Penn’s president resigns over her comments on anti-Semitism
University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned Saturday, four days after testifying at 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 announcement, in an email sent to the Penn community by Scott L. Bok, the chairman of the board of trustees, followed months of intense pressure from Jewish students, alumni and donors, who said they were addressing their concerns about anti-Semitism had not taken to heart. campus seriously.
Ms. Magill is the first president of a major university to step down from her position as part of the fallout from the protests that have engulfed campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
With students deeply divided over the war, university presidents have tried to balance the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters with concerns that some of their language is anti-Semitic.
Ms. Magill, a lawyer, came to Penn in 2022 as a free speech advocate, but ultimately found herself undone by trying to follow that legal principle.
During Tuesday’s congressional hearing, she provided legal answers to a complicated question involving speech. Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said students had chanted their support for the Intifada, an Arabic word meaning uprising that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.
After parrying back and forth, Ms. Stefanik asked, “Calling for genocide of the Jews, is that bullying or intimidation?”
Ms Magill responded: “If it is targeted and severe and pervasive, it is harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik responded: “So the answer is yes.”
Ms. Magill said, “It’s a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”
Mrs. Stefanik exclaimed, “Is that your testimony today? Calling for genocide of the Jews depends on the context?”
Two other university presidents — Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT — testified along with Ms. Magill and made similar statements. Free speech scientists said they were legally correct.
But Ms. Magill’s comments failed to provide a moment of moral clarity for many of the university’s Jewish students, faculty and alumni, and set off a wave of criticism, including the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and the two Democratic US Senators, John. Fetterman and Bob Casey. Even the White House got involved.
Ms Magill apologized for her testimony on Wednesday evening.
“At that moment, I was focused on our university’s long-standing policy, in line with the U.S. Constitution, which states that merely speaking is not a crime,” she said in a video. “I wasn’t focused on the irrefutable fact, but I should have been, that a call for genocide against Jewish people is a call for the most terrible violence that human beings can commit. It is evil – plain and simple.”
She added: “In my opinion it would be harassment or intimidation.”
In response to her apology, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free speech group, said a statement that it would be a mistake for Penn to revise its speech policy following the Congressional hearing.
Ms. Magill had been fighting for months before the October 7 attacks.
Over the summer, donors asked her to cancel a planned Palestinian literary conference on campus. Ms Magill, citing freedom of expression, said it would go ahead as planned in September.
Less than two weeks later, Hamas attacked Israel, and some of the university’s biggest benefactors, led by Marc Rowan, the head of Apollo Global Management, were outraged by what they said was Ms. Magill’s slow response, issuing a statement condemning the attacks.
“There has been a growing storm around these issues,” Mr. Rowan told CNBC. “You know, microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage, and yet violence, especially violence against Jews – anti-Semitism – seems to have found a place of tolerance on campus, protected by freedom of speech.”
He called on donors to withdraw their contributions. Among the major donors who participated were Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire, and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. and his family.
The university’s administrators had initially rallied in support of Ms. Magill and ignored Mr. Rowan’s calls for her removal. So did former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Penn graduate, who said she had made mistakes but was allowed to stay. But the fallout from her testimony in Congress became overwhelming. By Thursday morning, more than 11,000 people had signed a petition opposing her leadership.
Ms. Magill, a former dean of Stanford Law School and provost of the University of Virginia, had come to the university as part of a wave of women heading Ivy League colleges. Penn will now begin the search again.
Anemona Hartocollis reporting contributed. Kitty Bennett research contributed.