What’s New
A day after M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, testified at a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, the state’s Democratic governor said she had “failed” to “speak and act with moral clarity” and made an implicit call for her removal.
In her remarks, Magill did not directly answer pointed questions about whether students’ calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn’s code of conduct. Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters on Wednesday that Magill’s evasiveness was “absolutely shameful” and “unacceptable,” adding that Penn’s Board of Trustees “has a serious decision they need to make.”
Shapiro, a nonvoting member of the board, urged the trustees to meet soon, though their next scheduled public meeting is not until February, according to the board’s website.
Magill testified on Tuesday alongside Sally Kornbluth and Claudine Gay, the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, respectively, at a hearing convened by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The committee had demanded that the three leaders “answer for mishandling of antisemitic, violent protests” on their campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war, according to a news release.
Late on Wednesday, Magill issued a video statement about her comments. “In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” Magill said. “I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.”
Penn’s board chair did not respond immediately to requests for comment from The Chronicle. A Pennsylvania state senator on Wednesday called for Magill to resign, vowing not to support any state funding for the university until she does.
The Details
The exchange that prompted Shapiro’s comments was between Magill and Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York. Stefanik posed similar questions to all three presidents about whether students’ chants of “intifada” — an Arabic word that Stefanik defined as calling for “violent armed resistance against the State of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews” — during campus protests marked a violation of their institutions’ codes of conduct.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” Stefanik asked Magill. “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied.
Stefanik continued: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?” During a back-and-forth that lasted approximately 90 seconds, Magill said that such a comment could be harassment, if it were “directed, and severe, pervasive,” and that it was a “context-dependent decision.” (In her video on Wednesday, Magill clarified that, “in my view, it would be harassment or intimidation.” She did not say whether it would be a violation of Penn’s policies.)
“The answer,” Stefanik said before moving on to question Gay, “is yes.” (Stefanik posted on her website a transcript of the full exchange, in which Gay and Kornbluth also said that whether calls for intifada violated campus policies depended on context.)
Shapiro, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, agreed, saying that Magill “needed to give a one-word answer, and she failed to meet that test.”
“It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else,” Shapiro said. Penn’s board, he added, should meet to determine whether Magill’s comments “represent the values” of the university and board.
Shapiro said he had spoken to Magill and Scott L. Bok, the board’s chair, “multiple times” since the university hosted a Palestine Writes Literature Festival, with speakers who had previously expressed antisemitic views, in September, before the war’s outbreak. The governor said he’d offered “concrete suggestions” to both leaders, who “have seemingly failed every step of the way to take concrete action to make sure all students feel safe on campus.”
It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else.
Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania
Of the calls for intifada, Shapiro added: “If that doesn’t violate the policies of Penn, well, there’s something wrong with the policies of Penn that the board needs to get on, or there’s a failure of leadership from the president, or both.”
Shapiro said he would wait to see how Penn’s board responded before potentially intervening.
Magill also drew fire on Wednesday from the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors; its executive committee alleged in a letter that she hadn’t adequately defended faculty members against two congressmen’s “targeted harassment.”
The professors, the letter said, have faced “defamation and threats of personal violence for participating in the Palestine Writes Literature Festival and for expressing support for Palestinian civilians,” and Magill during the hearing did not challenge “false and inflammatory claims” the congressmen made about them. More broadly, the AAUP committee wrote, the “university administration has failed to defend the safety and academic freedom of faculty and students who have voiced concern for Palestinian civilians.”
The Backdrop
The congressional hearing occurred amid a tense campus climate nationwide over the Israel-Hamas war. Administrators have struggled since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel to figure out how to respond, and some presidents have criticized their colleagues for not condemning Hamas in strong-enough terms.
Gay was among those whose initial statements were seen as lackluster; meanwhile, at MIT, students have expressed frustration with how Kornbluth’s administration responded to a pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus.
This week, two Penn students sued the university, saying it had not sufficiently responded to antisemitism on campus and citing slurs like “intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea” as preventing them from fully participating in campus life, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.
The U.S. Education Department has opened civil-rights investigations of a number of colleges, including Penn and Harvard, over alleged incidents of antisemitism or Islamophobia since the war began.
What to Watch For
Magill indicated in her video that she and Penn’s provost would begin to take “a serious and careful look at our policies” on free speech, though she didn’t provide specifics. Last month she announced a plan to combat antisemitism, including the formation of a task force.
In the video, Magill did not directly address the calls for her resignation. Penn’s board has 46 members, and forming a consensus to remove Magill may be a tall task. But Shapiro isn’t the only prominent figure to criticize Magill.
A Penn alumnus, Marc Rowan, who is the board chair at the university’s business school, wrote the board this week asking it to withdraw its support for her, The New York Times reported. Rowan has called for Magill and Bok to resign for months, and by Wednesday evening, less than 24 hours after its creation, a Change.org petition demanding Magill’s resignation had accumulated more than 4,000 signatures.
Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and Harvard alumnus, wrote on X that all three presidents should “resign in disgrace.” Discussion of the presidents’ exchange with Stefanik reached the White House, where the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said that calls for genocide were “unacceptable” but that the White House does not “get involved in private-university processes and how they run their university.”
Gay released a statement on Wednesday that read in part: “Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.” On X, Stefanik described that statement as “a desperate attempt at cleaning up your pathetic antisemitic answers.”
