She didn’t resign when one of her school’s top male swimmers took away swimming trophies from female athletes earlier this year, but University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill did resign Saturday, just days after her disastrous testimony at a Congressional hearing about campus antisemitism and the university’s tepid response.
Dozens of public officials, donors, and members of the university community had called for her resignation.
“It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution. It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions,” Magill said in a statement. Magill will remain a faculty member at the university’s law school.
Two days after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Magill still failed to issue any statement condemning the atrocities, which included the killing of men, women, and children during a surprise attack. Instead, the university posted a note on Instagram honoring Native and Indigenous people “their culture, history, and importance as members of the Penn community.”
One of the university’s largest donors, Marc Rowan, chief of Apollo Global Management, said on CNBC,
“So this weekend, while 1,200 Israelis were being butchered and murdered and raped, we tweeted as a university about Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Rowan had given at least $50 million to the university, according to the New York Times.
Then came the campus protests, in which students and some faculty called for the genocide of Jews in repose to the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists.
During a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York asked the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University whether calling for the genocide of Jews on their campuses violated institution’s bullying and harassment policies.
Answering Stefanik, Magill said that it was “context dependent,” as it pertains to the university code of conduct.
“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill said. “If it is directed and severe and pervasive, it is harassment.”
“So the answer is yes,” Stefanik said. Stefanik said, “It’s a context-dependent decision, that’s your testimony today, calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer. ‘Yes,’ Ms. Magill.”
Magill replied, “It can be harassment.”
Her responses to the committee questions were less than satisfactory. In fact, they were so bad that Penn Trustee Board Chair Scott Bok also resigned over the weekend.
On Sunday, the president of Harvard University, also under pressure to resign for her lack of response to the Hamas terrorists and to the campus calls for genocide of Jews, was accused of plagiarizing her dissertation that earned her a PhD.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reminded America of what had happened to initiate the current war: “The atrocities that we saw on Oct. 7 are almost beyond description or beyond our capacity to digest.”
Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN, Blinken continued, “And we’ve talked about them before, but the sexual violence that we saw on Oct. 7 is beyond anything that I’ve ever seen, either.”
Watch the congressional hearing on CSPAN at this link.
