I'm Resigning in Protest from the University of Pennsylvania. Oh, and I'm Suing Them.
The University of Pennsylvania, where I am a lecturer, recently announced that it is capitulating to the Trump Administration’s demand that it ban transgender women from participation in women’s sports teams, in order to retain its federal funding. This is, on its own, a morally reprobate act of cowardice. But Penn is capitulating in a particularly malign, pathetic way. According to the Associated Press, “Penn agreed to restore all individual Division I swimming records and titles to female athletes who lost out to [Lia] Thomas, the Education Department said. Penn also agreed to send a personalized apology letter to each of those swimmers.1”. This cowardly decision is just the most recent in a series of cowardly decisions in which Penn has bowed to the will of a fascist government in order to preserve itself, at the expense of the students and faculty to whom it has an ethical obligation.
I am resigning in protest, effective immediately, from all of my remaining contractual commitments to Penn, which include chairing two doctoral dissertations and serving as a reader on several others. But I am not in a position to resign from the doctoral course on psychoanalysis I have taught at Penn for the last three years, because several weeks ago they informed me that they would not renew my contract for that course, in what I contend is associational and viewpoint discrimination and retaliation for my teaching about Palestinians.
Herein lies a (much) longer story, one I will tell below. I am sharing it publicly in an effort to be in solidarity with people who have been discriminated against and betrayed by the university—people like Lia Thomas, and like other faculty members who have been punished for their scholarship, and like students who were disciplined for their participation in encampment protests or for being an imperfect victim in some other way, and like the research associates and postdocs who are currently fighting for a union against Penn’s intense anti-union opposition.
I do not aim to make myself a story here, but rather to contribute my share of evidence to a larger story that is being told about this university and its unconscionable bending of the knee to a fascist government. I am under no illusion that my telling this story will make a dent in the problem in the near term. As a historian, I am hoping to lodge this story in the historical record, for a time in the future when people are studying this moment the way current historians study the first Red Scare and McCarthyism. I hope this will become a primary source someday.
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In 2022, I began teaching Clinical Theory 1, a course on psychoanalysis, in the Doctorate in Clinical Social Work program at Penn’s School for Social Policy and Practice (SP2). I have a tenure-track appointment at another school—a Massachusetts public college where I have strong First Amendment protections and a fierce union, which is part of why I feel comfortable being public about my experience at Penn, where I had no such protections. Penn was my side job; it paid well, it gave me access to an extraordinary library and other resources, and it let me teach a course I really loved to advanced students who could use the ideas we learned to do a lot of good.
My course on psychoanalysis is, to a significant extent, a course on Jewish intellectual history, one in which we read many leading Jewish thinkers from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Many of these thinkers—people like Sigmund and Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Heinz Kohut, and others—fled Nazi persecution. Some—like Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm—became leading theorists of antisemitism and fascism in the process, scholars whose work on those topics is still widely read and seen as crucial to understanding antisemitism and fascism today. Since so much of the course involves reading often-abstruse old theory, every week has one contemporary paper that students can read (often with greater ease) to see how the relevant concepts apply today.
Because this is a course surveying great thinkers of psychoanalysis, we focus on people who have been particularly influential in the field, both historical figures and current scholars. Because the psychoanalytic tradition in which I work—variously called psychosocial studies or social psychoanalysis—is interested in all forms of authoritarianism and abuse, from the despotic abusive parent to the despotic abusive dictator(ship), we focus on psychoanalytic thinkers who have worked to understand that theme. Such thinkers include the aforementioned Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno, as well as Frantz Fanon, all keystone scholars on these issues in the 20th-century canon; they also include my friends Lara and Stephen Sheehi, who have done pathbreaking and award-winning work studying psychoanalysis as it is practiced under occupation in Palestine, and other scholars who have written about psychoanalysis from Black, Latine, Asian American, and queer perspectives.
In my course last year, amidst over 50 readings by and/or about European Jews2, I assigned two brief segments of one chapter of the Sheehi’s book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine. The two segments report the case of a patient named Amjad, a Palestinian father from the West Bank who came to a clinic to see a Palestinian therapist, whose treatment of Amjad was supervised by an Israeli analyst. Amjad is a strikingly, classically Freudian patient—he is neurotic, and presents with what Freud called a “globus hystericus,” a sensation of a ball in his throat, a symptom straight out of 19th-century Vienna.
In the book, Amjad’s therapist, Yoa’d, recounts her experience conducting what I would see as a quite straightforward, even rather old-fashioned psychoanalytic treatment. In the Freudian mode, she seeks to identify the unconscious source of Amjad’s conspicuous symptom—which turns out to be a horrifying traumatic incident in which Amjad and his young daughter are assailed at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. Amjad’s daughter has to pee, urgently; the soldiers tell Amjad that she can “piss herself in the car.” Amjad holds his daughter tightly while she does so, only moments after she had been singing a made-up song—“bouncy ball, over the wall.”
I use this particular reading for several reasons. Chiefly, it is because it provides a clear, memorable illustration of concepts from ego psychology (e.g. defense mechanisms, symptom formation) and attachment theory (e.g. mentalization, mutual regulation) in a contemporary context. In other words, I assign this reading for the same basic reason I choose all my readings—because it is pedagogically useful, a consequential contribution to its field, and offers something compelling for students to explore.
In 2022, the first year I taught this reading, Lara Sheehi was kind enough to join the course for a guest lecture; students generally reported that this was the highlight of the course for them, something I tried rather hard not to take personally. The second year I taught this reading, the class session for which it was assigned fell on October 10th, 2023.
As you might imagine, that proved complicated. For the most part, students were able to make great use of the coincidental but timely opportunity to explore a Palestinian’s experience of oppression and traumatization at the hands of the state, at a historical moment that drew attention to how commonplace such experiences are—commonplace enough to inspire some people to violence, as happened just days before, on October 7th, and commonplace enough that the colossal military assault on Gaza did not strike anyone as surprising or out of character.
Still, students were not universally in a place to do this work. Two wrote to me prior to class saying they might not be able to handle it, and I gave them my blessing to do whatever made sense for their self-care. At least one still found it quite hard, and said something to the effect of “I can’t think about a Palestinian right now,” which struck me as quite bigoted, but I let it pass without comment because it was clearly coming from a place of pain and reactivity.
After that day, the class dynamic soured. I was given to understand that some students started saying particularly hostile, sexually derogatory things about me in their group chat; I cannot confirm this, but multiple students told me so. I worked quite closely with my chair and an associate dean with responsibility for DEI concerns to navigate the fractious moment in a way that was pedagogically useful; with a couple of exceptions, I was roundly praised in my student evaluations and by my colleagues for this. Most everyone involved seem to feel we had stuck the landing.
Before I taught the course again in 2024, my chair asked me if I would be assigning the Psychoanalysis Under Occupation reading again. I said that I would3, because it remained a uniquely useful text, and one that students generally reported finding very challenging and edifying. We did not discuss the matter any further.
Then, in the fall of 2024, after we read it again, I was called into a meeting with my department chair and another administrator. When I asked what the meeting was to be about, I was told: “1) a complaint that's been filed with the Title VI office; 2) grading; and 3) the type of dissertation projects that are acceptable.”
It was obvious to me that this meeting was perilous. It improperly linked two areas that are squarely in the realm of my academic freedom—my grading, and the dissertation research I supervise—with a disciplinary complaint, which creates an obvious threat and impingement upon my academic freedom. It also struck me as an effort to establish a pretext for future discipline. As a faculty union organizer, I had seen this play run many times before; I was ready.
Consequently, I insisted that I should be allowed to bring a representative of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors to the meeting. AAUP reps are charged with advocating for faculty academic freedom; in particular, AAUP reps are often tenured faculty members who can help advocate for the interests of faculty who, like me, do not have tenure to protect our academic freedom. My chair repeatedly refused my request to bring an AAUP rep to the meeting; eventually, the dean of SP2, Sally Bachman, summarily said no: “It would not be appropriate for an additional faculty member to be present in this meeting. If you feel that you need support for the meeting, you may have someone from the Ombuds office or Restorative Practices, but that is it. I think there has been sufficient discussion regarding the attendees.” Importantly, neither the Ombuds office nor the Restorative Practices office is supposed to “support” me—they are supposed to be neutral, and the ombuds’ code of ethics actually demands as much.
In the end, I met with my chair (J) and another professor in administration (P) alone. I insisted that the meeting be recorded, and that the recording be shared with me. While the file was not shared with me in a manner that could be downloaded, I nonetheless transcribed it verbatim—because, again, this is not my first rodeo. Here is the transcript of the relevant section of the meeting.
J: So, um, our other topic is about the complaint that was made. And you know, it’s not new, right, it’s what we heard last year as well, um, a student just feeling that, y’know, that there’s, an agenda, or they feel sort of alienated in the class, and um, don’t feel like they can speak up, because of the Palestinian, Israel, crisis.
C: So can you tell me what they said?
J: I mean, I mean, I don’t really know more than that, actually. I mean, what I heard was . . .
[Cross-talk] the same complaint we heard last year, which was that. You did know about that.
C: But, help me understand this though, because y’know, presumably the complaint’s made to you?
J: It wasn’t made to me. It was--
C: So who was the complaint made to?
J: It was made to the university office. You know, we have some new university offices. I actually don’t re-, um, [P], do you, um?
P: Yeah, it was—
J: Anti-bias?
P: It had some specific name, um, it’s for dealing with both, I think, um, Jewish students and Palestinian students. The office is basically dealing with complaints with regard to those classes of people. And, it just started—
J: Yeah, it’s a new initiative. So this is different, uh, in that the complaint was made to a different place, it was a university office, that now handles this kind of thing.
C: But they haven’t said anything to me.
J: The particular student?
C: Neither the student nor that office.
J: Okay, yeah.
[cross-talk]
J: Well I think the student had, has, you know, spoken to you, I can’t really—
C: I don’t know who they are.
J:--Name, but I do believe that, you know, you had a discussion with the student around these kinds of issues.
C: If I don’t know who they are, I can’t really—
J: You know, nothing was given to us.
P: No, we weren’t given anything.
J: It was just that it was the same kind of thing that happened last year, with a Jewish student feeling alienated. And, um, y’know, their advice is to provide balance in the course. So—
C: What does that mean?
J: So, there’s stuff about colonialism, and Palestine, 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, y’know, certain beliefs have come from.
C: But why are they not conveying that to me?
J: I don’t know. Why do you think?
P: I have no idea.
C: Because you see, like, y’know, there’s not really any—I’m not sure how I can meaningfully respond if I—
P: Well it’s not asking you to respond. What they informed us is, y’know, we’re not telling you you can’t do what you do. What we’re saying is, there needs to be a balance, that if you’re gonna do this, fine, but, just recognize that, for equality, you have to balance it, with other content—
C: Who—
P: That—
C: Who defines balance though?
P: That you offer a perspective on both Palestinian and antisemitism, so that it’s balanced.
C: Do we—
P: I don’t know, you can’t put a number on balance—
C: It’s an operational—
P: --Readings and discussions that focuses on both.
C: Here—there’s a lot that could be said about this. One is that the idea of “both” is problematic in various ways, but another is that, if you’re to look at my syllabus, it’s primarily a course about Jewish intellectual history.
P: Well yeah, psychoanalysis! Freud!
C: Yeah.
J: But that doesn’t mean that antisemitism doesn’t exist now.
C: But I also teach very extensively about fascism and the Holocaust in this course, in the version of the syllabus that students had this term. They read Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, from “The Mass Psychology of—”, they read substantially, orders of magnitude more from both Jewish intellectuals and about Jewish diasporic intellectual history, and about antisemitism, and Nazism, and the Holocaust, they read substantially more about that in this course than they ever read about Palestine. So the idea that there’s an—again, I’m not actually conceding the concept of “imbalance” as legitimate, but even according to what I would infer is this office’s vision of “balance,” if anything the balance very substantially favors Jewish intellectual history, and antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. So I guess what I’m suggesting is that the premise is not legitimate. The premise of the complaint is not legitimate.
J: Well, I mean, we’re just telling you what our advice is. It might help students understand it more if it was more current, like if you were talking about antisemitism as it plays out today and, y’know, I don’t know all your readings, I haven’t read them, and I’m not going to.
C: Yeah, I don’t blame you, they don’t want to either.
J: Yeah, uh, looks like a lot to wade through.
[Cross-talk]
C: There’s a process problem here though. This is—again, I’m lodging this with you because you’re the people who called me to this meeting and who are speaking to me, right? But as a matter of process, it’s not, it’s not appropriate for another office on, in this institution to accuse me of bias without having any specific evidence—
P: I don’t know if they’ve accused you. They aren’t, they, as far as we know, they—our understanding, at least mine, they didn’t find, all they’re saying is for the legislation, and if you’re saying you already do it, I don’t know if they looked at the syllabus—
C: What legislation? Again, I haven’t seen this.
P: Right, yeah, it, but it, um, is it Title 6 that this falls?
J: Title 6, yeah.
C: Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act, but Title 6 doesn’t tell me what to teach, though.
J: No. But it’s about issues of bias, so that’s why it came to that office.
P: Yeah, this office I think deals just with Title 6 stuff.
C: So is there a disciplinary consideration here?
P: No.
J: There wasn’t! It was just more just to talk to you, and their advice was to offer, to suggest, balance, um, and, y’know, that was all we knew about it, really, so.
C: I trust that you can see, though, how—we overuse this phrase “chilling effect,” right, to the point that it becomes not very meaningful, but like this is precisely the sort of thing that has like a chilling effect on academic freedom, particularly for an adjunct faculty member.
J: Well, I mean, I think sometimes students need some things a little bit more explicit, I don’t know, I don’t know if it means current day because they see the history in a different light than they do how things play out now, I’m not sure, y’know, I’m not sure based on, y’know.
P: It’s not saying you can’t do what you do. If you already do this balance, I don’t know—
C: Who defines “balance?” This is my whole thing. Is there a Balance Committee?
P: I don’t know. I don’t even know if they looked at the syllabus, this office, I have no idea.
J: Mhmm.
P: I don’t know what they—
C: But you see what I’m saying though, right? On whose authority is balance defined?
P: That I can’t tell you.
J: We can tell them that was your response, that’s fine.
C: To the extent that, I don’t know what you need to tell them or don’t, I don’t know about the rules and regs here, but y’know . . . we’re in a climate in this institution where it can feel like any invocation of the existence of Palestinian people is seen by some people as “unbalanced.” But I can’t possibly help that.
J: Mhmm.
C: Like, if someone is unsatisfied with my treatment of antisemitism despite my teaching some of the greatest Jewish intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the leading experts on antisemitism and fascism, and me being the author of literally a forthcoming peer-reviewed book about fascism and antisemitism, like, I don’t know what further I can offer than that. Like . . .
J: You feel like you already address that.
C: And also as a Jewish faculty member, right? Like, there’s also like a, there’s a concern for me on that account, as well, right? That like, to what extent am I actually being impinged upon in some inappropriate way by this process?
J: Hmm.
C: And so the concern that I need to raise with you two is . . . Part of the reason that I was really very insistent on bringing an AAUP rep from the campus, which I still maintain is an extremely appropriate and that I do not for the life of me understand why that was not permissible, because Sally also never offered a rationale for that, is that this conversation that we’ve had today links my exercise of academic freedom, via the papers that I choose to assign, via the kinds of dissertations that I see as appropriate and supervise within the parameters of the Handbook, via my grading practices, those three concerns, those three matters, are precisely and squarely within the purview of my academic freedom. Right? And to then host, to call all three of those issues into question in a meeting that then is invoking a complaint made about me to an office that’s supposed to oversee federal civil rights complaints, is linking a disciplinary matter, you know—potentially or actually—with my exercise of academic freedom.
P: [Inaudible] reaction.
C: Federal civil rights complaints have a disciplinary implication, and they often do involve disciplinary action, and so—I don’t know how this office operates, it’s newly constituted, but when my chair says to me, a complaint has been made against you to the federal civil rights office of the institution, that is a disciplinary issue.
P: At least my understanding, from what we were told, was that there was no disciplinary action whatsoever. And that it was just—
C: Then why was that not shared with me? Or why was the text that was shared with you not shared with me?
P: Well, there was no text!
C: Then how did they tell you this?
P: We learned from Sally! We never talked to that office.
C: But you can see, surely you can imagine this from where I’m sitting here, right? How this would seem from my perspective? Like, I’m being called into a meeting with the invocation of an accusation that I have violated such and such regulation—
P: No, there was no, because they did not find—all they said was, that--
C: But then respectfully, if they did not find, you should not be talking to me about this, in this way. I think that’s inappropriate, and it’s an imposition on my academic freedom to link these considerations, and that if in fact there was no finding, that like—I don’t think that this is proper.
J: Well I don’t, y’know, we don’t know all the backstory, y’know, we don’t, and we were just told, y’know, just have a discussion. I think they just wanted this to be worked out more informally is what I—
C: But what does “worked out” mean?
J: What’s that?
C: What does “worked out” mean?
J: Well just for us to tell you about the balance issue, basically.
C: Yeah, but surely you see how that is a problem for my academic freedom, that like, y’know, some brand new body is constituted and positions itself as an authority on whether or not I am “balanced,” and then directs my supervisor—who has the power to appoint, reappoint me, or not—right? To institute disciplinary action, or not. That like, this thing that I did that wasn’t a thought crime but but could, nonetheless, I should be really careful not to do any thought crimes. Like, this is a problem.
J: Well, yeah, I don’t know what else to say about it.
C: Well, and there may be nothing further, but I can’t, I can’t in good conscience not, like, insist that that’s a problem. It is. Again, as an adjunct faculty member whose reappointment is conditional, for that to be the way in which this was brought to me, and to then be literally forbidden from bringing a colleague from the body on our campus that is supposed to advocate for faculty, including those of us who don’t have tenure protections, like I—I object to that. Um, and I think that that could be called a “mistake,” it could be an—"oh, we’ve never had this before”—I’m not bearing ill will in any way based on that, but to me, like . . . I don’t imagine it’s difficult for you to empathize with why that would have a . . . would really impinge upon my feeling of having academic freedom.
J: Okay, well I’m hearing what you’re saying, and we can relay that as well.
C: I would appreciate it if you would.
J: I’ve taken some notes and, we can relay that. Okay.
C: Because again, I have no dispositional desire to be the squeaky wheel here. Right? But of course, when you are the adjunct in the situation, like, you worry about reappointment, right?
Six months after this meeting, in early June of 2025, I received an e-mail from J telling me I was not being reappointed.
—
A complaint was made about me, but I could not know by whom. The complaint was found to be baseless, but nobody knew what evidence the office reviewing it (which was brand new) had or had not reviewed in order to determine its baselessness. Still, despite the complaint being baseless, the office felt entitled to counsel me to be “balanced”—without actually having determined that I wasn’t, and more to the point without having any meaningful definition of “balance” in which to ground that judgment. All of this was conveyed to me, thirdhand, by administrators who also reported that they had never read any of the readings on my syllabus, and wouldn’t, but who nonetheless felt inclined to advise that I must be “balanced,” which they defined as talking about antisemitism (which I do, a lot) if I’m going to talk about Palestinian suffering (which I do, a little). I told my chair that it was inappropriate to do this, because it put me in fear of not being reappointed, only for me to not be reappointed, allegedly because a full-time faculty member wanted to teach my course, even though not a single full-time faculty member in the school has substantial expertise in psychoanalysis, which is why I was hired to teach the course in the first place.
This is what fascism does. It creates a climate of fear that leads people with a little power to abuse it, for fear of being punished themselves. It leads institutions that purport to promote “social good” to perpetrate social ills. Indeed, it leads an Ivy League social work school that, in 2024, advertised itself as unerringly committed to “social justice” to cower before fascist language mandates and, in 2025, revise its website to insist on its now-unerring commitment to “social good.”
Fascism makes people irrational, spineless, and small. That’s what I was trying to teach students in my class at Penn, until they wouldn’t let me teach it anymore.
—
It is obvious that Penn only responds to legal threats, so I’m suing the bejeezus out of them.
This is a daunting proposition. Penn’s general counsel is WilmerHale, the most powerful law firm in America; their chief counsel from WilmerHale is Seth Waxman, who used to be the solicitor general of the United States. They have billions of dollars (for now), including the $175 million that the Trump Administration just gave them back for capitulation, and a passel of meddling billionaires like Bill Ackman, who helped orchestrate the ouster of the university’s erstwhile president, Liz Magill, and who is currently spending millions of dollars trying to torpedo the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani.
I, meanwhile, am a rural social worker who worries enough about how I’m going to pay my heating bill that I hit my Substack readers up for money in between cutting firewood that I scrounge when the power company leaves it at the side of the road. My lawyer, a very nice man, was not, unless I am very much mistaken, ever the solicitor-general of the United States.
This is not, in other words, a remotely fair fight. Penn doesn’t really do fair fights. But I’m picking it anyway because, as Diogenes had it, “in a rich man’s house, there is no place to spit but his face.”
You do not get to carry water for fascists, bulldozing vulnerable people in the process, without someone flinging a stone at you4.
Emphasis added.
I do not mean to propose an opposition between Jews and Palestinians here; I am simply foreshadowing an opposition that was later proposed by university administrators, one that I see as specious and bigoted along both anti-Palestinian and antisemitic lines.
In 2023, I also had a very short reading by the Sheehis on reading Fanon in Palestine; in 2024, I cut it for length, because the Fanon readings for the week were already so extensive.
Figuratively in this case!