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After years of promoting various Left-wing ideologies, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) was finally forced to its knees when it agreed to block transgender women athletes from competing in women’s sports after a federal civil rights investigation found the university guilty of violating Title IX in the case of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas.

The US Department of Education, thanks to two executive orders issued by President Trump defending women from “gender ideology extremism,” announced that UPenn would apologize and restore to female athletes titles that were “misappropriated by male athletes.”

The typical “Penn Face” (the face the university presents to the world) reaction in a situation like this is to organize a protest, so in March 2025 hundreds of Penn students, faculty and staff took to the streets to condemn the proposed $175 million cut in funding for the school over its transgender athlete policy while demanding the school find other funding outlets.

In June, when UPenn reversed its support for transgender athletes, campus LGBTQ groups and legal activists condemned the ban as unconstitutional.

The fact that UPenn surrendered one of its major woke talking points — that trans women are women — in the name of funding is nothing less than a miracle. But to interpret this as the first step in the university’s turning over a new ideological leaf would be hopelessly naïve.

The school still has a hangman’s noose-grip on anyone, especially tenured faculty, who attempts to buck its Leftist orthodoxy.

In 2024, UPenn suspended Amy Wax, a tenured law professor accused of “racist, sexist and homophobic remarks.” These were thoughtful, measured comments Wax gave to students and UPenn journalists after she was asked a number of sensitive questions.

Dean Theodore W. Ruger later sent Wax a long letter with a list of her “offenses.”

Her punishment for holding unorthodox views was suspension for a year with half pay, loss of her named chair, and the loss of her summer pay in perpetuity.

Just last month a federal judge sided with UPenn and denied Wax a preliminary injunction in her ongoing lawsuit against the university.

The UPenn campus in West Philadelphia is a long and spiraling network of old buildings, crosswalks and pedestrian bridges linking the Penn Library, Kelly Writers House (where Susan Sontag once described the public reaction to her New Yorker essay on the September 11th attack in New York City).

In the 1970s, the Penn Campus was a major hangout of Ira Einhorn, founder of Earth Day and touted as a Philadelphia notable by Philadelphia Democrat politicians until he was arrested for murdering his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and stuffing the body inside a trunk in his Powelton Village apartment.

Outwardly, the Penn Campus is a pretty quiet place, although in 2017 the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian (DP), reported that neo-Nazi posters were appearing on campus with messages like, “Stop the blacks,” and “Join your local Nazis.”

While Penn has an ongoing policy that “no poster shall be prohibited or restricted solely on basis of content,” enough students were riled up to attract the attention of local media.

Although the offending posters mysteriously disappeared after their discovery, UPenn student activists covered the LOVE sculpture near City Hall with hundreds of anti-Nazi posters warning, “We are ready to resist.”

Posting a “Stop the blacks” poster in Philadelphia makes about as much sense as posting a “Stop the Mormons” poster in Salt Lake City.

Also, neo-Nazi sympathizers in Philadelphia are about as numerous as sub-groups of transgender Mennonites. If there are any neo-Nazis in the City of Brotherly Love, they are quiet basement dwellers who, like certain breeds of cockroaches, rarely make public appearances.

The nonexistent neo-Nazi activity in Philadelphia suggests that the “Nazi” posters were put up by Leftists so they would have something to protest against.

False flag operations are common on the Left since it is the Left that pushes for fascist, totalitarian interdiction of freedom of speech.

The Left, of course, also likes to espouse their calumny anonymously because they are not interested in freedom or justice but rather seek to control lives by government-enforced restrictions on freedom.

To understand all things UPenn, one must look into the phenomenon of the “Penn Face.”

In April 2018, CBS Philly produced a report on suicide on the Penn campus, focusing mainly on the death of Penn undergrad Olivia Kong who climbed onto the tracks at 40th Street in front of an oncoming train. Prior to Kong’s death, 14 Penn students lost their lives at their own hands since 2013.

The attorney for Kong’s family — the family believed the university could have done something to save their troubled daughter’s life — said Kong’s problems and personal issues were all hidden behind the “Penn Face.”

“There seems to be something unique about Penn that it is not only a pressure cooker, but there’s this culture where the students are almost not permitted to show any vulnerability,” Nelson Shepherd, the Kong family attorney, told the press at that time.

The biggest “Penn Face” story goes back to 2006 when the DP reported that Penn — an institution that seeks to avoid showing any signs of vulnerability — had no ties to slavery.

The DP stated:

In recent weeks, Yale and Harvard universities’ colonial connections to the slave trade have also received attention. Stained glass windows at Yale, for example, depict slaves working in cotton fields.

“Penn’s history, however, was unmarred by slavery, unlike some of its Ivy League peers, according to University Archivist Mark Lloyd.

“’Our 18th century trustees are not known to have profited from the slave trade,” Lloyd said, adding that “Pennsylvania history puts Penn in a different situation from some of its peers.”

“’I’m confident that Pennsylvania was very different from nearby colonies because of the Quaker tradition,’ Lloyd said.”

Penn again denied its affiliation to slavery in 2016 when The Philadelphia Tribune reported that, “Penn has explored this issue several times over the past few decades and found no direct university involvement with slavery or the slave trade.”

This despite an independent study backed by Penn’s History Department published in 2018 documenting the discovery that 20 of the university’s founding trustees had major connections to slavery. The DP then reported that the school did have serious ties to the slave trade.

The Penn Slavery Project received a fair amount of notoriety and publicity. One of the Project leaders, Vanjessica Gladney, wrote:

The early trustees of the University of Pennsylvania helped design symbols of American freedom while keeping other men in bondage. According to notes from the Continental Congress, Francis Hopkinson, an early trustee and slave owner, designed America’s very first flag. Isaac Norris Jr., another trustee and slave owner, chose the inscription for the bell, now known as the ‘Liberty Bell,’ that hung in the Pennsylvania State House….Seven of the early trustees of the University of Pennsylvania signed the Declaration of Independence, eight signed the United States Constitution, and four signed both: George Clymer, Robert Morris, James Wilson, and Benjamin Franklin. Though Clymer’s record has not been searched, we know that the last three men owned slaves…

Walk the Penn campus and you’ll find statues of men like George Whitefield, an 18th-century evangelical minister, or William Pepper, from the class of 1862, a graduate of Penn Medical School in 1864 and the 11th Provost of the University. There’s wealthy Charles Lenning, a chemist, who gave $700,000 to the school in 1891, and Edgar Fahs Smith, Penn’s 13th Provost (1911-1920), all “slavery transgressors” who may one day have their statues removed and their names demoted.

The “Penn Face,’ after all cannot stand any sort of tarnish.

Rather than accept the past for what it was, the university will want to eradicate it as if it never existed. Historical erasure applies equally to the dead as to the living.

Just ask Amy Wax.