Hello, Class of 2030!
As you begin your time at Penn, we want you to ask yourselves a very simple question: why are you here?
Some of you see yourselves as visionaries and changemakers—as people imbued with a unique power to change the world and forge your own path. Some of you are a bit more modest; you want to find a stable and fulfilling life for yourself doing what you love, and you think Penn gives you a pretty good shot at doing that. But high minded as your own plans may be, they are hardly the plans that Penn has for you.
The faculty and graduate workers you will meet during your time here are top-notch, experts in their respective disciplines. But their excellence is in spite of the University’s best efforts, not because of them. Since the 2024 Palestine solidarity encampments, Penn’s administration has steadily eroded the principles of free thought and student governance that have undergirded “liberal arts education” for centuries. They have tightened their “Open Expression Guidelines” to prohibit nearly all forms of protest or free expression on campus; they have authorized their police to surveil, stalk and harass suspected student “radicals”; they have acquiesced to the demands of the Trump administration in abandoning their own minority students.
The effects of Penn’s constant profit-centric approach can be felt in every facet of student life. Tuition goes up year after year, while the lack of transparency from the financial aid office makes budgeting for college a maddening task. Sexual and gender minorities are either ignored or sidelined as Penn neglects funding for Wellness, fails to provide basic reproductive health services, and acquiesces to Trump’s demands to disavow its own trans athletes.
But the injustices Penn commits against its own are nothing compared to the terror our university inflicts on the globe. Research conducted at Penn’s GRASP Lab—some of which is even funded by the Israeli Ministry of “Defense”—fuels the construction of autonomous weapons systems that slaughter the oppressed populations of the world on an industrial scale. In Philadelphia, Penn gentrifies and exploits the city it calls home, “redeveloping” West Philadelphia residents out of their communities. Moreover, despite being the city’s largest landowner, the University pays no property taxes on any of its holdings, depriving ordinary Philadelphians of the funds their communities need. Make no mistake—from the close economic links Penn maintains with Israel to the University’s aggressive (tax-free!) expansion into West Philadelphia, this is a university that profits off of death and despair, both at home and abroad.
As you begin your time at Penn, it is important that you—you who dream of a better world, of a real education, of an equitable future—know that the deck is stacked against you. But it is equally important for you to know that you are not alone. The money of the trustees and the pressure of the federal government have turned Penn’s administration into their all-too-willing puppet—but we, the students, have a power all our own when we stand together and dare to fight. In the 60s and 70s, student protests against the Vietnam War and gentrification brought an end to chemical weapons research at Penn—in the 90s, anti-apartheid organizers successfully pressured Penn to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. On the most trying moral issue of our time—the genocide in Gaza—Penn’s administration has been recalcitrant in its approval of ethnic violence, silencing students and faculty who dare to speak out against Israel’s mechanized slaughter of the Palestinian people. But the fight is far from over.
Penn is nothing without the students, faculty, and workers who sustain its operations and allow it to maintain its prestige. In the last instance, it is not we who need the University—it is the University that needs us to be complacent, to live according to their mandates, and to remain ignorant of our power. Recall why you came to Penn in the first place—whether you seek to change the world or simply inhabit a stable place within it, Penn is undermining your goals. By ignoring your needs and screwing you out of aid, the University is antagonizing you as we speak. But in a much broader sense, by exploiting the marginalized and profiting from genocide and war around the globe, Penn is contributing to a grand effort to make the world far less equal and far less stable. When you leave this university, it is their world that you will have to inhabit—and you’ll be the one who’s left picking up the pieces.
You don’t have to take it anymore.
We—not just as Penn students, but as human beings—must decide for ourselves: We may continue to “live” apart—subject to the whims of those in power and blind to the cruelty they inflict on our world—or we may join together and fight for a just and equitable future.
For us, there is only one option. We hope that, in your four years here, you’ll make the right choice as well.
LEGES SINE MORIBUS VANAE,
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