Michael Weisberg on building community at Penn

What do you feel Penn has accomplished in this process so far?

One important accomplishment is building our physical safety net. First and foremost, we’ve addressed issues around security in our religious spaces including Penn Hillel, Chabad, and the various spaces where our Muslim and Christian students meet. We had an outside, third-party security contractor assess those spaces and make recommendations, and the University financially supported the upgrade of those facilities. This is very important work, and I want to make it clear that the physical safety and security of our students is the highest priority of our Division of Public Safety.

We established the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, Title VI (OREI). We didn’t previously have one single place you could go to with a concern about antisemitism, Islamophobia, or other types of discrimination based on religion or ethnicity. OREI and its leaders are best-in-class and offer our community a variety of resources that were previously diffuse and hard to access. If you have a concern and aren’t sure what the next step is, they can sit down with you in a confidential, ombuds-like way to lay out options. They can also help to mediate conflicts between members of our community. And if it’s mutually decided that this is something really serious, they have the ability to do an investigation, and then, if necessary, take the results of that investigation forward through the appropriate university process.

The Task Force and Commission also uncovered a number of smaller issues that we have addressed. For example, it used to cost more to eat in the kosher dining hall than the regular dining hall. President Jameson made a commitment to change that. If you walk into the kosher dining hall today, a meal costs the same as in 1920 Commons.

We’ve also continued to encourage more substantial discussion around some of the most polarizing issues on our campus. One of the  most exciting events last academic year was the Silfen Forum, where we hosted a former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and a former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority in dialogue, in front of students, faculty, and staff. We will have a similar event this year, where we will have a former Israeli prime minister and a former minister of the Palestinian Authority in dialogue. And there will be many others. It’s important to highlight these events to demonstrate that we do not shy away from conflict or presenting multiple points of view. In fact, we’re committed to engaging with multiple perspectives on these tricky issues right here on campus, in a respectful and productive way.

And while modeling dialogue matters, what is more important is what comes after the high-profile conversations. I’m really proud of our Critical Conversations series at Perry World House, which invited students to actually sit down and talk with the former Prime Minister and Israeli Ambassador from the Silfen Forum in an off-the-record space where different ideas could really be discussed.

And it’s not just high-level dialogues like these where differences are discussed in a thoughtful way. Despite the difficulties of the last years, we’ve also had many interesting and meaningful moments of people coming together to talk through differences, spurred in part by programs like Dialogues Across Differences, Conversations for Community and the many programs led by SNF Paideia at Penn. We are also advancing Jewish studies scholarship, developing a new endowed professorship, and increasing graduate support in the Jewish Studies Program to deepen our understanding of the context of some of the difficult issues that have confronted our community specifically.

What motivated you to want to engage with this work?

I’ve long been interested in the twin challenges of combating hate and bringing people together to form community. When I was in high school, I led student efforts to deepen Holocaust education for teachers. As a young adult I was highly motivated by the opportunity to connect across religious, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and academic differences. As a graduate student and professor, I’ve devoted my research to understanding how scientific communities are organized to produce knowledge even against the backdrop of radical disagreement. More recently, as a climate diplomat trying to deal with almost 200 countries at the same time, I’ve learned the importance of empathy and patience as the most important ingredients for progress. But now, as a parent, these issues feel more personal. I want my children to inherit a world that is better than the one that I did.

What are you learning about Penn while doing this work? And what’s ahead?

I’ve yet to meet a person at Penn who is not excited about building community and willing to lend a hand in combatting hate.

I would like to find ways to further enrich our community. Even those who are quite critical of the University or how we handled events on campus over the last two years still believe in the core project of building an academic community based on the shared values of academic freedom and mutual respect.

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I would add that universities are very special places. Here we can create our own campus based on our shared values. We are so privileged to be in a place where we have so many tools at our disposal, so much expertise, and people from so many countries in the world and from every state, with so much incredible knowledge and so many resources and experiences. We can make that the basis of how we build a wonderful community. But it is ours to build—it’s not simply given to us. That will take real effort on all our parts.

The events of the past few years, and COVID before that, has put stress on our community. I think everybody is eager to rebuild and to rediscover what ties us together. I would like to find every opportunity to do that. And when all of us figure out what the most important elements of our community look like, we will try to find ways to support them. That’s my goal. I really do believe we are a community, and we get to decide how it is and build it the way we want.

A fundamental question moving forward is this: How do we best live up to our commitment to pluralism—to finding ways for all of us at Penn to live well together, despite our differences? That’s the project I’m most excited about, and I invite everyone to be a part of it.

How can students and faculty get involved with this community building? 

One thing I’ve learned in diplomatic spaces is that empathy is necessary for real dialogue. Dialogue is central but just talking to someone whose views are different from yours may not be enough. To be effective, people have to really commit to being present in those conversations and to listen with empathy and compassion. Penn Hillel recently brought together Black and Jewish students, in partnership with local and national organizations, including two Philadelphia HBCUs, for a meal and conversation. Whether it’s that or a UN negotiation, dialogue goes better when people have shared a meal together, and even better when they’ve talked about why a dish, or a place, or a piece of music is so important.

So, I encourage my colleagues and our students to find the most engaging and exciting way to come to understand each other. I think those moments of connection are actually how we begin to build community. It’s genuinely hard to talk about conflict in the world, what’s happening in Gaza, in Kashmir, in South Sudan, in the U.S.—and we have to, but it’s not always the place to start. Sometimes the place to start is ‘Did you ever taste this dish? Did you know that it came to the Middle East via Central Asia via the Silk Road?’ and then the conversation is going to roll.