Ben Franklin would be ashamed of what Penn’s become | Will Bunch Newsletter

”What do we do now? the young Senate candidate played by Robert Redford in 1972’s The Candidate famously asks after his upset victory. And it’s probably what a lot of Philadelphians are asking now that the decisively victorious Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles have been fêted with a massive, joyous parade. The 76ers are dreadful, the Flyers are tanking, the weather is horrendous, and Donald Trump is president for the next 47 months. Welcome back to the polar vortex of reality.

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The start of the current academic year at the University of Pennsylvania was rocked when campus police and a Philadelphia cop donned riot gear and stormed an off-campus apartment, seeking the alleged vandals of the iconic campus statue of the school’s founding father, Benjamin Franklin.

But let’s be honest: No one has done more to trash and deface Ben Franklin — the actual legacy, that is, of the Philadelphia civic legend who in 1749 founded Penn with revolutionary ideas about the power of knowledge in the future America — than the gutless administrators and billionaire trustees who run the Ivy League campus in 2025.

Last week, Penn capped a wild 14 months — which started with the ouster of the institution’s ninth president, Liz Magill, under pressure from congressional right-wing lunatics, and included a harsh, 33-arrest crackdown on student protests over the war in Gaza — with a rather shocking, obey-in-advance knee bend to its most famous alumnus, President Donald Trump.

In apparent response to Trump executive orders seeking to bar federal aid to colleges and universities that promote policies around diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, Penn administrators scrubbed the school’s former main DEI webpage harder than the crews tasked with cleaning up damage to the Franklin stature in front of College Hall. A site once full of charts and lists showing what an elite university was doing to welcome more Black and brown students and staff, now hosts just three lonely sentences about “Belonging at Penn.”

This comes as an array of Penn web pages that had hailed diversity efforts at programs ranging from its medical school and athletic teams to the Wharton School — which spawned Trump, his closest ally and world’s richest man Elon Musk, and many of the university’s richest donors — have either disappeared or been radically altered.

“We are reviewing websites and programs to ensure they are consistent with our nondiscrimination policies and federal law,” Penn said in a statement last week. But many faculty members — who weren’t consulted as top administrators pushed the DEI erasure — are furious that the university raced to comply with the new president’s war on diversity, even as some college presidents and professors elsewhere resist them.

“The purpose of all of these executive orders is to probe and see which parts of our society are weakest — which ones will cave to threats," Amy Offner, president of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told me Monday night. “And what the Penn administration has done is show that it is cowardly and weak, and that it’s a good mark.”

The faculty union leader said that in addition to the disappearance of DEI pages and language from Penn’s website, there is an escalating assault on academic freedom behind closed doors in which professors are urged to retitle academic programs or alter their content, or amend their funding requests. Said Offner: “This is a violation of the freedom to teach, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to engage in research that is fundamental to education.”

Certainly other schools have found the backbone to stand up to Trump and his threats, including the risk of compliance audits at schools like Penn with large endowments of more than $1 billion. One such institution is Massachusetts’ Mount Holyoke College, where officials told the Associated Press they won’t kowtow to Trump. Its president, Danielle Holley, said “I don’t believe that the value of saying we live in a multiracial democracy is wrong.”

Penn, on the other hand, seems determined to violate the No. 1 rule laid down by Yale history professor and fascism expert Timothy Snyder: “Do not obey in advance.” The message the university is sending not only to Black and brown folks, as well as women, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and other underrepresented or marginalized groups on its ivy-drenched West Philadelphia campus, is deeply troubling.

It comes — following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action — in a year when, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn already saw a decline in admissions from those groups of about 2 percentage points, and even steeper at the finance-oriented Wharton School. But the diversity pullback is troubling for reasons that go beyond that.

The DEI backtrack comes in the wake of Magill’s messy ouster, a tumultuous spring semester in which Philadelphia police were called to campus to clear out a pro-Palestinian encampment, a new set of university curbs on when and how students and others can protest on campus, and this fall’s controversial raids seeking the alleged statue vandals.

Offner and others have told me it adds up to a chilling atmosphere on a campus where students and faculty are more fearful of speaking their mind, and where as a result what has long been the thriving center of political and social discourse and protest in America’s founding city has become ominously quiet in 2025.

“This is an attempt to restore a kind of closed and repressive environment of the [Sen. Joe] McCarthy period in the United States when our universities were quiet and dissent was not tolerated,” Offner said, invoking the “Red Scare” that paralyzed colleges during the 1950s. “And we are not going back to that.”

The Trump regime’s war on higher education — which accelerated over the weekend with a U.S. Department of Education memo declaring that any race-based programs, such as scholarships or awards for Black and brown students, are unlawful — carries dangerous echoes of other authoritarian strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán who have crushed the academy to boost their own power.

At Penn, the fever dreams of MAGA far-right extremists who see campuses as hotbeds of “liberal indoctrination” and seek to destroy them are aided by the outsized influence on the school’s direction by its billionaire donors like Wall Street titan and Wharton School trustee Marc Rowan, which has trampled not only on faculty governance but the very soul of the university.

The new vibe on the Penn campus is throwing a metaphorical gallon of paint on the image of Franklin, who some 275 years ago dreamed of a place where the young men of the 1750s wouldn’t just learn a narrow profession, like the ministry, but study literature and history to make them better citizens in what soon became the American Experiment in democracy. Centuries later, the Penn community would recapture that spirit with vigorous debates around the Vietnam War, climate change and foreign policy from South Africa to Gaza that now are becoming faint, faraway echoes.

On Wednesday, members of the Penn AAUP chapter led by Offner as well as other higher-ed unions from Philadelphia’s thriving college community and their supporters in organized labor, are staging what they hope will be a large protest at noon outside new Sen. Dave McCormick’s Center City office, and speaking out on another front in the higher-ed wars: Trump’s steep cuts to scientific research. I hope they also send a message to Penn’s craven administrators who’ve so far flunked the entry exam on how to beat back American autocracy.

Question: Where is Sen. [Dave] McCormick in all this? As a hedge fund guy, he understands you learn the business before you sell it for parts. What’s his take on the PA lawsuit re: withholding approved funding for his constituents? —Diane‬ ‪@dianer.bsky.social‬ via Bluesky

Answer: I’m answering not because I actually know where Pennsylvania’s newly elected GOP senator is, or what he’s doing — I have no more of a clue than you do, frankly — but because so many of you this week asked variations of this question. Honestly, I nearly forgot about McCormick until he surfaced briefly from his groundhog hole or wherever to briefly hail Russia’s release of imprisoned Pennsylvania teacher Marc Fogel. Even the despised Pat Toomey promised, insufficiently, occasional independence from Trump and did vote, as a lame duck, to convict him. McCormick is a rubber stamp in a suit, so far. Voters should join me in demanding that our junior senator hold a town hall in Pennsylvania’s largest city, to explain himself.

I was delighted both in the number of responses to last week’s question about taking to the streets to protest the Trump regime, as well as the overwhelming numbers of you planning to do exactly that. Cathleen Donnelly said she was originally not intending to protest but “it now appears that Musk, Trump and their toadies believe quiet streets signal widespread support for their rampage. I’m now quite prepared to march — locally, nationally, repeatedly.” And many of you are thinking about innovative ways to do this, like Carol-Ann Dearnaley, who wrote: “I would take a page from the aughts — flash mobs. It would be harder for the MAGAts to retaliate.”

📮 This week’s question: Every day or two brings a new stratum of Trump chaos, as now seen with the White House negotiations with Russia that appear to be selling erstwhile ally Ukraine up the river. Is it time for a deal to end the fighting in Ukraine, even if Vladimir Putin’s Russia gets the best of it, or should Volodymyr Zelensky’s government be defended at all costs? Please email me your answer and put “Ukraine talks” in the subject line.

This February has been quite the month for the two cultural phenomena launched in this boomer’s youth that have loomed large until this day: the Super Bowl, and Saturday Night Live. As a 16-year-old, I was lured by the promise of a Simon and Garfunkel reunion to watch SNL’s second episode in October 1975, and I’ve never fully stopped, even now that 11:30 is way past my normal bedtime. This Sunday’s celebrity-studded 50th-anniversary three-hour celebration tried to have it every which way by writing fresh skits to repackage its nostalgia, yet also honored, in the breach, another tradition: SNL’s muddled message on American politics.

Some critics were surprised that a sketch comedy show in its 21st-century old age has refined the art of political impersonation, peaking with Tina Fey’s 2008 takedown of Sarah Palin, all but shunned the subject in its anniversary show, even with the nation’s capital currently on the brink of a meltdown. The Washington Post’s postmortem called the show a break from politics, noting that “the SNL50 show seemed to pull its political punches; there was no overt commentary about what’s happening in Washington — apart from an ICE joke about carting away Canadian Martin Short — and there was no President Donald Trump impersonation.“

I wasn’t surprised. Cultural critics see the show’s launch in October 1975 — just 14 months after Richard Nixon’s Watergate resignation arguably ended “the Long Sixties” — as the beginning of an age of irony in American pop culture that has never truly ended. Conversely, you could call SNL’s embrace and popularization of satire as the end of a nation’s youthful earnestness.

“We can change the world,” Graham Nash had sung in 1971’s “Chicago,” an anthem for a generation that had learned by 1975 — after crucibles such as the Kent State Massacre and the government assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton — that actually it couldn’t change the world, at least not radically.

In many ways, SNL has been the peak acknowledgment that political rage can be repurposed into humor. Or, in occasional fraught moments, from Ronald Reagan’s first term to today’s threats of dictatorship for more than one day, you can just ignore it altogether. The true politics of SNL is to steer us away from politics, either through loud guffaws or deafening silence. I know I won’t be here for all of the next 50 years of SNL, but I do hope to see a day when we can not only laugh at our corrupt ruling class, but also regain the earnest optimism to overthrow it.

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