UPenn president, board chair resign after controversial comments
The two top leaders of the prestigious University of Pennsylvania resigned Saturday after several days of furious reaction to the school president’s testimony before a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism where she, and the heads of Harvard and MIT, offered equivocal responses to whether calls for genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ rules.
The resignation of UPenn president Liz Magill was announced by Scott L. Bok, chairman of the university’s board of trustees, who who soon after disclosed that he too was stepping down, a spokesman for the school confirmed.
The blowback focused on a line of questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who repeatedly asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate their campus codes of conduct.
“If the speech turns into conduct it can be harassment, yes,” Magill said. Pressed further, she told Stefanik, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”
Pressure on Magill included a threat by one donor to withdraw a roughly $100 million gift to the university, while Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called her testimony “shameful” and urged the UPenn board to consider whether they were consistent with the university’s values.
A day later, Magill addressed the criticism, saying in a video that she would consider a call for the genocide of Jewish people to be harassment or intimidation and that Penn’s policies need to be “clarified and evaluated.”
On Friday, more than 70 members of Congress demanded in a letter that Magill, as well as Harvard University president Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, resign.
Late Thursday, the executive committee of MIT’s governing board said Kornbluth had its “full and unreserved support.”
As of Saturday evening, the Harvard Corporation had not issued a statement about Gay.
Magill will remain a faculty member of UPenn’s law school, according to Bok’s message.
She had previously been under fire earlier in the this fall after a Palestinian literary arts festival held on campus in September featured speakers whose past statements about Israel had drawn accusations of antisemitism. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson Friday, Harvard’s student newspaper, Gay apologized for her testimony.
“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” she said. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
The furor over the testimony comes amid rising concerns over antisemitism on campus and heated debate over free expression after the attack on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7.
Some Jewish students have said the activist fervor has spilled over into generalized animus against Jews. Many protests have featured controversial slogans that some view as calls for righteous resistance to Israeli oppression of Palestinians and that others understand as calls for violence against Jews and Israeli civilians.
Material from Globe wire services was used in this report.