Penn’s 2025-26 Faculty Senate chair Kathleen Brown spoke to The Daily Pennsylvanian about the group’s plans, priorities, and anticipated challenges for the fall semester.
Brown — who stepped into her role amid increased internal and external scrutiny on the University — emphasized the importance of streamlined communication between Penn’s faculty, administration, and students as a “foundation for political effectiveness.” She outlined various initiatives aimed at inviting diverse faculty voices into administrative conversations.
“I think our engagement and trust in the Faculty Senate isn't where it should be,” Brown said. “If the Faculty Senate Executive Committee is going to really be a functional political entity — a representative entity, a democratic one, and one that can do things that will help the University and the faculty — we actually have to get to know each other a little bit."
According to Brown, the University Archives can serve as a compass for understanding the current state of Penn’s shared governance. She emphasized that “back in the 1980s,” the Faculty Senate used to hold “pretty hotly contested elections” for chair.
“At one point in the early 1980s, 1000 out of 1200 possible standing faculty voted in an election,” she added. “I think faculty have lost their taste for hotly contested elections for all kinds of reasons, and I think there's been a waning of engagement and trust that the Senate can actually address faculty concerns.”
Today, Brown said, the Faculty Senate’s role in Penn’s governance teeters between an “advisory” and “authority” capacity.
The Senate’s advisory function varies from issue to issue. Although the relationship between faculty and administration at times focuses on “listening and accepting,” Brown said that in other cases it is “truly advisory, which is to say that maybe people will listen to it, or maybe they won’t.”
While “there are parts of University life that are pretty squarely in the faculty lane of shared governance” — including hiring, tenure recommendations, and curriculum — Brown acknowledged that “most faculty would say … they wish they were heard more” and that they were able to “have more of an impact on some of the big decisions at the university.”
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Brown attributed the lack of faculty input to Penn’s decentralized governance structure, in which each of the University’s 12 graduate schools has some “autonomy” and “independent” decision-making capabilities.
“There's some strength in having this decentralized difference in the schools, but it means that when one part of the University is in jeopardy, it's hard to come up with a remedy,” she said. “If you have something like a change in federal policy that threatens some important resource that the University counts on, you don't get to make 12 different responses.”
In response, Brown has incorporated “community building” exercises and opportunities to discuss aspirations, in faculty settings.
At the Sept. 10 University Council meeting, for instance, Brown invited Penn Chaplain Charles Howard to facilitate conversations about “mentoring … members of our campus community.”
The Faculty Senate is also drafting a proposal for the formation of an ad hoc committee designed to organize faculty conversations — “not just [for] SEC members, but [to] draw on a bigger pool of faculty.”
Brown hopes to ask faculty to share elements of their departments, programs, and projects, with otherwise detached peers. The process would “create some survey questions for faculty that would allow us to take the temperature of morale” and, in turn, generate “date for comparison” across years, she said.
Despite faculty grievances, Brown emphasized that Penn’s administrators — including Penn President Larry Jameson, Provost John Jackson, and Vice Provost for Faculty Laura Perna — have “a willingness to talk to students and talk to faculty.”
“I have the sense that the Provost Office is perhaps more accessible to faculty than faculty realize,” Brown said. “The official mechanism in the shared governance scheme is that faculty should be electing … representatives to the senate executive committee, and those representatives come and gather at SEC.”
Brown compared the current process for voicing faculty concerns to “water traveling uphill,” and encouraged other professors to utilize their respective deans offices to repeat requests.
“I feel like we're at a moment where there are a lot of members of our community who need support and care — both for morale [and] well being,” Brown said. “How do we actually learn more about each other's circumstances in different schools as members of different faculties around campus who've been differently affected? How do we heal from some of that, and how do we regroup?”
