A year ago when we started Franklin’s Forum, President Jameson had just transitioned from interim to permanent president. Penn had recently recovered $175 million in frozen federal funding. Alumni and members of the broader public remained frustrated by the university’s leadership turmoil and alarming antisemitism on campus. Penn faced the immediate challenge of restoring stability, rebuilding trust, and reaffirming its commitment to its core academic mission.
In June, Jameson announced that after helping to stabilize the university and guide it through a rebuilding phase, he will not renew his contract when it expires in June 2027.
Penn’s challenges have not disappeared. The Board must still select a new president, debate over Penn’s open expression policies continues, grade inflation remains a concern across higher education, and artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping learning, assessments, and the future workforce. Although public confidence in higher education has improved modestly since its 2024 low, distrust remains a significant issue.
Yet we are optimistic that Penn enters this next chapter stronger. Penn now has the chance to move past crisis management and toward imagining a more ambitious vision of what it wants to be and what the next generation of higher education should become.
As Penn enters its next phase this 2026-27 school year, Franklin’s Forum will start a new chapter as well. We are moving away from a fixed weekly publication schedule. That does not mean our commitment to Penn has changed. We will continue following the university closely and staying connected with the community we have built.
From the beginning, we believed that Penn could best fulfill its mission by remaining focused on four core principles that underlie the University Values and Benjamin Franklin’s ideals for Penn: academic excellence, the pursuit of truth, freedom of inquiry and expression, and continuous self-improvement. Since publishing our first newsletter last August, those principles have guided our work. As we wrote then, our goal was to “build an alumni community that can both celebrate Penn’s strengths and push it to be better, ensuring its story is told with clarity, credibility, and love for the university.” Over the past year, we have done exactly that.
We celebrated innovations in research funding, curriculum development, public service, and responsible governance. We examined policies we believed could jeopardize academic excellence, free expression, or Penn’s long-term success. Most importantly, we built a community of more than 5,000 alumni, faculty, staff, administrators, trustees, students, and parents who care deeply about Penn’s future. In the process, we demonstrated that alumni remain engaged, invested, and committed to helping Penn succeed.
The questions facing Penn are changing, but our commitment to and care for the university have not. Thank you to everyone who spent the past year thinking seriously about the university we love alongside us.