Franklin’s Forum launched in August of 2025 with a simple but pressing goal: to bring together Penn alumni, faculty, staff, and current students to fight for a strong future for the university. From the beginning, we have focused on four guiding principles that we believe will define Penn’s long-term strength:
Promote academic excellence, maintaining a focus on merit
Seek and defend truth by advancing the use of logic and reasoning
Encourage freedom of inquiry and expression, promoting respectful debate
Advance strong governance to promote Penn’s continuous self-improvement
Every week, we cover these four themes in our weekly newsletter to cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters at Penn, and in higher education more broadly.
Since launching this summer, Franklin’s Forum has grown in both size and depth. Today, our community spans across alumni from all 12 schools, as well as faculty, staff, current students, and parents representing different geographies, industries, ages, and perspectives, and we have been cited by The Daily Pennsylvanian and the Anti-Defamation League. As the community has grown since our first issue in August, so has the scope of our work.
As we look ahead to 2026, Franklin’s Forum will continue uncovering key insights, analyzing tough tradeoffs, asking hard questions, and holding the university to the principles that excellence demands. Our goal remains the same: to help Penn confront its challenges honestly, strengthen what works, and continue becoming the best version of itself.
For our final issue of 2025, we’re taking a step back to reflect on our first semester. Today, we break down Franklin’s Forum’s coverage so far, revisiting the themes and conversations that shaped our first year and will continue to shape Penn’s future.
We hope you use today’s issue to read a piece you may have missed, share a story that resonated with you, or dig deeper into the most important challenges facing Penn.
Franklin’s Forum 2025 Wrapped
In 2025, public trust in higher education sank near historic lows. 23% of Americans reported “little” or “no” confidence in higher education, up from 10% in 2015, and nearly 30% labeled Ivy League universities the “enemy.” Cost lies at the core of this distrust. More than half of Americans now say a high-quality postsecondary education is no longer affordable. Penn has expanded access through the Quaker Commitment, offering free tuition to families earning under $200,000. Rebuilding trust in Penn’s excellence in academics and research, however, will demand more: clearly communicating Penn’s value while addressing campus antisemitism, protecting freedom of thought, and resisting political agendas in the classroom.
As the university launches Penn Forward, its university-wide strategic effort to renew its academic mission and chart long-term reform, understanding how the university arrived at this moment is essential. Inside Penn: Two Years That Defined Our Campus traces the key events since August 2023 that reshaped Penn’s leadership, culture, and public standing, building a shared foundation through this series for informed conversation about what comes next through Franklin’s Forum.
In the fall of 2023, Penn plunged into crisis as rising antisemitism, concerns over free expression, and leadership failures collided. The Palestine Writes Literature Festival, a deteriorating speech climate — with FIRE ranking Penn 247th out of 248 universities — and escalating alumni, donor, and federal pressure culminated in President Liz Magill’s congressional testimony and the resignations of both Magill and Board Chair Scott Bok (C ‘81, W ‘81, L ‘84). This first chapter of Inside Penn traces how Penn reached one of the most turbulent moments in its modern history, setting the stage for a reckoning over leadership, trust, and academic values.
In early 2024, Penn installed new leadership, with Larry Jameson as interim president and Ramanan Raghavendran (ENG89, W ‘89, ENG ‘06, LPS ‘15) as Board Chair, but the campus remained unsettled amid rising antisemitism and intensifying debates over free expression. A 16-day “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” disrupted campus, prompted police intervention, and led Penn to ban encampments and rewrite protest rules. Even after the tents came down, trust remained scarce: only 16% of seniors said the administration was transparent, and just 33% felt comfortable expressing controversial views. Also, over half reported classrooms did not welcome unpopular opinions, revealing a campus still deeply in flux.
Entering the 2024–25 academic year, Penn moved to chart a new course under President Larry Jameson. The university launched a new Title VI office and adopted a policy of institutional neutrality on geopolitical issues, even as FIRE ranked Penn 248th out of 251 universities for free speech and students reported growing discomfort over expressing dissenting views. As national DEI policies shifted and federal funding pressures mounted, Jameson was confirmed as president through June of 2027, opening a possibility for a new phase of reform amid continued uncertainty.
In 2025, federal policy shifts pushed Penn into a period of financial strain, exposing risks across research funding, tuition, and the endowment. A proposed NIH cap threatened $240 million annually, $175 million in federal funds was temporarily frozen over Title IX concerns, and a new endowment tax is expected to cost Penn over $350 million in the next five years. Although funding was restored, rising debt and continued federal scrutiny signal a harsh new financial reality ahead.
Penn was one of nine universities invited to join the federal government’s proposed Compact for Academic Excellence, which offered potential funding advantages in exchange for sweeping new requirements. While parts of the proposal aligned with existing Penn policies, others raised serious concerns about academic freedom, politically driven enforcement, and the feasibility of compliance. As Penn weighed the offer amid financial uncertainty, the Compact emerged as a defining test of how much federal funding might cost in institutional independence.
Penn’s finances may look strong on paper, but rising costs are straining the university’s long-term sustainability. Personnel expenses surpassed $2.8 billion in FY2025, more than 15 times the student aid budget. Administrative headcount has risen 78% since 2004. Faculty grew 2.5% annually. Student enrollment grew just 1.3%. True financial resilience will require more than containing costs, and Penn must confront whether growth still serves its academic mission or has become the mission itself.
Penn rejected the federal Compact for Academic Excellence, choosing academic independence over financial certainty, even as the White House warned the decision could jeopardize $1 billion in annual federal funding. But rejection is not an endpoint: the challenges the Compact aimed to address, academic standards, affordability, and free expression, remain central to Penn’s future. We believe Penn must now lead reform on its own terms, advancing excellence, freedom of inquiry, and strong governance through collaboration rather than compliance.
Penn Medicine is legally part of the University of Pennsylvania, governed by the same board and president and tied to the university’s balance sheet. It generated nearly $12 billion in FY 2025 revenue across 14 hospitals and 23 outpatient centers and transferred $208 million to support university operations. That integration also exposes Penn to federal policy shifts that affect healthcare reimbursement. With roughly $5 billion in annual patient revenue tied to Medicare and Medicaid, now facing proposed federal spending cuts, coverage restrictions, and reimbursement pressure, financial shocks to Penn Medicine could quickly reverberate across Penn’s research enterprise, borrowing capacity, and long-term fiscal stability.
Students at Penn increasingly optimize for easy classes, shifting student priorities from learning to GPA. In 2024, 87% of seniors reported GPAs in the A range, while 95% described the undergraduate environment as moderately or very competitive, reinforcing incentives that push students toward low-risk, low-rigor classes. Without a serious reckoning with grade inflation and campus norms, Penn risks weakening both student learning and the long-term value of its degree.
A sweeping data breach exposed personal information across the Penn community, deepening anxieties about the university’s ability to safeguard its own. How Penn responds now carries weight far beyond cybersecurity, shaping trust at a moment when confidence in higher education is already thin.
Penn’s first-quarter FY2026 financial results exceeded expectations, but the apparent surplus masks deeper structural limits. With 90% of the endowment’s funds donor-restricted, rising expenses, and an endowment tax set to increase from 1.4% to 4%, Penn cannot rely on investment gains or restricted gifts to cover continuous overspending. Long-term financial strength will depend not on strong quarters or endowment size, but on disciplined cost control.
Penn’s graduate student union voted 92% to authorize a strike, raising the stakes for negotiations that could disrupt teaching and research across the university. The talks expose a core tension: ensuring fair working conditions for graduate students while preserving their primary role as students, and safeguarding faculty authority over academic standards. As Penn prepares for a possible strike, the outcome will test whether the university can deliver both labor protections and the academic excellence that defines a Penn education.
Penn’s first comprehensive survey of Jewish undergraduates in over a decade, run by Penn Hillel, revealed a stark duality: 96% of students are proud of their Jewish identity, yet 40% say it is difficult to be Jewish at Penn and 85% have experienced, witnessed, or heard about antisemitism on campus. The survey provides a long-missing baseline for measuring whether Penn’s new initiatives actually improve Jewish life on campus.
Beginning in July of 2026, the federal government will end unlimited Grad PLUS loans, capping lifetime borrowing at $200,000 for professional degrees and $100,000 for other graduate programs. At Penn, where many non-PhD programs cost well above those limits, the new caps force hard tradeoffs on pricing, financial aid, and access, putting pressure on Penn’s graduate education model.
In the wake of the 2023-2024 leadership crisis, Penn’s Board of Trustees has overhauled its governance structure. Changes include reducing voting trustees from as many as 60 to 44, imposing chair term limits, revamping the Governance Committee, and adopting a formal code of conduct with a removal process. The aim is a smaller, more disciplined and accountable board, better equipped for faster decision-making through mounting financial, political, and institutional pressures.
Penn is facing an unusual legal clash with the EEOC, which is asking a federal court to compel the university to turn over names and contact information of Jewish faculty, staff, and student workers as part of a Title VII investigation. Penn has refused, and large segments of the Penn community have backed that stance, warning that forced disclosure could erode privacy, deter reporting, and undermine the trust needed to confront antisemitism effectively.
Thank you for reading the Franklin’s Forum newsletter and for being a part of our community in 2025. We love hearing from our readers, so please reply with your favorite piece! Happy New Year!