Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
Editor’s note: A culture of rampant lawlessness has been steadily growing in American academia. Our nation’s universities have shamelessly put their pursuit of woke leftist ideology ahead of their loyalty and obedience to the laws of the United States of America and the principles of freedom and equality of opportunity that inform them. The Freedom Center is exposing the worst perpetrators of this illegal conduct as the Top Ten Academic Felons, and we will be highlighting one school a day as we count down from #10 to #1. The University of Pennsylvania is #4 on our list.
#4: The University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania has been one of the most critically scrutinized institutions of higher education over the past several years—and for good reason. The Ivy League university has repeatedly violated federal law, both by failing to protect its Jewish students from a hostile environment as is demanded by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and by championing men’s inclusion in women’s sports, in violation of Title IX.
Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testified before Congress claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission.” Despite these assertions, Penn persecuted one of its own, conservative law professor Amy Wax, for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.
Professor Wax was severely punished by the university and was suspended for one year at half pay, despite her status as a tenured professor. Meanwhile, Magill was presiding over a campus where professors openly celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre of innocent Israeli Jews and gleefully called for a global intifada.
Penn’s Jew hatred problem goes back considerably further than October 7. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Featured speakers included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite who enjoys dressing in Nazi garb. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.
The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer who attempted to justify a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, claiming that, “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants.” She added, “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”
Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum for Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”
Hoda Fakhreddine, one of the organizers of the festival who serves as a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn, invoked the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea,” and invoked anti-Semitic tropes, claiming that Jews control the media, and denied the fact of the Jewish people’s historic connection to the land of Israel.
Fakhreddine laughed off concerns that the presence of so many anti-Semites on campus might cause Jewish students at Penn to fear for their safety, dismissing them as “hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippahs.”
Fakhreddine also stunningly blamed the Jews for wanting “an extra country” claiming that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis, the climate of Jew hatred on campus only grew worse—and yet the Penn administration stood idly by and watched their own faculty side with Hamas while Jewish students suffered the consequences.
On October 16, 2023, a pro-Hamas front group, Penn Against the Occupation, held a “Collective Walk Out for Palestine.” During that event, a Jewish student was assaulted while putting on tefillin (boxes containing Torah verses used in prayer).
The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group that tracks anti-Semitism on campus, describes some of the other events that took place:
“A speaker claimed there were no ‘innocent civilians,’ since ‘all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and they will be targeted until the time in which one-state, a plura-national, secular and socialist state is formed on Palestine and you can either live there in peace or you can go back to Moscow, and Brooklyn and and f**king Berlin where you came from,’ and added, ‘I can never condemn the violence [against Jews].’”
“Comments by professors further condoned terrorism directed at Jews.”
“Chants that included ‘Intifada, Intifada,’ ‘Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied,’ and ‘Free Palestine.’”
“Another speaker stated, ‘Zionism is racism’ and ‘the only solution is a one state solution from the River to the Sea.’”
“According to reports mentioned in a lawsuit against the University, Professor Biareishyk ended his Russian history class early so that students could attend the walkout. Also according to the lawsuit, a student with a yarmulke was harassed by protestors, who called out ‘how does it feel to be a part of a mass genocide?’ Similar profanities were directed at another Jewish student who was wearing a Star of David necklace. Several students yelled to Jewish students to ‘get out of here k*kes!’ Three men, whose faces were covered by keffiyehs and who were standing at the outskirts of the rally, harassed a female Jewish student with statements of, ‘you’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die’; ‘you don’t deserve to be on the same earth that we stand on’; and ‘the Jews deserve everything that is happening to them.’”
Highlighting these various instances of Jew hatred and Penn’s failure to enforce existing campus rules against vile Hamas-supporting students and faculty, several Jewish students sued the university in federal court alleging its violation of Title VI.
One of those students filing the lawsuit was Eyal Yakoby, who has testified to witnessing illegal Jew hatred that was tolerated by the campus administration.
“I have seen and heard first-hand reports of individuals in the encampment, including students, committing acts of violence, intimidating and harassing Jewish students and faculty members, and inciting others to do the same,” Yakoby stated in his legal declaration.
“Those at the encampment have denied a campus rabbi and numerous others entry to the quad. I have also seen a video of a Jewish student, surrounded by campus protesters, who threatened him with ‘I hope you have good health insurance’ and ‘how’s your dental?’” Yakoby alleged. “I personally witnessed a police officer, after being assaulted by a protester, asking his sergeant whether he could arrest the individual, only to be told that the police do not have the authority to make arrests at the encampment.”
Yakoby and other students reported “these and other incidents” to members of the Penn administration but says they refused to act.
“Since the filing of the original complaint, students and professors at Penn have only become emboldened by Penn’s response (or lack thereof) to combat antisemitism,” Yakoby said. “Penn has proven that it is incapable of effectively addressing antisemitism or is unwilling to do so.”
A district court judge stunningly dismissed the initial lawsuit in June but allowed the plaintiffs the opportunity to refile an amended suit.
Penn’s record on illegally allowing men to participate in women’s college sports is as marred as its tolerance of anti-Semitism.
During the 2021-2022 athletic season, the University of Pennsylvania notified its women’s swim team that 6’4” male swimmer “Lia” (aka William) Thomas was transitioning to female and would thus join them in their locker room and pool.
Abiding by the Biden administration’s deeply flawed interpretation of Title IX which allowed an individual’s self-asserted “gender identity” to take precedence over their biological sex, Penn insisted that “Lia” be treated as a member of the women’s team in good standing and allowed to use the same locker rooms and training facilities and enter the same competitions. When female swimmers on the team expressed reservations, they were treated to lectures on kindness and inclusion and told that they were the problem.
A lawsuit filed by three former Penn female swimmers alleges that the university heavily promoted trans ideology and claimed that their concerns about sharing a locker room with Thomas were evidence of a “psychological problem.”
“The UPenn administrators told the women that if anyone was struggling with accepting Thomas’s participation on the UPenn Women’s team, they should seek counseling and support from CAPS and the LBGTQ center,” the women’s lawsuit states.
“The administrators also invited the women to a talk titled, ‘Trans 101.’ Thus, the women were led to understand that UPenn’s position was that if a woman on the team had any problem with a trans-identifying male being on her team that woman had a psychological problem and needed counseling,” the suit describes.
Not only were Penn’s female students told they were mentally disturbed for objecting to Thomas, a fully intact male, changing in their locker room, they were threatened with reputational harm if they dared to publicize their objections.
“The UPenn administrators went on to tell the women that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job,” the lawsuit claims.
Thomas’s male stature and strength also gave him an undeniable advantage over his female opponents. While he had been merely a passable swimmer on the men’s team, Thomas quickly shot to the top of the women’s leaderboard. “At the 2022 Ivy League Swimming Championships, Thomas came in first in the 500-, 200- and 100-yard freestyle races, setting pool and Ivy League records, and was ultimately the highest-scoring swimmer at the entire meet,” Fox News recounts.
From there, Thomas went on the NCAA Women’s Swimming Championships where he won the 500 yard freestyle individual title and tied for fifth place with the University of Kentucky’s Riley Gaines in the 200 yard freestyle event. Since there was only one fifth place trophy, the NCAA decided to award it to Thomas, giving Riley the sixth place award to hold for photo ops.
It was only during the summer of 2025 that the University of Pennsylvania, facing legal challenges from the new Trump administration over their handling of Title IX and other issues, finally apologized to the female swimmers that it had coerced into accepting a male as their teammate and updated their records to reflect the women who had lost to Thomas as the true victors, though Thomas’s name remains with an asterisk.
“While Penn’s policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson said. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
Jameson attempted to excuse Penn’s conduct in the case as consistent with the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, but for the female swimmers whose rights to privacy and fair competition were violated, this excuse holds little substance. The actual law forbidding sex discrimination in education has not changed—only the administration’s interpretation of it as applying to so-called “gender identity,” a deeply flawed and disingenuous reading. Penn should have known and done better.
For its failure to protect its Jewish students from a hostile campus environment and its refusal to uphold the Title IX rights of its female students, the University of Pennsylvania belongs on the list of Academic Felons.
Previous articles in series:
#10: Academic Felon: Golden West College.
#9: Academic Felon: University of Arizona
#8: Academic Felon: San Jose State University
#7: Cornell University
#6: University of Louisville
#5: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
