Penn argues RAs and GAs are ‘not employees’ in response to unionization efforts

Penn’s response comes two weeks after a supermajority of RAs and GAs filed for official unionization recognition

JONAH MILLER AND VIDYA PANDIARAJU Senior Reporter and Staff Reporter

Penn is arguing that residential advisors and graduate resident associates are “not employees” in response to their recent decision to unionize.

The Board of Trustees’ official Statement of Position, obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, claims that the RAs are not employees of the University, but instead classifies them as student leaders with an “educational relationship” to Penn since they are not on the payroll. Union organizers and RAs told the DP that they see these arguments as a way to delay the election to officially unionize.

In response to a request for comment, University spokesperson Ron Ozio wrote that Penn “greatly appreciates and values our Resident Advisors and Graduate Resident Advisors, who are important student leaders on campus,” adding that “unionization is a very significant issue, and we encourage all RAs and GRAs to be as informed as possible.”

Ozio referenced a Frequently Asked Questions page that College House & Academic Services emailed to all RAs and GAs that contains information about the unionization process.

Cozen O’Connor, the legal team Penn hired, did not respond to a request for comment.

Penn’s response comes nearly two weeks after a supermajority of RAs and GAs filed for official unionization recognition with the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 153 and the National Labor Relations Board.

OPEIU Local 153 organizer Scott Williams, a 2016 graduate of Penn’s Graduate School of Education, told the DP that he thinks the University’s arguments are “very weak,” adding that delaying union elections are a “common union-busting tactic,” citing similar events earlier this month at Duke University.

Williams said he found it “surprising” that Penn chose this route because several peer institutions, including Columbia University, Tufts University, Barnard College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have recognized RAs as employees and granted a vote to unionize.

“Penn uses the term, ‘student leaders,’” Williams said. “This is an illegal position and, frankly, a criminal misclassification. This is something we will seek to clarify.” College junior and Rodin College House RA Mica Lin-Alves told the DP that Penn’s Statement of Position neglects to include much of the casework that would “take away from their argument.”

“There’s both precedent for us to be employees and to have the right to unionize, so I feel it’s quite drastic that

Penn is challenging that because — not only would it affect us if they go through with this — but it has the potential to really impact millions of other student workers across the nation,” Lin-Alves said.

Lin-Alves said he disagreed with the University’s characterization of RAs not being recognized as employees. He said that RAs and GAs receive compensation — in the form of included housing and meal swipes — for their job, and if they were to stop serving in their current positions, such compensation would be terminated.

Lin-Alves added that the RA selection process contains many similarities to a standard job application, including multiple stages of interviews, inclusion of professional references, a cover letter, a self-recorded video interview, and various written questions.

“Some students have a highly aided package, so their voluntarily being an RA makes it more of a student leadership position and less of an economic relationship. Basically, they’re admitting that they do not pay their students for this work,” Lin-Alves said, building on a core reason for unionization: that first-generation, lowincome students are “essentially doing unpaid work.”

College junior and RA Yasmin Abdul Razak said that RAs are routinely subject to non-business hours, tasked with hosting and planning events, and asked to provide social and emotional support to residents. She added that RAs are on-call and expected to respond to various emergencies throughout the night and on weekends.

Even with Penn’s response, Lin-Alves said that he feels secure that the RAs will be able to follow-through on their plans to unionize.

“The energy is still high,” Lin-Alves said. “I think we know that this is a challenge, but I think we’re still quite confident that it’s something that we can overcome.”

Abdul Razak said that she was disappointed by the University’s Statement of Position, but she said that the RAs have ultimately been motivated by it.

“I think combating misinformation is the main thing moving forward, and we do that by keeping in-touch with the RAs and informing them about their rights,” Abdul Razak said.

Abdul Razak added that RAs will be contesting the Statement of Petition, which she said is a tactic that could delay the union election until the fall 2023 semester.

Williams said that the OPEIU Local 135 will continue to be hosting information sessions for the RAs and GAs to “understand their rights” and a public rally on March 31.

Biotech company founded by Penn alum seeks to prevent food allergies

Lele was inspired to start Hanimune Therapeutics when her son developed food allergies at a young age

The Quadrangle Dormitories on Jan. 26.

DEAN’S LIST, from FRONT PAGE

representatives from the Undergraduate Assembly and Student Committee on Undergraduate Education — reached the conclusion that academic achievement is better reflected through other means, such as departmental and school awards.

“With Latin Honors and these many other awards remaining, our students will continue to have a rich variety of avenues for their academic achievements to be acknowledged,” the administrators wrote in their email to students.

The Pennbook will be updated in July 2023 to reflect the new policy and documentation of the change will be added to Penn transcripts, according to Winkelstein and Detlefsen’s message. The decision was the culmination of several years’ worth of extensive conversations across the Penn community, including with student leaders, the administrators wrote.

Two UA members that the DP spoke with voiced varying opinions about the decision.

“[Ending the dean’s list] takes away a chance for students to receive recognition for their achievement,” College junior and second-year UA College Representative Charlie Schumer said. “College is really hard, and I think it’s worthwhile to acknowledge the effort that people put in.”

Schumer told the DP that the removal of the dean’s list was first discussed among the UA at a general body meeting in September. That conversation occurred after the proposal was brought to the attention of UA President Carson Sheumaker during a meeting with the Council of Undergraduate Deans.

According to the UA GBM minutes, the deans cited a number of reasons for removing the award, including a high number of students qualifying for the list and peer institutions who no longer offer it. They also said it would deemphasize the value that students place on grades.

UA reactions to the decision were mixed, Schumer said. Members tended to understand the administration’s reasons for removing the dean’s list while still preferring that the University keep it, he added.

Wharton junior and UA Speaker Xavier Shankle said that the removal of the dean’s list may seem

“shocking on the surface,” but serves as an indication that Penn is “consciously thinking” about how to reduce academic stress for students.

“Whether or not removing dean’s list is the best way to remove or reduce academic stress … is something still to be determined,” Shankle said, adding that the issue was centered around “finding a balance” between maintaining Penn’s academic rigor while promoting academic wellness.

While Shankle said that some students may experience an “adjustment period” without the dean’s list each year, he added that it could be beneficial in the long term for promoting “learning for the sake of learning.”

He said that the UA brought up with administrators how removing the dean’s list would impact students applying to graduate schools, jobs, and other positions that use the list as an indicator of academic performance. Administrators wrote that the end of dean’s list awards will be indicated on transcripts beginning this fall “to eliminate potential confusion with employers or graduate school admissions committees.”

Winkelstein and Detlefsen’s message said that the University will continue to recognize student academic excellence in a number of other forms, including Latin honors and school and departmental awards.

However, Schumer said that this recognition is insufficient. He said that it was important to acknowledge the effort that students put in on a yearly basis, and that the dean’s list recognized improvement in academic standing.

While this year marks the end of the dean’s list, the award was suspended through the 2019-20 and 202021 academic years in light of the University’s shift to online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic and the extended pass/fail policy that was adopted as a result.

In 2020, some students expressed frustration when the announcement was made. A 2020 petition demanding that the list be re-enacted received support from 249 students.

“The removal of dean’s list for the 2019-20 academic year would be a great disappointment to Penn students who have dedicated efforts to their academics in these difficult times,” the petition said.

2005 Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology graduate Meenal Lele started a biotechnology company that seeks to prevent food allergies.

In 2018, Lele founded Hanimune Therapeutics with the goal of developing food allergy-preventative products. She started Lil Mixins under Hanimune Therapeutics to promote the early introduction of allergens through powder packets and probiotic capsule supplements.

Lele was inspired to start Hanimune Therapeutics when her son developed food allergies at a young age and learned shortly after his diagnosis that a high percentage of peanut allergies are preventable.

“[Food allergies] is a terrible disease that really restricts your life … [and] limits all the various things you can do,” Lele told The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Lele recalled that creating a company was a different experience from what she was taught as an undergraduate student. She said that although the M&T program trains its students to think of what makes the best product from a scientific perspective, a successful businessperson should understand how the product works and why it works the way it works to prevent making mistakes.

“Any activity you do has ripple effects on all parts of the business,” Lele said. “Think of obstacles four years from now, five years from now. Optimize better instead of doing one thing at a time.”

Lele said that while the initial start-up process — starting with an idea and forming teams — is the same for all companies, the way founders think about their products is what differentiates a company’s level of success.

In January, Hanimune completed a seed round funded by partners such as BioAdvance, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and angel investors.

Five years from now, Lele hopes that Hanimune Therapeutics put at least two — if not multiple — food allergy treatments on the market.

Lele said the pharmaceutical development process is one riddled with regulations, and the production process is a collaborative effort with the United States Food and Drug Administration. For next steps, Lele said she seeks to “develop things the FDA is excited to commercialize.”

Clint Smith is the author of award-winning bestseller How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, and two poetry collections. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic Mia Bay, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, is a scholar of American and African American history. Her books include the award-winning Traveling Black:

The art of listening has been lost in both educational and daily settings, translating into disunity locally and globally. This is evident as seen in the symptoms plaguing the world: polarization, disconnection, nationalism, insensitivity, and the systemic ills that are further propelled by our divisiveness. Listening must be cultivated in transformative education as it is the key to deliberation and problem-solving. To listen is not to merely hear others’ views, but to comprehend and digest what they are saying with responsive efforts. Active listening also enhances one’s ability to convey their own thoughts while learning from others.

Fostering tools for listening in higher education is a pedagogical challenge — such developments of active listening begin in the classroom and transcend beyond school. And yet, professors of higher education, including at Penn, are ill-prepared by their universities to employ pedagogical methods generating such skills.

“One of the things that a lot of us have lost is actually the capacity to hold discussions, especially with people with whom we disagree,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, Penn GSE professor and historian of education. “I think we need to think about the civic dimension of higher ed. We have a duty to try to help people learn civic skills, and I think classroom discussion is integral to that.”

Granted, some professors falsely assume that because students are not experts in their fields of study, student-driven discussion is unhelpful. To that, Zimmerman argued, “Students aren't experts, but that's precisely the reason that they need to talk about it. Not so that they can inform people necessarily, but so they can explore the important issues and try to get their heads around them.” And despite this, conventional lectures are still frequent at Penn.

Transformative education is diverging away from conventional methods of teaching and assessment as they do not stimulate nor model necessary skills such as engaging with one another and listening closely. Traditional pedagogy, such as lecturing, often positions the teacher above the student, detracting from student-led teaching. Students listen to the teacher but are not always listened to — making education less so a matter of dialogue between both the student and the teacher, or students with their peers. It is harmful to omit rich discussion from the classroom, especially if school is meant to be a microcosm representative of the larger society. Students should feel invited and empowered to contribute and learn from their peers.

Researchers are not inherently good presenters, nor educators. Someone may be brilliant in their discipline, but pedagogical knowledge requires a different type of mastery. Simply put, rigors of the classroom cannot be self-taught. Thus, the complex intricacies of teaching necessitate training. As part of the academic system that has a crucial role in societal functionality, educators are obligated to administer the best form of teaching that may only form after generating a tool kit to do so. But the reality is, higher education neglects teacher training crucial to developing practices that emphasize student collaboration rather than passive reception and regurgitation. This is due to professors’ lack of foundational knowledge surrounding formative teaching techniques beyond the antiquated methods they were exposed to when they were taught, perpetuating a negative cycle of defective teaching that has become normalized in higher education. The job of a professor is two-fold, teaching and researching. And arguably, executing transformative teaching should be at the forefront of a professor's job. However, there are limitations to this given how research demands of tenure may detract professors from focusing on pedagogical practice that is time-consuming and sophisticated. At Penn, with high expectations for professors to conduct and produce research, standards for ample teaching skills often fall to the wayside at the expense of student benefit.

“That's a fundamental flaw of the universities. We are learning on the job, basically,” Reto Gieré, earth and environmental science professor, said. “They're not teaching us [professors] how to teach,” political science Professor Loren Goldman expressed.

At Penn, the Center for Teaching and Learning is intended to help instructors excel as educators through the use of workshops, but its very existence is contradictory. It should be a requirement for professors to be adept at instruction prior to beginning. “The Center for Teaching and Learning reveal[s] the low status of this enterprise. If we actually valued [employing formative pedagogy], we wouldn't need a center devoted to it,” Zimmerman asserted.

“[Penn] teaches people, but it's not focused on teaching,” Goldman has found.

“And so they try to do things that make it more amenable by creating a Center for Teaching and Learning. The production of skillful listeners [and] good academic citizens is not what it does at the undergraduate level. Penn sort of teaches people to go off into the world and not be citizens.”

Gieré contended that the nature of the scale of lecture courses pose logistical obstacles to teaching in the way he aspires. He found that the most adequate, integrative teaching style for his discipline would be to “go into nature” to stimulate interactive student discussion beyond recitations.

Gieré also attested that student curiosity is consequential, noting that he “think[s] curiosity is a really important aspect of our lives. And that involves asking questions” amongst peers.

“Would it be costly in terms of time and money and energy to alter the system? It would,” Zimmerman acknowledged. “But if we valued it, we would sustain that cost. And the fact that we don't sustain the cost or we're unwilling to show that, we don't value it.”

Essentially, it’s a jarring, systematic flaw that professors are not required to learn how to teach in the process of embarking

Pay attention to the Philly mayoral election

on a career in academia. Students are not guinea pigs. While paying expensive tuition, they expect to receive valuable education from quality educators. But many students have become so accustomed to their classroom structure that they do not know to expect differently, despite experiencing notions of detachment in content.

In Zimmerman’s book, “The Amateur Hour,” he discussed how in higher education, “we don't have a standard for what's good. And we don't have a set of systems for enforcing it … nobody's minding the store. It isn't all bad … [but] the point is we don't have systems to really differentiate between [teachers’ quality].” And at institutions like Penn, professionalizing teaching is vastly overlooked; professors feel a lack of incentive that would otherwise not be the case if required to learn pedagogical theories from the get-go of their careers.

Although Penn is a prestigious institution with highly esteemed researchers, we cannot continue to fail to criticize insufficient teaching methods. Frequently, Penn opts for big-name researchers to add to their staff in lieu of effective educators. Ultimately, the priority of the university should be teaching — plain and simple.

It's best to end this column with a simple remark from Gieré: "Primarily, we are professors: We should teach."

RIANE LUMER is a College junior studying political science and journalistic writing from Huntingdon Valley, Pa. Her email address is rlumer@sas. upenn.edu.

DELVING DEEPER | The mayoral election affects us as both Penn students and as residents of Philadelphia

This election could also be a historic one, given the diverse slate of candidates. For example, four of the 10 major candidates are women, which is a step in the right direction for a city that has never elected a woman to the mayoral office despite having had 99 mayors in its long history. Furthermore, the presumptive Republican nominee, David Oh, was the first Asian American elected to the Philadelphia City Council. His potential ascension to the mayor’s office would continue the trend set by trailblazers like Michelle Wu, the first woman and Asian American to serve as mayor of Boston, and Aftab Pureval, the first Asian American to serve as mayor of Cincinnati.

This May, hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians will flock to the polls to cast their ballots in the Democratic and Republican primary elections to select each party’s nominee for the city’s 100th mayor, and then again in November during the general election.

So why should Penn students be paying attention this early? The reason is because registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Philly by seven to one, so barring any major surprises, the winner of this May’s Democratic primary will likely be the winner of this November’s general election.

What’s more, the person we elect as this city’s mayor will arguably affect our everyday lives as students and Philly residents. The University of Pennsylvania and its Health System (UPHS), which includes Penn Medicine, constitutes one of the largest employers in the city, and so local politics can have a massive impact on these organizations. For example, there are numerous progressive candidates running for mayor that have secured the endorsement of powerful labor unions in the city.

These include Cherelle Parker, who has received an endorsement from the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council; Jeff Brown, who has gained support from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 33; and Helen Gym, who was endorsed by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. The involvement of key labor unions in the mayor’s race is especially important in the context of the ongoing efforts by RAs and GAs at Penn to unionize for increased labor rights and fair compensation.

Penn infamously does not pay property taxes to the City of Philadelphia because its tax-exempt status is derived from its existence as a nonprofit entity. The University also refuses to make payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs), a decision that forces surrounding areas such as increasingly gentrified West Philadelphia to pay for the extra tax revenue that is not supplied by Penn. Current mayor Jim Kenney, as an example, was not willing to negotiate with institutions like Penn, Drexel, and others throughout the city to enact PILOTs programs, but this could change moving forward.

Furthermore, the new mayor’s policies will have an impact on cost of living concerns in a city where housing and utilities are becoming more expensive, directly affecting Penn students who live off-campus.

Public safety has also become an increased issue, with the budget for city-sponsored violence prevention initiatives having increased alongside overall gun violence.

However, since Philadelphia is heavily restricted by Pennsylvania law and a statewide judicial system that blocks the city’s ability to enact meaningful gun control policies at every turn, it is worth exploring the different candidates’ platforms and perspectives on enhancing public safety.

I would therefore encourage you to consider changing your voter registration to Pennsylvania, if you haven’t done so already. And if for some reason you cannot or are unable to, that is totally okay — anyone can get involved in civic engagement, despite their circumstances. Whether it involves discussing the mayoral election with friends, watching debates, or participating in politics-and-government-aligned student groups on campus, there are myriad ways to get involved in the city’s vibrant political atmosphere.

Even if most of us only live in Philadelphia temporarily, the dynamics of city politics does have an impact on our everyday lives. So if you’re a registered Democrat or Republican, I urge you to either apply for a mail-in or absentee ballot or vote in person for Philadelphia’s closed primary election on Tuesday, May 16. And if you don’t belong to either one of these parties, you can still vote on the four questions that will appear on local ballots for all voters.

KESHAV RAMESH is a Wharton and College sophomore studying finance, statistics, and international studies in the Huntsman Program from South Windsor, CT. His email address is keshmesh@wharton.upenn.edu.