“I want to get the words right.”
Professor of English Suvir Kaul surveys me carefully from behind his desk, as if this is a test. “Do you understand?” My computer rattles, bouncing on my knees as I meet his stern gaze, but his tone is pure earnest. He waits patiently, allowing me to consider his offer, and eventually the rattling stops. I do understand—he has been an English professor for almost five decades; he knows the importance of “the right words.”
I start recording.
Kaul has spent his life in academia. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Delhi where, he admits, he was a “slow student” who didn’t do particularly well in his degrees. “I always loved reading, but I had to learn how to love writing.” That love developed during his pursuit of an MPhil degree at Delhi, where he simultaneously taught undergraduates at the Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College. “That combination of teaching and doing research seminars confirmed that [a career in English education] was something I wanted to do.”
Kaul went on to receive a Ph.D. from Cornell University, but returned to India soon after to continue teaching there. “I didn't, at that point, intend to live in the United States,” he recalls. And yet, the broader variety of research opportunities eventually led him to apply for postdoctoral fellowships in America, bringing him back to Cornell’s Society for the Humanities five years later. Since then, he has taught at Stanford University and at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign alongside his wife, professor Ania Loomba, also of the Penn English Department.
When asked what brought them both here, Kaul takes a moment to formulate his response.
“In a sense, truth be told, we didn't come to Penn,” he says conspiratorially. “We came to Philadelphia.”
As frequent travelers and self-christened “big city people,” Kaul and Loomba were charmed by the connection the location offered them. India and their family overseas, they found, were much more accessible from Philadelphia than Urbana–Champaign. So for more than 20 years, Philadelphia is where they’ve stayed. “We've enjoyed living here very much,” he says, his voice tinged with fondness. Then his smile falters.
“We have not always enjoyed Penn,” he adds. “But we have always enjoyed Philadelphia.”
Despite teaching at multiple universities before coming to Penn, Kaul reveals that he wasn’t prepared for the compartmentalized decision–making structure here, especially in comparison to institutions like UIUC that had a foundation of shared governance. “We hadn't realized what it means to be in a private university where all the decisions are made at higher levels and passed down to the departments,” he explains. “There is nothing by way of faculty participation in big decisions here.”
In an attempt to create a more equitable and representative administrative environment, a group of Penn professors, including Kaul, revived the university’s advocacy chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We realized that there is really no forum for faculty participation which is oriented to the faculty's needs and their sense of what is right and wrong,” he says. Kaul explains that although there is a faculty senate here, the chairs are all appointed by the provost. “Now that's an absurd way to be, because if you have a faculty senate, everybody should be elected to it.”
“They shouldn't be beholden to the provost for their positions,” Kaul says with exasperation. Then he stops himself, sobered. “At Penn, they are.”
Kaul has never been afraid to demand accountability from the Penn administration, especially regarding their response to campus protests. In 2022, he wrote a guest column for The Daily Pennsylvanian critiquing the administration’s reaction to and subsequent treatment of the Fossil Free Penn protestors.
In his piece, Kaul divulged that, as a graduate student at Cornell, he himself was involved in protests calling for the administration and the trustees to divest from companies doing business in South Africa during the Apartheid regime. He described participating in the occupation of Day Hall, Cornell’s central administrative building, and witnessing the eventual ejection and arrest of fellow protestors by the police. All the while, he emphasized the foundational level of respect that was maintained for students’ right to nonviolent protest.
Kaul then compared his experience with the administration at Cornell to what he witnessed from Penn’s administration in response to the Fossil Free Penn protestors.
“[V]arious institutional entities [at Penn], particularly the office of the Vice Provost for University Life, have made it their mission to launch repeated investigations of these students, and to do so in ways that have heightened the stress that the protestors deal with as they keep up with their demanding academic workload,” he wrote. “Nor have officials of this office or others done anything to suggest that they recognize that nonviolent protest, even when disruptive…, is crucial to the functioning of democracy, and certainly of universities as bastions of free speech.”
Kaul stands by what he wrote to this day, and his words remain eerily applicable, even—or especially—now. Protests over issues like climate change might feel like a benign, distant memory, but the seemingly timeless shadow of administrative backlash continues to loom overhead.
“This university has done what so many universities across the nation have done last year because of the Palestine exception,” he tells me. “They’ve just tightened their speech codes on campus to a point where it doesn't feel like a democratic campus anymore.”
Kaul exudes an air of firm, thoughtful conviction as he ponders the best way to address the topic of free speech on campus. “Standards of free speech are not dependent on the cause represented,” he asserts. “Though responsible speech requires the speaker to make sure that they are not racist, misogynist, homophobic. Nor should speech be an inducement to violence.”
“I do believe the pro-Palestine activists on campus were behaving responsibly in this way; their actions and their speech was never antisemitic, though it was profoundly critical of political Zionism and the present government of Israel.”
Kaul goes on to articulate the leadership he believes students have the capacity to demonstrate through the act of protest. “Not all protestors speak for ethical and progressive causes, so not all protestors are likely to be ‘leaders,’” he prefaces. “But those who speak in the name of the public good certainly lead the way forward.”
His words echo the piece he wrote two years prior—it’s remarkable to witness him in conversation with himself. “Our administrators, and members of our board of trustees, should recognize that these students are showing us the way,” he previously wrote about the Penn students. “They are leaders—ethical, committed, and willing to risk punishment—acting to further the public good. And our administrators should match their leadership and commitment. But Penn, which styles itself a model of excellence in all things, now brings up the pathetic rear…”
Kaul doesn’t look angry, or disappointed, or even hopeful now when he considers Penn’s past, and present, relationship to protest, or his relationship to Penn. Instead, he looks determined. I witness his determination in the precision of his words. Determination doesn’t require action or movement, only confidence in where one rests, and I’m certain that whatever beliefs he holds, he holds firmly.
Beyond that, as a pillar of Penn’s English department for more than two decades, Kaul has observed a more subtle, gradual change in the university’s environment over the years, largely reflected in the changing values of its students. “I think students are much more preprofessional than they were when we first came here,” Kaul remarks. “Now you know, that's fine if that's what they want to do, but it means that the tone of the university has shifted in that direction: much more focused on the STEM fields and the professional fields, and arts and sciences are also now looking to new students who can serve corporate interests.”
When I prompt him about the future of the English Department upon his departure, he immediately starts to shake his head, as if to prevent the ridiculous notion I’m suggesting from reaching his ears. At this point, I’m indeed convinced that in his absence, any space would feel a significant lack of leadership.
“The English department is in good shape,” he assures me. “We really are a more efficient department than most on campus. We look after our young professors. We make sure that they do well here; they're properly mentored. I don't worry about this too much. I worry about the fate of the humanities.”
“[The Penn English department] still gets very good students; that's not the problem. We [just] don't get enough of them, or we don't get as many as we used to, but that's a trend across the nation,” he says. “That's also a result of the fact that our administration has been deemphasizing the humanities.”
Kaul has noticed the general dissipation of an exploratory college curriculum in conjunction with the rise of the preprofessional culture that seems to dominate at Penn. “The understanding [at other universities] is that their students will be taking a lot more courses in the humanities and the social sciences,” he explains. “I don't know how you get that shift at Penn, and I can't see it happening. There's now a well–established track from places like Penn to the world of Wall Street or consulting, or into law school and medicine. Which is good, I mean, there's no problem there. But it's not only the humanities department—the pure sciences and the social sciences are seeing a shortage of students.”
It seems, as a professor, Kaul excels at posing lingering questions, a skill he will undoubtedly take with him when he leaves Penn. Indeed, Kaul is certain he will never stop being an academic. “The good thing is the library never disappears; your computer and your desk never disappear, so research and writing will carry on. I just won't be teaching. That's the only difference.”
He’s also sure he will preserve his relationships with the people at Penn. “We have a lot of friends who are colleagues, and we'll be coming [back to campus], I'm sure, to go to the library, to use the library. We'll be coming in for talks that we might be interested in. So the life of the mind will stay alive, and Penn is part of that life,” he says. But his eyes widen a little when he reiterates, “No more teaching, though.”
Kaul might not intend to return to Penn to teach, but no matter where he goes, he will offer his informed perspective, principled leadership, and thoughtful words. Though I’ve never taken one of his classes and, given the circumstances, I fear I’ll never be able to, I can say from just one conversation that I’ve had the privilege of learning from him. It’s more than a profession; it’s a personal quality—whenever people are around Suvir Kaul, they learn.
