Progress Update

March 13, 2024

Section I: Overview

The Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community was convened and charged on December 20, 2023 by Interim President J. Larry Jameson. The Commission was tasked to address bias, discrimination, and hate on campus as Penn strives to be a community that leads with care and compassion. Specifically, the Commission was charged to:

• Listen and Understand: Engage broadly and deeply to better understand how Penn students, staff, and faculty experience hate and discrimination and how they believe Penn can move towards being a broadly inclusive community.
• Consider What it Means to be a Penn Citizen: Examine what it means to be a responsible and engaged Penn Citizen and recommend strategies for how to foster such behaviors and norms.
• Recommend Strategies to Build and Strengthen Community: Recommend strategies about how to reinforce and strengthen Penn's sense of community through education and engagement.
• Recommend Strategies to Address and Counter Hate: Recommend strategies about how to support Penn community members who have been impacted by hate and how best to counter hate on campus.

The full charge can be found in Appendix A.

The Commission is co-chaired by Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics for Penn Engineering, and Katharine Strunk, Dean and George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education for the Graduate School of Education. The Commission consists of 19 members, including students, faculty, staff, alumni, and Trustees, and two ex-officio members. A full list of the Commission membership can be found in Appendix B.

 

Section II: Summary of Work to Date

Gathering Community Input

The Commission is invested in gathering input from the Penn Community to help shape its work. On January 18th, the co-chairs of the Commission reached out to the Penn Community through email to encourage individuals to share their ideas, experiences, and perspectives with the Commission through a dedicated email address (presidential-commission@upenn.edu). A similar request for ideas was shared in a Penn Today story published the same day.

The Commission is also reaching out to small groups of stakeholders as well as hosting open listening sessions with students, postdoctoral researchers, staff, and faculty. These listening sessions will occur throughout the months of March and April 2024 and will help the Commission develop the recommendations in the final report.

Commission Meetings and Learning Sessions

Leading up to the interim report, the Commission held six meetings spanning seventeen hours. In addition to these meetings, Commission members have participated in discussions in subgroups and individual conversations with the co-chairs and relevant members of the Penn community. Our meetings also included learning sessions from various experts and planning for and drafting the interim report.

Experts presented to the Commission on various topics including open expression, education programs, student wellness, religious life on campus, community standards and accountability, diversity efforts, student, faculty, and staff life on campus, safety, and the work of Penn’s Antisemitism Task Force.

The Commission also engaged Keystone Civic Ventures to provide a training called “Can We Talk?” to its members. The training focused on how to engage in civil dialogue and ideas on how we might provide similar training to members of the Penn community.

Section III: Preliminary Recommendations

The Presidential Commission is focusing on four critical areas pertaining to combatting hate and building community at Penn: Education, Research, Community and Values, and Open Expression and Free Speech. We have organized ourselves into subcommittees to address each area and develop recommendations in each of these categories. We are exploring actionable ideas that might be acted upon quickly while considering others that might form the basis of longer-term efforts.

While we continue to get input and suggestions from the community through in-person and virtual small group listening sessions and surveys, our framework will lead to recommendations for a broad multi-year strategy to strengthen the Penn community through an interwoven set of education and community-oriented activities. We recognize that building a broad portfolio of aligned initiatives will take substantial coordination, planning, and time. However, we are convinced that Penn can begin rolling out offerings to help rebuild campus community while planning for longer-term initiatives that will enable us to take a stance of continuous improvement, acknowledging that there will be a need to learn from early efforts and refine them to adjust to the evolving needs of the Penn community over time.

Our current framework for recommendations has five focus areas.

1. Orientation Programs: We are reviewing undergraduate student, graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, staff, and faculty orientation programs and exploring new programming that might be offered as early as Fall 2024. These programs might incorporate discussions of open expression guidelines, responsibilities as members of the Penn community, Penn’s values and what it means to be a “Penn Citizen,” and holding dialogues across differences.
2. Education and Learning: Because we know that learners are often overwhelmed during packed orientation sessions and true understanding is best achieved through repeated interaction with content, we are exploring the best form for providing additional learning opportunities throughout the year for students, postdocs, staff, and faculty that can incorporate Penn-wide as well as school-specific programming. In addition to new curricular offerings, we also expect that education may take the form of webinars, conversations or forums on contemporary controversies, and massive open online courses (MOOCs) that can provide historical context for understanding critical current international, national, and local issues.
3. Building Community: We believe it is necessary to take direct and planful action to build community across groups of Penn citizens. In our discussions, we noted that because of Penn’s decentralized nature, members of the broader Penn community are often siloed and may not feel included in Penn-wide initiatives. We will identify a set of activities that will begin to build a shared community, climate, and culture at Penn. Central to this is the task of bringing the community together to develop a shared set of “Penn Core Values.” By levering existing resources for institutional research and analysis, we should ensure the thorough and regular collection of data pertaining to Penn’s community culture and climate. These data will help Penn leaders understand how to continuously improve campus culture and climate to create a stronger sense of belonging and community. We also envision organizing campus-wide activities that bring students from across schools and years together with faculty, staff, and postdocs. These activities may take the form of “Penn Spirit Days” or other targeted actions intended to create a stronger sense of belonging to the larger Penn Community. Another way to build community might be via the establishment of University-wide awards and recognitions for members of the Penn community who exemplify Penn’s values and can help bring us together as a community.
4. Increased Coordination to Support Student Success at Penn: While each school implements programs to support student success and increase access for students with diverse lived experiences at Penn, the University would benefit from greater coordination at the central university-wide level. We suggest a new central structure that assesses each school’s efforts in these areas, identifies gaps, and leverages school-based assets so that best practices and opportunities can be scaled across schools and centers, capitalizing on synergies across schools for central implementation.
5. Information and Communication: While there are a multitude of resources already available at the central level at Penn as well as by the individual schools, the University should consider an information and communication campaign to increase the entire Penn community’s awareness of the resources and services available to students, postdocs, faculty, and staff (e.g., for wellness, campus life, guidelines for conduct, restorative practices, and campus safety). Further, these communications need to be consistent and ongoing to be effective.

Appendix A: Charge

Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community
Charge to the Commission | December 20, 2023

Reporting directly to the President and chaired by Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering, and Katharine Strunk, Dean of the Graduate School of Education and George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education, the Presidential Commission will address bias, discrimination and hate on campus as we strive to be a community that leads with care and compassion. Recent events have revealed challenges with Antisemitism and Islamophobia, but the Commission will address the interconnectedness of all forms of hate and bias.

The Presidential Commission will provide critical feedback that will shape Penn’s ongoing efforts, and it is charged to:

• Listen and Understand: Engage broadly and deeply to better understand how Penn students, staff and faculty experience hate and discrimination and how they believe Penn can move towards being a broadly inclusive community.
• Consider What it Means to be a Penn Citizen: Examine what it means to be a responsible and engaged Penn Citizen and recommend strategies for how to foster such behaviors and norms.
• Recommend Strategies to Build and Strengthen Community: Recommend strategies about how to reinforce and strengthen Penn's sense of community through education and engagement.
• Recommend Strategies to Address and Counter Hate: Recommend strategies about how to support Penn community members who have been impacted by hate and how best to counter hate on campus.

In forming these recommendations, the Presidential Commission will consult with campus leaders and local, regional, and national subject matter experts. The Presidential Commission will also be expected to serve as a resource for other campus leaders, including those who are advancing key tenets of Penn’s Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism.

In beginning its work, the Presidential Commission should develop a workplan that operationalizes the above charge. The Presidential Commission will be expected to submit an interim report with recommendations no later than February 15, 2024. Following submission of this interim report, the President will consult with Deans Kumar and Strunk to determine an appropriate date to submit a final set of recommendations. Rapid response recommendations on issues or items assessed to be urgent are welcome and may be made through the Chairs.

Finally, members of the Presidential Commission are expected to serve as University citizens —to consult broadly; to engage in respectful, meaningful, and substantive dialogue; and to strive for common ground and consensus in the face of disagreement.

Appendix B: Commission Membership

Co-chairs:

Vijay Kumar
Nemirovsky Family Dean and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, School of Engineering and Applied Science

Katharine Strunk
Dean and George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education

Faculty and Staff:

Sigal Ben-Porath
Faculty Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program and MRMJJ Presidential Professor at the Graduate School of Education

Tonya Bennett
Director of Educational Technology at the School of Veterinary Medicine

Joretha (Jerri) Bourjolly
Associate Dean for Inclusion and Associate Professor/Clinical Educator at the School of Social Policy & Practice

Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Diane v.S. Levy & Robert M. Levy University Professor, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School

Martine Haas
Anthony L. Davis Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute for Management & International Studies, and the Lauder Chair Professor and Professor of Management at the Wharton School

Sara Jacoby
Associate Professor of Nursing and Assistant Professor of Nursing in Surgery at the School of Nursing

Fariha Khan
Co-Director of the Asian American Studies program at the School of Arts and Sciences

Steve Kocher
Senior Associate Chaplain and Director of the Spiritual & Religious Life Center

Hikaru Kozuma
Vice Provost for University Life

Harun Küçük
Associate Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the School of Arts and Sciences

Joseph E. Lowry
Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences

Joann Mitchell 
Senior Vice President for Institutional Affairs and Chief Diversity Officer

Josephine Park
School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English

Barbie Zelizer
Director of the Center for Media at Risk and the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication

Student Representatives

Ranim Albarkawi
Vice President of the Undergraduate Assembly, fourth-year student at the School of Arts and Sciences

Adina Goldstein, Ed.D.
Candidate in the Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education Division at the Graduate School of Education

Alumni and Trustee Representatives

Osagie Imasogie
Member of the Board of Trustees, Chair of the Penn Carey Law’s Board of Advisors, and Penn Carey Law School alumnus

Joan Lau
Member of the Board of Trustees and a School of Engineering and Applied Science and Wharton alumna

Harlan Stone
Member of the Board of Trustees and a College of Arts and Sciences alumnus

Ex-Officio Wendy White
Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Mark Wolff
Morton Amsterdam Dean of the School of Dental Medicine and Chair of the Antisemitism Task Force.

Staff to the Commission

Jennifer Bieter
Director of Fiscal Operations, Office of the Executive Vice President

Rebecca Hayward
Executive Director of Penn Engineering Online, School of Engineering and Applied Science