An antiwar evening in Huntsman

Penn faculty revived a protest technique time-honored on college campuses last night: They staged a teach-in.

For the second of three evenings, Penn Faculty & Staff Against the War on Iraq sought to make their case about the current conflict by turning the Huntsman Hall basement into an antiwar event after normal business hours ended.

The "Teach-In on the Occupation of Iraq" featured a discussion panel of six Penn professors, a visiting scholar at the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and a professor from the Florida Coastal School of Law. Attendees also saw a presentation of the film The Dreams of Sparrows, a fictionalized account of Iraq during the American invasion.

The discussion panel was uniformly opposed to the war and touched on perceived human-rights violations in Iraq, the economic impact of the war and the war's impact on the poor.

Penn professor Shannon Lundeen said that she was particularly worried by the number of educated Iraqi women who had been assassinated since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government.

Emeritus Finance professor Ed Herman put his objections more bluntly.

"We've got to get the hell out," he said.

Penn professor Felicity Paxton, a member of Penn Faculty & Staff Against the War, said a teach-in serves as "a time when professors can stand up and say, 'This is not OK.'"

She added that the main goal of any teach-in is to "educate" and provide a forum for "moral leadership."

According to Paxton, teach-ins began at the University of Michigan in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War.

Last night's event, attended by perhaps 100 people, drew many others besides Penn students, faculty and staff.

Bill Perry, a Vietnam War veteran, said he supported the troops in Iraq, but wanted them to come home.

"I feel that anyone who puts our troops in harm's way is incredibly anti-American," Perry said.

Phyllis Gilbert, director of Peace Action-Delaware Valley, a group opposed to the war, came to the event with a petition for the United States to withdraw from Iraq.

"We need new blood, we need to get students involved and form a movement" to stop the war, she said.

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