The University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Ivy League, is offering a three-week, $9,949 “Social Justice Research Academy” summer camp for high school students.
The program, scheduled for July 5–26, 2025, is hosted by Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences and targets students interested in exploring social justice issues.
“The Social Justice Research Academy brings students from around the world together for three weeks to dive deep into the past, present, and future of social justice,” the University of Pennsylvania’s website for the camp explains.
Participants will engage in daily classes and workshops led by Penn faculty, teaching fellows, and guest lecturers, covering topics such as gun control, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and historical narratives.
The topics and issues being covered include “a selection of significant historical struggles (the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights) as well as those that define our recent past and present (climate change, immigration and refugee/asylum policy, LGBTQ rights, #BlackLivesMatter, disability studies, faith and social justice, interfaith leadership, intersectionality, affordable housing, prison reform, #MeToo, food deserts, social distancing as a privilege, access to health care, textbooks and curricular biases, anti-racism, anti-Semitism, music and civil rights, international human rights, race and popular culture).”
Tuition covers on-campus housing, meals Monday through Friday, and access to Penn’s academic facilities, but excludes a $100 application fee, travel costs, and personal expenses. Students from Philadelphia public or charter schools may be eligible for scholarships to attend tuition-free. The non-credit program requires a high school transcript, a letter of recommendation, and two 400-word essays for admission.
Campus Reform reports:
Other colleges and universities are offering social justice-themed high school programs this summer. A program at Tulane University this month is teaching high schoolers about “queer theory” and “Black feminism.”
Another program beginning next month at Smith College in Massachusetts will explore topics such as “queer love stories” and “reproductive justice.”
“[W]e interrogate the histories of gender in sport and physical education and use critical feminist and queer theories to decipher the ways sport creates, supports, and resists dominant ideologies of inequality,” a description for a course on “Gender in Sport” says.
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