The scene was both exceedingly collegiate and exceedingly collegial. In fact, the only evidence that two years prior this had been the site of a notorious pro-Palestinian protest encampment—a source of deep discord and division that drew the ire and rebuke of both President Donald Trump and Governor Josh Shapiro, and ultimately police in riot gear—was a metal sign stating that “Demonstrations, rallies, protests, and large gatherings require prior university approval,” and that “Overnight occupation” was strictly prohibited.
Over this past winter and spring, I spoke to some 20 current and former faculty and staff at the vaunted Ivy League institution, some of whom refused to be quoted by name for fear of reprisals by Penn administrators, donors, and funders, or fear of harassment from far-right-wing agitators. They all report that diversity, equity, and inclusion, academic freedom, and free speech are under attack on the Penn campus. And it’s not just the absence of protest on College Green that concerns them. DEI language has been scrubbed from university websites and programming scaled back. Trans athletes have been barred from women’s sports. Put up an anti-ICE flyer, and it gets taken down. Attempt to organize a screening or a panel discussion deemed critical of Israel, and a call from campus security says you won’t be accommodated. Lecture on the plight of Palestinians and be accused of antisemitism. Basically, these professors say, anything deemed offensive to the Trump administration, which could thereby put federal funding to the university at risk, can elicit unwanted attention from Penn’s Office of General Counsel. Faculty in the School of Medicine even told me that efforts to urge Congress to preserve science funding were suppressed by Penn administrators. The pursuit of science, they were effectively told, is now categorized as partisan politics. (Penn’s Office of General Counsel declined my requests for an interview.)
But to many of the faculty I spoke to, Penn’s capitulation to Trumpism became official on July 1 of last year, when, following closed-door negotiations, it was announced that the university would fully comply with Department of Education demands to ban transgender women athletes from women’s sports, which included stripping trans swimmer Lia Thomas of her swimming awards and records from the 2021–2022 season.
Jonathan Katz, a professor in Penn’s gender, sexuality, and women’s studies department, said that Penn made a “strategic decision” with Thomas. “Penn saw the Lia Thomas affair as a necessary sacrificial lamb,” Katz told me. “They thought they could fend off the Trump administration this way. But I think they made a frankly bad decision.” Since Penn’s deal with the DOE, the Trump administration continues to harass the university: The White House targeted Penn for the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which aims to induce universities into adopting conservative priorities, and Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continues to investigate the university for allegedly creating an antisemitic work environment. (More on those later.) Beyond all this, Katz believes the strategic error was to “not reassure the university community that the first principles of academic freedom are sacrosanct.”
“We had one funder express concern after the Lia Thomas deal,” said Katz. “They basically said that universities in this day and age really can’t be trusted to do the right thing because the pressures on them from the Trump administration are so great. That funder has decided not to invest in universities.”
In December 2024, shortly after Trump was reelected, Carter J. Carter, who uses they/them pronouns, was called into a meeting with the director of Penn’s doctorate in clinical social work program and another administrator over a complaint that was made to the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, or OREI, a.k.a. the Title VI Office. Formally opened that same month in response to claims that antisemitism had spun out of control on the campus, the OREI’s stated mission is to handle charges of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias, and to ensure that Penn is in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on religious identity, ethnicity, race, color, or national origin at any institution receiving federal funding. But multiple sources at Penn tell me the OREI’s mission appears to be legitimizing and weaponizing spurious claims of antisemitism in an effort to discourage teaching and speech at the university that’s critical of the Israeli government and the war in Gaza. It’s an effort, these critics say, spurred on by a handful of conservative and powerful donors, a U.S. House committee’s investigation into antisemitism at Penn, and the Trump administration, who have all appeared to adopt an overly broad and false definition of antisemitism. (My interview request with the OREI was declined. When I asked via email for specific metrics on the Title VI Office, including the ratio of alleged instances of antisemitic conduct versus other forms of bias, I received a vague response that appeared to merely reiterate the broad mission statement found on the OREI website.)
The complaint came from a student in a class Carter was teaching in the fall of 2024 in the doctorate in clinical social work program at Penn’s School for Social Policy & Practice. A course on the history of psychoanalysis, it was essentially a class on the history of Jewish intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it covered such thinkers as Anna and Sigmund Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Heinz Kohut, who all fled Nazi persecution, and Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, key figures of the Frankfurt School who provided foundational theories on the rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. Carter is also of Jewish heritage. But Carter assigned one reading about a Palestinian father named Amjad being treated for a “globus hystericus”—a sensation of a ball in the throat. In the reading, the therapist, also Palestinian, concludes that the source of Amjad’s symptom is a traumatic experience he endured with his young daughter at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank. As Amjad and his daughter, who was just seven years old at the time, were being detained in their car, Amjad’s daughter urgently needed to pee. When Amjad asked if his daughter could use a bathroom, a soldier said she could “piss herself in the car.” And so Amjad held his daughter, who moments before had been singing a made-up song about a “bouncy ball” bouncing “over the wall,” as she wet herself.
Following the class, one of Carter’s students reported to the Title VI Office that, as a Jewish person, they felt alienated by the reading and the discussion. In the Zoom meeting addressing the complaint, Carter asked the supervisors—Jacqueline Corcoran (the director of the doctoral program) and Phyllis Solomon (a professor in administration)—to explain where the complaint was reported. “It’s a new initiative ... a university office that now handles this kind of thing,” said Corcoran, who then proceeded to tell Carter that the Title VI Office’s guidance was for Carter to provide balance in their course.
“So, there’s stuff about colonialism, and Palestine,” said Corcoran. “Then offering something about how psychodynamic theory also explains antisemitism. You know, for an example, that you just want to offer a counterbalance to different positions on where certain beliefs have come from.”
“Well, I mean, we’re just telling you what our advice is,” said Corcoran. “It might help students understand it more if it was current, like if you were talking about antisemitism as it plays out today.”
“I don’t know if they’ve accused you,” said Solomon. “All they’re saying is for the legislation …”
“Title VI,” said Corcoran.
“No, but it’s about issues of bias, so that’s why it came to that office,” said Corcoran.
“We can tell them that was your response, that’s fine,” said Corcoran coldly.
“Mhmm,” Corcoran coldly responded.
“Well, yeah, I don’t know what else to say about it,” said Corcoran, poker-faced.
“OK, well I’m hearing what you’re saying,” said Corcoran, again very coldly. “And we can relay that as well [to the Title VI Office].”
“It’s pure McCarthyism,” Carter told me after we finished viewing the recording, a more complete transcript of which can be read on Carter’s Substack. “And this behavior by administrators, by fellow professors, no less, just cannot co-exist with the normal exercise of academic freedom. And unfortunately, I think I was the canary in the coal mine for this.”
It’s true: In the time that has elapsed since Carter’s unceremonious departure from Penn, several more professors have been questioned by Penn’s Title VI Office for baseless claims of antisemitism. According to the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP—an organization that advocates for faculty, with a particular focus on academic freedom, shared governance, and working conditions—one was questioned over their peer-reviewed, scholarly research that referenced a third-party resource that a complainant claimed, without evidence, was antisemitic; another was summoned to the Title VI Office for appearing at an off-campus event wearing a stole bearing the Palestinian flag; while others were questioned about political statements made on their personal social media accounts.
Grundy then recounted the example of a colleague who spent an inordinate amount of time and effort agonizing over how to frame one bullet point that touched on Israel in a lecture. The colleague even sent Grundy the slide so that she could help bulletproof it against any potential misinterpretation.
According to a survey conducted this year by researchers at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, such self-censorship among Middle East scholars is rampant. In the United States, 77 percent of respondents reported feeling the need to censor themselves when speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an academic or professional capacity. Of that 77 percent, 81 percent said they self-censored their criticism of Israel, compared with just 11 percent who said they self-censored their criticism of Palestine.
“One thing that has certainly happened is complainants who aren’t affiliated with the university see something that upsets them,” she said. “And then they start calling colleagues, and chairs, and deans. Then that well-meaning chair or dean or whatever goes to the Title VI Office, saying, ‘Hey, I got this harassing email from someone upset about this thing that my colleague posted on social media. What do I do?’ And then that’s now taken as a complaint from someone inside the university. That’s how these external complaints, some from far-right-wing activists, get laundered as internal.”
“The Title VI Office incentivizes right-wing activists to make accusations because as soon as they make an accusation, it has to be investigated,” he told me. “Because if the institution doesn’t investigate, that in itself makes the institution look antisemitic. Out of 100 complaints, 99 might be bullshit, but it doesn’t matter because it’s going to create the climate they want—a climate of anticipatory compliance. And Trump is using it.”
Marcus would later bring his ideas to Trump’s first presidential administration as assistant secretary of education in the Office of Civil Rights—the same federal office responsible for investigating alleged Title VI violations on college campuses. And in 2026, the second Trump administration appears to be continuing Marcus’s strategy with its investigation of Penn for allegedly creating an antisemitic work environment. The evidence is apparently so thin that Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has resorted to subpoenaing Penn for a list of its Jewish faculty and students in what appears to be a fishing expedition.
Huda Fakhreddine is a professor of Arabic literature at Penn. She was born and raised in Lebanon. Since September 2023, when she co-organized the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on the Penn campus, she’s been doxxed and subjected to death and rape threats both at her office and at her home; she’s been offered police escorts on campus and had police patrolling outside her home; members of the Penn community have called for her firing and deportation; she’s been investigated by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for charges of antisemitism; and called out by name in a congressional hearing as dangerous. “I keep reminding myself that this is happening to me because I was involved in a literature festival,” Fakhreddine told me. “And I insist it was a literature festival. It was a cultural event. There was music, food, children’s literature, poetry….”
But critics of the event pointed to the inclusion of Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd who’s been an outspoken critic of Israel and accused of repeated antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League, and Marc Lamont Hill, a professor with the CUNY Graduate Center and a news commentator who was fired from CNN for statements concerning Israel and Palestine, as evidence that the festival was offensive and hostile to Jewish members of the Penn community.
“Penn lives in an ecosystem where its highly attracted to private donations,” said Tulia Falleti, a professor of political science at the school who resigned as chair of the Penn Faculty Senate in protest after administrators broke up the pro-Palestinian encampment by force. “All universities choose to develop these very strong ties with donors. But Penn also has a very quasi-symbiotic relationship with the financial sector of New York. It’s partially because of Wharton. There’s this class of very wealthy alumni who donate, and who provide high-paying jobs to Penn graduates. They have outsized influence, and from time to time they exert their pressure on Penn.”
That same fall, Penn administrators started to take a harder stance against programming that could offend its donors. The progressive Jewish student group Penn Chavurah was barred from screening Israelism, a documentary by Jewish American filmmakers critical of the Israeli government. When they screened the film anyway, the vice provost of university life threatened disciplinary action. Meanwhile, donors started singling out professors by name. After Anne Norton, a political science professor, was called out by pro-Israel activists for her pro-Palestinian tweets, the private equity investor Henry Jackson and his wife, Stacey, pulled funding from Norton’s professorship. Fakhreddine alleges that the following month, January 2024, television producer Dick Wolf, whose name adorns Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center, used her as the basis for an antisemitic and homicidal professor on an episode of Law & Order. And on March 28, 2024, a group of alumni and students sent a letter to Magill’s successor, current Penn president J. Larry Jameson, demanding sanctions for eight professors—including Fakhreddine and Norton—citing alleged antisemitic conduct.
When I asked Fakhreddine if the scrutiny and harassment has affected her teaching, she was defiant. “I teach poetry, and I will always teach it the way it needs to be taught,” she told me. “I will not censor myself because there’s somebody on the other side who’s ignorant and racist and bigoted.”
“The Palestinian students were very quiet in class,” she said. She asked them why. “They told me they were afraid that the self-identifying Jewish students would report them to the Title VI Office for antisemitism, and then that could result in Marco Rubio taking their visa away.”
“Even the Middle East?” Troutt Powell asked him.
Troutt Powell said that afterward Trodden came up to her, and she said, “Mark, that’s crazy!”
While other universities are having similar challenges, what sets Penn apart is Marc Rowan’s relationship with Trump, who is also a graduate of Penn’s Wharton School. According to The New York Times, Rowan was the chief architect of the White House’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The compact was sent to nine of the nation’s top universities—Penn included—last fall; benefits including federal research funds were promised to those institutions that signed on to its conservative priorities. Among those priorities: limiting the number of foreign students and vetting those students for “noxious values such as antiSemitism”; “abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”; and adopting a heavily restrictive policy on campus protests. Many of the ideas in the compact were taken directly from a document Rowan circulated to Penn’s board of trustees amid the campus furor over antisemitism in the fall of 2023.
“People now are extremely careful about what they say and what they have in class,” said Norton. “Not just junior professors and not just adjuncts. Everybody from top to bottom is scared.”
Many of the professors I spoke to also allege that, through attrition, the Penn administration appears to be slowly but surely ridding its curriculum of courses that its donors and the Trump administration may find offensive. Norton, who taught Muslim political thought, told me she officially resigned this past fall under pressure from alumni and the board of trustees. She’s skeptical that the university will replace her expertise. Troutt Powell is also due to retire soon and doubts she will be replaced. “I’m very worried about what’s going to happen to the field of Middle East studies,” said Troutt Powell, adding that, with war in Iran, their expertise is needed now more than ever.
“I know Penn is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Troutt Powell. “I get that, you know, they’re trying to deal with this crazy president. What in God’s name are you supposed to do? But one thing you do, I think, is you take a breath and remember that your responsibility is to your university community.”
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