The Our City, Our Schools Coalition and other groups are calling on the University of Pennsylvania to help support the city’s cash-strapped public schools though a “payment in lieu of taxes” — or PILOT — agreement.

Under the looming statue of Benjamin Franklin, with umbrellas shielding them from the rain, about 50 people gathered on the University of Pennsylvania campus Thursday to demand that the university contribute Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) to the City of Philadelphia to help fund public schools.

PILOTs are payments that nonprofits, like Penn, voluntarily make to local governments since they are exempt from paying property taxes. Most of the Ivy League schools pay PILOTs, with the exception of Columbia University and Penn, the latter of which covers 299 acres of taxable land in University City.

Penn doesn’t act like a nonprofit anymore; it prioritizes research over the education of the undergraduate students it was founded to serve. Fernandez says universities like Penn are no longer “producers of knowledge”; they’re “producers of wealth.”

The debate over whether institutions like the University of Pennsylvania should be tax exempt focuses far more on the economic than the civic role they play, writes Matthew Fernandez.

The debate over what contributions Penn owes to Philadelphia took a turn this month as Penn released its annual economic impact report detailing a $14 billion contribution to the state in 2015. But some observers doubt whether all of the impacts cited are entirely Penn-generated.

Nonprofits like Penn, Drexel and Jefferson Hospital are tax exempt, so they don’t normally pay anything — that could change under Mayor-elect Jim Kenney.

This week on the podcast, we bring you a story about the relationship between the University of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia. Produced by John Vilanova and Aaron Shapiro, in this episode, we hear from a group of undergraduate students who have organized around the issue of PILOTs, or payments in lieu of taxation. Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the United States and, even though Penn is the biggest land owner in Philly, and its endowment is the tenth largest in the country, it pays nothing to the city in property taxes. Here, we follow the students in asking, What exactly is the role of the private university in supporting its home city’s public institutions?

On Thursday morning, the Philadelphia City Council approved a non-binding resolution calling on Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration to ask large nonprofits in the city for PILOTs, or payments in lieu of taxes.