A Letter from the Editor

^{Attendees of the vigil display a banner of names of people who died in the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 14. Credit: Chenyao Liu}

August 25, 2025

Today the University of Pennsylvania formally welcomes the Class of 2029. 

Today is the six hundred and eighty-eighth day of genocide. 

For six hundred and eighty eight days, the University of Pennsylvania has watched in silence as Israel, with the full support of the United States, has systematically murdered the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands dead, yet today Penn’s endowment continues to fund Israeli weapons, Penn’s trustees and administration maintain close personal and professional ties to Israel and Zionist organizations, and Penn continues to repress and silence those who speak and act for Palestine. At this moment, Penn’s GRASP lab is researching weaponized drones in connection with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Today, as our administrators offer words of welcome and tout Penn’s values of freedom, justice, and knowledge, they and the institution they serve are deliberately, actively, cheerfully enabling unfathomable atrocity.

Today across the United States, we are watching the rise of fascism in real time. Masked, unidentifiable ICE agents kidnap people off the streets, in grocery stores, and in schools. Millions of people are losing access to food and healthcare, while the capitalist class only gets richer. Immigrants, people of color, queer people, women, and other marginalized peoples are facing escalated discrimination and violence. To no one’s surprise, Penn has done almost nothing to support or protect its students, faculty, staff, or the people of Philadelphia, caving to the Trump administration at the expense of the most vulnerable members of its community. Penn remained silent in the face of Trump’s new immigration policies and visa revocations, offering no guidance or support to its international students. Penn failed its queer community in its disavowal of transgender athletes. Penn’s actions clarify yet again that its priority is not its students, but the preservation of its wealth and power at whatever cost. 

Today in Philadelphia, Penn continues to gentrify, exploit and harm the communities of this city. Just two years ago, Penn demolished the last affordable housing units near campus, the University City Townhomes, despite widespread community protest. Although it is the largest landowner and one of the wealthiest institutions in the city, Penn pays no property taxes as a result of its nonprofit status, depriving the notoriously underfunded School District of Philadelphia of much needed revenue. With all its wealth and influence, Penn has chosen to rob Philadelphia’s residents of their autonomy, power, and resources to benefit its bottom line. 

Today you become part of the University of Pennsylvania: an institution driven by profit and power, an institution actively and knowingly complicit in violent oppression.

Today, you become complicit.

We too carry the weight of this complicity. We know that in attending the University of Pennsylvania we perpetuate its existence and thereby the very violence and oppression we protest against. 

But we, like you, have chosen to attend this university for a reason. There is, we believe, some value in the knowledge, connection, influence, and access to resources Penn provides. We hope our time here will enable us to better work towards an equitable world. However, it is not enough merely to pursue our education, even if we intend to use it for good, and ignore the blood on Penn’s hands, the blood on our hands. 

We’ve written this year’s Disorientation Guide to expose Penn for the profit-driven, exploitative institution it is, to disorient you from the shining facade of a free, just, benevolent university, and to give you a deeper understanding of how Penn actively oppresses and harms its own community, Philadelphia, and the larger world. 

But understanding and recognizing Penn’s wrong can only be the first step. In choosing to attend the University of Pennsylvania, we also inherit the responsibility to actively resist Penn’s wrongs. 

Penn is immensely powerful, but we are not helpless. Undeniably, Penn’s trustees, donors and administrators wield incredible wealth and influence. But they forget that we are also Penn. This university is nothing without its students, faculty, and staff; when we choose to work, act, and fight together we can change Penn, can hold it accountable for its crimes and wrongdoing, can disrupt business as usual. 

Our hands are not tied; we need not, must not, quietly accept our university’s role in violence, in oppression, in genocide.

Instead we choose to speak out, to protest, to resist. We choose to care for one another and the communities around us. We choose to build a freer world, right here, right now, at our university, in our community, in our city. 

Will you stand with us?

from the Penn Disorientation Guide Editors, 2025

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