s claim to fame is “centuries”! I’m pretty sure there was actual academic excellence at Penn when Ben Franklin founded it … more than a few decades ago.
They act like skin color determines (lack of) academic ability. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations. It does not help anybody.
Funny how they never give up their positions due to a lack of melanin.
The faculty seems to have lost sight of the first and most important rule of corporate governance: management is governed.
how dare the people in charge act like they’re in charge!
Faculty are very self important.
Just ask them!
After Jan-6, my undergrad university rescinded a honorary award to Donald Trump. A purely nonsensical gesture.
I rescinded the idea of donating any more.
Simple. Tit for tat.
Now encourage others to do the same. I discovered that their emailing list could be downloaded by entering one letter at a time. It was like stomping on an anthill.
Doing a mass mailing suggesting people stop donating would make an impression.
Yes
Begging the old Dennis Miller joke: “What is this tat, and where do I get some?”
“Staff at the University of Pennsylvania have expressed concern about a ‘hostile takeover’ by trustees and donors”
There has already been a “hostile takeover” of the university. All the trustees and donors are trying to do is take it back.
“Hostile?”
Lady, you ain’t seen hostile yet.
Harder and faster. It is well past time Univ Trustees asserted their power of these institutions and that Alumni used the power of their purse to demand accountability which is kryptonite to the woke. These clowns want power and authority but without any icky consequences much less judgmental attitudes applied to them. Brats.
Faculty, as a group, are the most infantile pompous asses that you can imagine.
I tell you that from personal, unpleasant experience.
“The Faculty Handbook makes abundantly clear that the Board of Trustees delegates the management of the University to the President and the decision-making process to the shared governance of faculty, staff, and students (Section 1.A.).”
And there you have it. The inmates are running the asylum.
Only hostile takeovers by communist faculty members are allowed.
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
#lefties
6:39 AM · Nov 10, 2015
“Hey, no fairsies taking our skin suit back!”
Isn’t that what Leatherhead did in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”
it is past time for the grownups to reenter the room … take the sharp objects away from the children.
give them a hard swat on the bottom. send them to bed.
make sure they understand that they the children no long make the rules.
Interfering with the leftists who RUN the joint? THAT sums it up rather well! These BILLIONAIRES should look elsewhere to donate! The “elite” schools have BILLIONS in endowments – put your more where it’s NEEDED and APPRECIATED! Set up or contribute to funds that benefit Our VETERANS! Set up HOMES for Our VETERANS! Establish College Funds for the CHILDREN of Veterans who were killed in Action or permanently disabled! Do something for those who have done ALL for YOU!!
I just can’t wait for Elon Musk’s new university in Texas.
All the real scientists will flock there.
No woke studies.
But hillary voters say it was supposed to be “her turn” ??
The first mistake was in formally entrusting students with any role in the governance of the University. This began in the late ’60s, when I was at Penn. Students have not lived up to even the limited responsibilities entrusted to them back then, and mob rule—always a danger from aggregations of immature students—has instead been enshrined as a valid mechanism to guide the evolution of the institution. Student mobs can inflict mayhem upon the policies of the University, make all sorts of demands, and then happily disappear from the campus in three years or less, without having to live with, let alone clean up any mess they might have made. Radical faculty members, who otherwise might find it difficult to generate enough support among their colleagues, can short-circuit the process of consultation and debate by stirring up groups of students and overwhelming the administration. The students also can agitate for more radical faculty hiring and promotion decisions, helping perpetuate the spiral.
The Board of Trustees shouldn’t determine policy? Going all in on “saying the quiet part out loud”, I see.
That it does. But delegation can always be withdrawn. Otherwise it’s not delegation, it’s abdication. And now the board should determine that the said delegation has clearly not worked, so it is withdrawn. Anyone who isn’t happy with that should feel free to leave.