Republicans reject funding for Penn’s Veterinary School
The news
Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted this week to withhold millions of dollars from the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school amid an uproar over the school’s response to anti-Semitism on campus.
The money, more than $30 million, would have been part of an annual allocation to the School of Veterinary Medicine, which is partly funded by the state. The rest of the private university receives no state funds.
Background: Penn’s president resigned after a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism.
The war between Israel and Hamas has created a firestorm at several American universities as administrators have tried to balance the freedom of speech of pro-Palestinian protesters with concerns about rising anti-Semitism.
Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned Saturday, four days after a congressional hearing in which she appeared to dodge the question of whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be punished.
The presidents of Harvard and MIT also faced strong backlash for their responses during the hearing, but managed to keep their jobs.
What happened next: Some Republicans in the House of Representatives wanted to send Penn a message.
House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler called Ms. Magill’s resignation a “good first start.” But he said he could not support the annual funding request for the veterinary school until more was done “in terms of rooting out, calling out and taking an official position on anti-Semitism that is contrary to the values of the university.”
In his comments ahead of Wednesday’s House vote, Mr. Cutler also pointed out that Ms. Magill remained a tenured faculty member at the university.
The Senate had already approved funding for the school, often called Penn Vet, and Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for it on Wednesday. Some Republicans did so too, but not enough to gain the two-thirds majority needed to pass the proposal.
Response: The school says it is ‘deeply disappointed’.
Part of the state budgetary decisions, including for state-supported universities, have been postponed for months. The decision to withhold funding for the veterinary school applies to the current fiscal year, and the state money would have represented about 18 percent of the school’s budget. This is reported by the Associated Press.
A Penn Vet spokesman, Martin J. Hackett, said in a statement that the school was “an essential part of Pennsylvania’s agricultural industry” and that the state was experiencing a shortage of veterinarians. He added: “We hope the State House will reconsider this vote when it reconvenes in 2024.”