Jared Mitovich, WHYY ; Gov. Shapiro meets with Penn Med leader amid ‘existential’ threat posed by Trump
"Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has met with the leader of the University of Pennsylvania’s Health System multiple times as Philadelphia’s largest private employer faces an “existential threat” from a loss of federal funding.
The meetings were described by the dean of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, Jon Epstein, in a live-streamed message to the Penn Medicine community on Feb. 18 that was obtained by WHYY News. It remains unclear when exactly the meetings were held and whether Shapiro discussed with Epstein a statewide response to the challenges facing Penn and other state universities — including a precipitous decline in the National Institutes of Health’s support for research that has prompted schools to curtail graduate admissions and lay off employees.
In his message, Epstein — who was appointed to his position in a permanent capacity Feb. 11 — painted a dire portrait of Penn Med’s future amid a “chaotic pace of government regulations and executive orders,” many of which have placed the university directly in their crosshairs...
Caught in the middle of the political upheaval are graduate students, researchers and 49,000 employees of Penn’s health system — which the university says supports 79,990 jobs in the region and generates a $15.1 billion economic impact.
Penn’s graduate admission cuts are the difference between studying pharmacology and working at Costco for Keely Barton, a first-generation student whose research appointment at Georgetown University ends in the next month. She was rejected from Penn’s prestigious Biomedical Graduate Studies program Friday, even though she said she was told when she interviewed in early February not to worry about changes at NIH impacting admissions.
On Feb. 7, the NIH slashed the rate it pays universities to support indirect costs to 15%. The weekend she expected to be offered admission came and went...
“I think there’s an entire generation of scientists that could be lost to this,” she said. “We can’t survive as a society without an investment in science.”...
Earlier this week, state lawmakers held an at-times contentious meeting with Jameson in opposition to the school’s scrubbing of web pages related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — with two officials walking out in protest of one top administrator’s referral to diversity as a “lightning rod."
In the message obtained by WHYY News, Epstein acknowledged that scrutiny of DEI has caused “considerable anger and pain” in the Penn Medicine community.
“For now, it’s clear that we need to modify some of our programs and websites in response to explicit government directives indicating that such diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts violate the law,” Epstein said, while cautioning that the school was not departing from its “core values.”"
