No Need to Wait for Project 2025, Genocide 2024 Kamala Harris Fascism Comes to U Penn – Petition Opposing Campus Repression at U Penn
The University of Pennsylvania administration has allowed armed police to terrorize their own students for exercising their right to principled protest. The repeated use of excessive force against Penn students reached a new precipice on Friday October 18th at 6 am, when twelve Penn Police officers in tactical gear — along with one Philadelphia Police officer — armed with semi-automatic rifles and pistols, raided the off-campus home of Penn student organizers who advocate for Palestine.
Penn Police is the largest private police department in the state of Pennsylvania and one of the largest in the country. Its increasing policing and surveillance of Penn and West Philadelphia community members and its ongoing patrolling outside its university-area jurisdiction is unacceptable. It has become a renegade police department with no oversight from university administration.
According to reporting by The Intercept, in the early morning hours of Oct. 18th, police armed with rifles and pistols entered the home of several Penn students while refusing to show a warrant, threatened to break down the door, and pointed rifles and handguns at students’ heads. They took one student into the Penn Police station for questioning, seized their personal device, and later released the student with no charges. These actions were disproportionate to the stated justification: an investigation of vandalism on campus. Students could have been shot or killed.
This incident is the latest in Penn’s escalation of actions against student organizers advocating for Palestine. On September 27, a few dozen students gathered on Locust Walk to read poetry and mourn the dead amid Israel’s bombing in Lebanon. Students and faculty were immediately surrounded by Penn police, who accused them of trespassing on their own campus and threatened them with arrest. After the vigil, two students wearing hijabs reported being followed home by a police officer.
Similarly excessive use of police force was used to threaten and ultimately disperse the Gaza Solidarity Encampment of last April and a sit-in protest and peaceful building occupation in May. Students were injured with dislocated shoulders, massive bruising, head concussions, and were tased by police. Afterwards, the administration imposed sanctions on roughly 30 students for their involvement in the encampment, suspending half a dozen.
The use of police to intimidate and disperse has not been limited to large gatherings. Police have detained students for chalking on the ground with water-soluble chalk, they have disciplined students for quiet study-ins in the library, they have met robust educational sit-ins such as the Freedom School in Houston Hall with threats of arrest, and they have surveilled students at the bequest of the Vice Provost for University Life, whose staff IDs and then reports them to the student disciplinary office to be subject to probation and suspension. All of this intimidation and harassment is in clear violation of the University’s own Guidelines, which state that protests must be dealt with in non-emergency situations solely by negotiation with students, never by threatening arrest or force via police.
Meanwhile, College Green remains barricaded. Penn police are ubiquitous and counter-terrorism vans have become a familiar sight. Penn has taken these measures in the name of keeping students on campus safe, but these measures terrorize students, making them afraid to walk to their classrooms, and now, even to live and sleep in their own homes.
This pattern of violence and intimidation has been facilitated in part by the new Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations, instituted in June 2024 after the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was violently disbanded. The guidelines prohibit encampments, overnight demonstrations, the use of spray-chalk or light projections on campus buildings, and require any outdoor non-academic event, rally, or protest to be reserved two weeks in advance. These guidelines were not produced by a process of shared governance, but instead created and instituted ad hoc to effectively ban Palestine solidarity protests on campus.These “standards” are illegitimate, and threaten to destroy the basic free speech protections that have governed this university for more than fifty years.
Although the Penn administration has recently endorsed a policy of “institutional neutrality” their behavior is not, and never has been, neutral on the question of Palestine. For over a year, Penn administrators have abdicated their responsibility to open expression, academic freedom, intellectual debate, and student safety when it comes to protests expressing solidarity with Palestine, or criticisms of Israel. Administrators have violated the university’s principles and open expression guidelines, and allowed university and Philadelphia police to intimidate, harass, and physically injure students, making campus and its surroundings an increasingly militarized space.
As concerned Penn and Philadelphia community members, we condemn Penn’s continued repression and terrorization of student organizers for Palestine.
We demand a formal, public investigation of Kathleen Shields Anderson, Vice President of the Division of Public Safety, Detective Paul Guercio, and the other officers who authorized and led the raid on October 18.
We call on the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Senate to issue a resolution for the immediate repeal of the Temporary Standards and Procedures for Campus Events and Demonstrations.
We call on the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Senate to initiate a vote of no confidence in the university administrators responsible for militarizing the campus environment: Interim President Larry Jameson, Provost John Jackson, and Vice Provost of University Life Karu Kozuma.
***
Names collected through this petition will not be publicly shared by PennFJP.
