The mission of the Temple University faculty is to educate working people. Our 1888 charter declares: “The purpose for which the Corporation is formed is the Support of an Educational Institution intended primarily for the benefit of Working Men.”  Russell Conwell, the founder, aimed to provide a third-level education to those who had neither the money nor the freedom to pursue it as the more wealthy could.   

Today, our egalitarian mission is under assault. A tsunami of executive orders targets not only Temple and other universities but also educational, food, housing, and health programs that promote a decent primary and secondary education for poorer students, many of whom we hope will attend Temple.

As faculty at a major urban university striving to educate those likely affected by these executive orders, we should not sink mutely into the silence that seems to prevail on campuses.  Nor should we limit ourselves to loudly condemning those assailing the values we hold as educators and scholars, as well as crippling our mission. Condemnation won’t stop the barbarians at our gates. Mere condemnation, to them, only validates their actions, spurring them to further iniquity. 

We, the faculty at Temple, must act. To act effectively, we must first identify and understand the issues and then apply the most appropriate strategies.  We need that deeper knowledge so that we can contribute to and influence the critical conversation that must occur at Temple about how best to defend our mission.

We should pool our expertise. We possess a deep store of specialized knowledge that we can summon to defeat this threat to education and the rule of law. The James E. Beasley School of Law, where I teach, has experts in constitutional law and in the matters of diversity, equity & inclusion so integral to our mission. We also have experts in environmental law, health policy, immigration, international law and institutions, poverty law, and transgender rights, to cite programs and policies most besieged.  Other schools and departments have experts aplenty in these and other fields. We should harness and wield our collective expertise.

The Faculty Senate should be the forum where we can begin planning for battle – because, most certainly, we are in a war for the soul of education and our egalitarian mission.

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Editor’s note: This is a challenging time for many of us involved in education. If you are Temple faculty or a librarian on any of Temple’s campuses and would like to contribute to the conversation started in this post, please get in touch with the editor, Stan McDonald, via email: stan.mcdonald@temple.edu.