Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine

^{Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine organized a die-in demonstration at College Hall on Jan. 29.
Credit: Abhiram Juvvadi}

by Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, University of Pennsylvania, 2025

For nearly two years, the Penn Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine chapter has spoken out against the brutal and ongoing extermination of Palestinian lives by the Israeli state and its Zionist settler-citizenry. The sheer scale of the US-funded destruction breaks the rational mind—entire cities blitzed to rubble, easily over 500,000 people dead, wounded, starving. These facts are readily available to anyone with eyes and a heart. And yet, those who have followed their conscience and insisted on illuminating the truth, by peacefully protesting, holding an academic event, or simply tweeting support for Palestinians, have been reprimanded by Penn, in some cases suspended, or fired, even raided by police in their home. The campus crackdown on dissent is now being executed in compliance with the Trump administration’s threats to university funding, but all along administrators have serviced fanatically wealthy donors, trustees, and Zionist politicians whose calculated performance of civil rights (calling any critique of Israel “anti-Semitic”) undermines the intellectual and moral integrity of this university. Professors turned administrators have lost their way, and in doing so, created a climate of antagonism and repression on our campus. Complicitous colleagues and peers conveniently deem Palestinian “activism” unscholarly or unrespectable even as they celebrate the history of revolutions, decry attacks on academic freedom, debate the nuance of words like Nakba, intifada, river, sea, boycott, or now, starvation: this is a turning away from the reality of genocide and anti-Palestinian racism, which names the form of dehumanization that makes an exception of Palestinians when it comes to basic human rights. 

Academics might be more comfortable when ethics remains abstract. But now, even as our institution is broken, Gaza bleeds out. In the words of Riyad Mansour, Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations, “The mind cannot comprehend, the heart cannot withstand.” It is not too late to step off the sideline, shed the guilt or ambivalence, stand up, speak up, and refuse what poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called the “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying” tyrants, those who “neither see, nor feel, nor know,/ But leechlike to their fainting country cling.” 

The following are selections from the speeches by staff, students, and faculty delivered to Penn’s President Larry Jameson, Provost John Jackson, and other administrators, faculty, and student representatives at the annual open forum of the University Council in Houston Hall on December 4, 2024. These archive some voices of our Penn community who speak truth to power; they invite you, reader, to be on the right side of history, to do whatever you can to demonstrate your solidarity with Palestine as it is being decimated before our eyes.

1. Repression and Surveillance 

I have spent decades of my life at Penn. Over the years I have taken seriously my sacred duty to support and mentor our students as well as support my colleagues. 

I would like to describe three recent incidents which signal a troubling trend: the othering, even criminalization, of our own students, faculty and staff. 

Incident #1 occurred in May when six students were placed on mandatory leave of absence. The students – all women from diverse racial, cultural, and faith-based backgrounds – were already going through disciplinary hearings through the Committee on Student Accountability (CSA) because of their involvement in the encampment. Nevertheless, without due process, they suddenly and callously were locked out of their dormitories, had Penn cards deactivated, and were barred from all Penn facilities, including the library and dining halls, during finals. According to the University handbook, a mandatory leave of absence is used in “extraordinary circumstances” when students are deemed a “threat to order, health, and safety”. One can imagine a student being a threat if, for example, they bring a gun to campus or commit sexual violence. In this case, they were expressing their moral conscience about mass human suffering and peacefully exercising their rights to open expression and assembly. 

Incident # 2 occurred at the end of September. Penn faculty, students, and staff had gathered to mourn civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. Some were grieving the loss of loved ones. Some were anguished about family members, whose cities and towns were getting bombed in real time. Yet soon after the Vigil had begun, our own students and colleagues were denounced as “trespassers” by Penn security. They were then kettled by Penn Police carrying zip-ties.

Incident #3 occurred in late October when 12 Penn police officers raided students’ West Philadelphia residence as part of a month-old vandalism investigation. According to news sources, the Penn Police were in SWAT gear and trained assault rifles on the students. Trained assault rifles on students. Let that sink in. A student could have been killed. Many students have shared with me that, since hearing about the raid, they have experienced extreme duress and cannot concentrate on their studies. They also speak about a deeper crisis of faith in our scholarly and campus community.

There are troubling implications about this trend of surveillance and harassment, including the suppression of open expression and the normalization of police intimidation. As a university, we should be having robust intellectual debates about contentious geopolitical topics, not this. What perhaps concerns me most is how our very own colleagues and students, those whom we are entrusted to nurture, have been criminalized as “enemies within” our own campus. This is a hallmark of authoritarianism and sets a chilling precedent. These students and faculty deserve an official apology – a small first step toward healing our fractured campus community. 

As we enter a new national political period, there may very well be external pressures to target more members of our community, for example immigrants, trans individuals, and those who teach about structural racism. Penn has long prided itself on its commitment to the values of pluralism and diversity of thought. Are we going to hold the line and stay true to these democratic values?

2. Open Expression 

Our world is lurching towards autocracy in nation after nation, with autocrats often elected to power. Thus, the other institutions of democratic life need, more than ever, to guard their independence, their self-regulating authority, and their ability to speak about difficult issues. More: they need to insist upon their right to safeguard individual members who speak truth to power, including when they speak out against the complicity of their institutions, and of the administrators of those institutions, in perpetuating harm. In our case, universities need to defend fully their right to be the home of difficult and challenging ideas, ideas that make us uncomfortable as they demand our attention, ideas that invoke ethical ideals that are battered by political compromises and military violence.

At Penn, which was never any good at tolerating student dissent and anger, our administrators have compromised all that this university might have stood for. Well before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce staged its interrogation of three Presidents from Ivy League universities, the then President of Penn was under sustained pressure from wealthy donors, members of Penn’s Boards of Trustees. It seems clear that it was not opportunistic Republican members of Congress who brought down the President. She resigned because of the partisan political actions of those whose wealth enabled them to be elected our Trustees. But the President also brought it on herself when she stated—presumably under such Trustee pressure—that she found slogans projected onto Penn buildings “vile” and “anti-Semitic.” Anti-Semitic they were not, and in designating them as such, the then President set the stage for her later inability to defend the university before the Congressional committee.

I return to this history to remind our university administrators that they will now find it increasingly difficult to oppose the intervention of politicians, whether they be the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, or the Republican Education Secretary-designate. Nor will they be able to withstand the attempts of uber-wealthy Trustees and donors to shape institutional and academic policy and practices. They have tasted blood, and they will certainly spill more of it in their attempts to remake universities in their own image. 

At the heart of any strong defense of the university lies our commitment to Open Expression. You—and I address our administrators here—want to make student protestors, as well as their allies amongst our staff and faculty, go away, but they aren’t going anywhere, for they are the ethical and political conscience of our community. They join an important list of those who protested the Vietnam war, or apartheid South Africa, or those who agitate against the climate catastrophe that threatens us all. In prosecuting them as you do, you become willing accomplices to autocrats and plutocrats. That cannot, and must not, be our future

3. Words and Weapons 

For the past year and a half I have been dismayed and sickened by the university’s McCarthyist response to student protest on this campus, even as I am horrified by the daily destruction and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, while the world watches, and while Penn partners with weapons contracting companies like Ghost Robotics [whose headquarters has since moved off Penn’s campus.] 

Campus safety is a real concern, but not for the reasons that have driven university admin to erect metal signs and barriers prohibiting disobedient speech. More weapons, more aggressive policing, stifling of principled and informed dissent, will not make our campus safer. We often hear the phrase “weaponized speech” used metaphorically. But in its curbing of free speech, Penn draws a false equivalence between words and weapons. As the poet and journalist Mohammad El-Kurd reminds us, tropes are not drones. 

Meanwhile, Penn profits from the production of actual weapons. Ghost Robotics’ AI-armed robot dogs, called the “darlings of the US military,” are not only being tested and used in Gaza and the Middle East; along with drones, they have been deployed by the Department of Homeland Security to surveil and patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. When used to hunt vulnerable refugee groups in the desert, they “worsen an already severe humanitarian crisis,” and criminalize migration.

I ask that that we as a university have serious, open discussion and debate around cutting ties with Ghost Robotics, and more generally, around the Department of Defense funding of our robotics and science research. We need an ethics review of grants like the National Defense Science & Engineering Fellowships that ask our students to draw ties between their work, and military applications. Especially with the opening of the new AI hub at Amy Gutmann Hall, we must take seriously the ethicists and scientists who speak on the ethics of weapons-related research. I remind you of the principled stance taken by Penn Engineering Professor Daniel E. Koditschek in his 2021 letter cutting ties with Ghost Robotics–which was formed in his lab. He wrote: “I am certain that this integration of guns with . . .eventual ubiquity of small legged machines transgresses a crucial ethical barrier.”

With regard to policing at Penn, I ask: that the university remove semiautomatic weapons from the Penn Police arsenal. Even as the Penn Medicine Trauma Center educates the public on curbing gun violence by limiting access to firearms in the community, Penn arms its police force with semiautomatic weapons and raids its students’ homes in tactical gear. This is traumatizing; this does not make campus safe. 

Number 2: I ask that the university conduct a transparent, ethics-guided review of all university contracts with military-weapons research. 

Number 3: I ask you to take immediate steps to do one small thing: require that Ghost Robotics pledge not to weaponize their robots. There is good precedent for this. The Boston Dynamics robotic dog company, founded at MIT, took this pledge against weaponization, along with 5 other companies, in October 2022. 

Please: let us use our knowledge and research to make the world a more peaceful, not a more violent place.

4. Institutional Neutrality

I am here to highlight how Penn’s recently announced policy of “neutrality” has created significant challenges for Muslim faculty like myself, particularly in supporting our students and fostering a meaningful academic community. To be honest, I hesitated to even address this forum today. Despite this stance on neutrality, the campus environment feels more charged than ever.

The reality is that this so-called neutrality is not neutral at all. By refusing to take a principled stance on critical issues—such as the repression of free speech and the targeting of those standing for justice in Palestine—the university creates an atmosphere where faculty and students who are already in the minority face increased scrutiny and marginalization.

While the university’s message claimed that “quieting Penn’s institutional voice” would amplify the “expertise and voices within,” this has not been my experience nor that of many of my colleagues. Instead, the opposite seems true: the silencing of Penn’s voice has stifled academic freedom and individual voices, particularly those standing for justice in Palestine. And while Penn claims this stance is “not in response to any events,” the timing suggests otherwise—it’s hard to see this as anything but a reaction to increased advocacy for Palestine. Neutrality, in this context, protects institutional interests while leaving vulnerable communities to navigate a hostile environment on their own.

In fact, for Muslim, Arab, and particularly Palestinian students and their allies, neutrality feels like abandonment. As one of the few Muslim professors at Penn, students seek me out for support, sharing experiences of being silenced, erased, and targeted by anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism. Yet, my ability to advocate for them is increasingly constrained, limiting not only the support I can provide but also my capacity to engage in my own research and public scholarship on justice, human rights, and structural Islamophobia.

As a contingent faculty member, these constraints deepen an already precarious position. I have to carefully weigh every word I say—publicly and privately—because the risks of speaking out feel amplified in this environment. The university’s stance contributes to this atmosphere of fear and self-censorship that undermines academic freedom and the relationships that foster trust and support within our community.

The incoming Trump administration raises further concerns. The potential return of travel bans targeting Muslim-majority countries or intensified surveillance of Arab, Muslim, and specifically Palestinian communities would directly impact many of our students—and faculty like me, who are seen as allies. Will this university’s commitment to neutrality extend to these threats? What will neutrality look like when policies shaped by anti-Muslim white supremacists target non-citizen Arab and Muslim faculty and staff?

If neutrality silences advocacy and shields the institution from responsibility, then it is no longer neutrality—it is complicity. What we need is not neutrality, but a principled commitment to protecting the rights and dignity of all members of this community, especially the most marginalized.