After Congress Comments, Penn President Liz Magill Resigns
Photo by EastEndQuaker, CC BY-SA 4.0
Liz Magill has resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania after strong backlash to comments she and other university heads gave to congress earlier in the week.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill has resigned amid intense criticism from donors, alumni and others after testimony she gave at a congressional hearing this week about antisemitism on college campuses.
Scott L. Bok, chair of the Penn Board of Trustees, said in a note to the university community on Saturday that Magill will stay in the role until an interim president is appointed. After that, she will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law.
“On behalf of the entire Penn community, I want to thank President Magill for her service to the University as President and wish her well,” Bok wrote.
The announcement came a day before Penn’s board of trustees was set to meet amid the growing leadership crisis.
“It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution,” Magill said in the note to campus. “It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions.”
Magill came under withering criticism for testimony in which she declined to state plainly that a call for genocide against Jews would violate the university’s code of conduct. Meanwhile, Harvard President Claudine Gay, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, apologized for remarks she made at the congressional hearing.
Summoned before a House committee Tuesday, Magill, Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth sought to defend values of free expression, while assuring that they would punish harassment or bullying. To many, though, the academics’ attempts at nuance came off as weak-kneed and legalistic equivocations.
The backlash was particularly notable for Magill, who became Penn’s president in July 2022 after previously serving as provost at the University of Virginia and dean of Stanford Law School. Magill’s testimony alienated key constituents, including the state’s governor, the board of the Wharton School of Business, and an alumnus who is threatening to withhold a $100 million donation. A video Magill released late Wednesday, walking back her remarks from the hearing, did little to placate critics.
Chair of the University’s Board of Trustees has stepped down too. He’s released a statement:
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I am not much of a fan of Instapundit but came across this in my substack browsing, and thought it illustrates just how hollow that statement is:
But think how much easier the life of these administrators would be if they and their institutions had just had some principles. If they had a record of allowing student and faculty speech on everything without punishment, they could point to that record and say, sure, some of our students are saying monstrous things, but we believe in free speech and that the best way to deal with monstrous ideas is by discussing, and refuting, them in the open.
Of course, they can’t say that, because it isn’t true – and, more importantly, it obviously isn’t true. Top universities have for years been denying the value of free speech, and even suggesting it is some sort of questionable relic of white supremacy, or Christian Nationalism, or something. They’ve been centers for the belief that the way to deal with ideas you don’t like isn’t to refute them, but to ruthlessly suppress them.
Well, when that’s your stance – and we all know that it largely has been theirs – suddenly appearing before Congress and parsing free speech doctrine to a nicety isn’t very convincing. When you censor any speech, you make yourself responsible for whatever you allow.
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/reverse-speech-codes-arent-the-answerReport
Yeah, that’s pretty good.
One of the takes I saw the other day came from one of the big schools out that said something like “We’re going to go back to just not commenting on political events. If you comment on one, failing to comment on another one seems like a statement in and of itself.”
Which might be easy to make fun of… but how many times have you seen someone in any given commenting thread say something like “Oh, where is so-and-so? S/he usually comments on this sort of thing BUT WHERE ARE THEY NOW?”
And then so-and-so has to show up and say something like “I actually supported getting rid of Franken, I just didn’t think it was worth commenting on” and it becomes a discussion of the obvious duplicity of someone *NOT* saying something.
Anyway. I think it’s smart for any given university to not play the “keep up with the headlines” game. They’ll never be able to.Report
…have they?
Haven’t we had a long and stupid series of actual Na.zis and slightly-less Na.zi far-right jackasses speaking on college campus? Things the administrators generally seemed to have no problems with, even if the students did?
Am I misunderstanding what was happening there?Report
Fire-dot-org maintains a database of disinvitations.
If we want to run with “but it’s okay to ban speech for Nazis and slightly-less Nazi far-right jackasses”, then we’re going to have to really start splitting hairs when it comes to the occasional and certainly-not-representative outlier who claims to align with Palestine but, charitably, gets over-enthusiastic in some of their statements intending to communicate solidarity and support for people who love freedom for *ALL* people.Report
You’ve got what Jaybird linked to. You’ve got the universities themselves tolerating student disruptions and extreme hecklers vetos in highly selective, content based ways. Worst of all you have administrative personnel and entities in the universities treating speech by faculty and students as disciplinary matters or subject to bureaucratic sanctions for no reason other than failing to align with a particular worldview. There’s no justification for it, and even private schools agree not to do that sort of thing when they accept federally backed loans and other sources of funding.Report
come on dude can’t you just let him have a little hate, just a little bit, it feels so good, can’t you just please let him have this tiny crumb he needs it so bad because he’s just exhaustedReport
Liberals have been really divided about whether the University Presidents messed up on this and whether Magill messed up in particular. On the other blog, one of the front pagers and many of the commentators basically saw the Congressional hearing as McCarthyism and that the Presidents did their best under what they saw as trolling on a massive scale. Other liberal commentators aren’t so sure about this. Michelle Goldberg pointed out that universities spent many years emphasizing student safety, especially from besieged communities, but now that Jewish students feel unsafe are changing their tune and it doesn’t take much to see a double standard. Michael Tomasky at the New Republic argued convincingly that we are in age of theater and that Democrats need to realize that Republicans are really good at theater and start competing. The Presidents needed to emote a bit.Report
One silver lining out of all this may be to establish the leftward boundary of the liberal coalition.
In my comments about populism I mentioned how populism inevitably leads to intolerance since it draws a line between those who are The People and those who are not.
The line between liberalism and illiberalism is like this, where anyone who posits that some other group is not entitled to the same protections and rights as everyone else, is by its nature, an illiberal faction.Report
I would say, beyond that, that the only answer is not just liberalism but universalist liberalism. What Lee decries was an inevitability.
E ventually the safetyism, the special pleading for me, but not for thee, the kid gloves for some but others, type of philosophy would ultimately crash against these kinds of rocks.
What’s critical is learning the right lesson, which is absolutely not that Israel or supporters of Israel are due some special deference. They aren’t, and they shouldn’t be allowed to hide from scrutiny anymore than anyone else. It’s that no one is due any special deference.Report
This is from a poster on the other blog:
That’s a good summary of the legal basis. But beyond that, isn’t the fundamental issue here that rules conform to what exists, rather than forcing what exists to conform to them? Suppose that heated rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian war does, in fact, cross a line that these universities have laid down? If it does, then the universities are fucked, because there are a lot of intelligent, well-off, and radical kids studying at them; and youth being youth, the rhetoric will escalate. Do the universities want to deal with this can of worms, which is less a ‘can’ and more a vast pile of unstable nitrates permeated with gasoline? They do not. They don’t want there to be a line that their students are charging across.
It’s obvious by now that the I/P conflict is escalating internal Democratic tensions — I don’t know if Stefanik is intelligent enough to realize the details of this, but I suspect she is. The basic problem that universities are confronting is that they have spent WAY too long emphasizing ‘safety’ of their students. ‘This X is a safe space’ has been used to justify alternative assignments, students skipping lectures, trigger warnings, all sorts of stuff being cut from the curriculum.
Now, Jews feel unsafe. But to a lot of other students, ‘Jew’ = ‘Afrikaaner’, and Afrikaaners don’t get to bitch about feeling unsafe. This claim by Jews to being unsafe is a very, very unsafe one for anyone who is trying to manage a university.ReportReport
Colleges spent years emphasizing student safety. Now Jews feel unsafe because many Pro-Palestinian activists can’t resist going after Jews or hounding people that disagree with them. Jewish students are invoking the protections that other groups invoked but plenty of other students find this laughable because Jews are white and whites don’t get to talk about how unsafe they feel. The university professors have no idea what to do.Report
You know, in a normal world, the person talking about safety on campus would be talking about the repeated clashes between groups, that _both sides_ have that made others feel unsafe.
There’s very little actual incidents of anyone going after ‘Jewish students’, as opposed to disruptions by both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine (Which often includes Jews!) rallies of supporters.
In fact, the examples in the article are…not any sort of calls against Jews in general. Even if you want to argue that ‘From water to water, Palestine will be Arab!’ is a call for removal of Jews (As opposed to just asserting it would be a majority Arab country.), that isn’t arguing anything about Jews in America.
I know it _really_ helps the narrative LeeEsq is pushing when it’s ‘threats against Jews’, but there are actually rather a lot of _Jewish_ pro-Palestinian supporters getting harassed also, and it seems like people are generally able to make a clear distinction between Jews and Israel, no matter how much other people (Mostly the pro-Israel side) are trying to confuse them.
A reminder: Israel wants itself confused with Jews, because then any criticism is criticism of Jews. And the US government is happy to play along.Report
Maybe. The Israel-Hamas War is showing some really big divisions in the Democratic Party on some levels and neither side is willing to endure for the sake of party unity in light of the Trump threat. The new forces in the Democratic Party that have a much more critical opinion or even outright hostile opinions of Israel and Israeli Jews, and possibly Jews generally, aren’t going to keep silent. Jews aren’t going to hold their nose at the more extreme and outrageous tactics of Pro-Palestinian activists in the United States like what happened in Oakland. Pillsy might be right that some Pro-Palestinian activists are using this moment as a type of entryism. The upper levels of the Democratic Party are trying to say cool it to the more out there antics but lack disciplinary powers to use against them.Report
As I see it, the important question isn’t whether the anti-Israel forces keep silent, but whether they get elected.
Part of the equation is how events develop. If Israel conducts itself within some reasonable definition of self defense it makes the anti-Israeli voices harder to defend.
If some prominent Palestinians coalesce around some vision that sounds like a liberal state recognizing Israel, their voices will be harder to ignore. If they keep up with the “Rive To The Sea” stuff, it will make it easy to reject them. This is why Bibi wanted Hamas as their face in the first place.Report
I don’t know. On Facebook, I suggested that Hamas can end the current Israel-Hamas War that they started by surrendering. People sympathetic to Israel like this suggestion but a lot of other people seem to think that it is utterly hilarious as if Hamas has something of a point or why would Hamas want to take responsibility. My feeling is that a lot of people just want some sort of end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and if Palestinians misuse their new independence and continue to attack Israel than Israel just needs to take it on the chin and not do anything because that agitates too many people.Report
I have a growing sense that large swathes of the world are tired of Jews and seek to reduce us to irrelevancy. We Jews might see us as an important people who have communal rights but I suspect many others just want us to be one of those obscure survivors from antiquity. Rather than having people being able to rattle off a list of Jews, they want the reaction to be “oh, those people are still around” and for Jews to exist in hundreds or thousands of scattered small communities. If we feel alienated from our host societies, so what? There are only 16 million Jews in a world of 8 billion humans.Report
Perhaps. Maybe. The problem is that we don’t have a hypothetical machine that can game out things.
The current situation seems like a no win for Biden. People on the other blog are worried that Biden’s current stance is going to cost him the election in 2024 because Muslims and/or the youth will not vote for him. However, I think if Biden was more neutral or Israel critical, the stories would be about how he is losing New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Maybe even CT and MA.
It is hard to convince people of this though. They either downplay the size of the Jewish vote, take it for granted that the Jewish vote is less likely to switch or sit out, and/or think the Jewish vote has switched Republican because they don’t know many Jews but they know the loud voices in the mediaReport
Given that the majority of Americans generally favor Israel, from what I can see, Biden has once again found the political center of gravity wrt Israel and the Palestinians.
The trouble is that “support for Israel” includes a lot of people who are aligned with Biden on the issue, but hate him for other reasons.Report
Is there anything that Biden could do to make Muslims and/or the youth sit out?
Is there anything that Biden could do to make the Jewish vote sit out?
If there is a list of things that Biden could do to make Muslims and/or the youth sit out but nothing that he could do to make the Jewish vote sit out, isn’t the smart move to just do what the Muslims and/or the youth want?
It’s not like the Jews are going to go anywhere.
Seriously. This is the most important election of our lifetimes.Report
I think Chip is probably right on this. Popular sentiment in the US is generally pro-Israel. The visibility of handfuls of protests has more to do with it being a slow time of year for the news than actual interest, and whatever they’re reflective of it isn’t the sentiments of the average American (who remember, approximates to something like a white person in their 50s without a college degree, living in an unfashionable suburb).
My guess is that the price of groceries or gas in October of next year will have more impact on Biden’s fortunes than anything that happens in Israel.Report
Well, we can look at the first question again:
Is there anything that Biden could do to make Muslims and/or the youth sit out?
Is Israel on this list? If it’s not and the Muslims and/or the youth can be reliably relied upon despite some superficial disagreement… no problem.
Hey, maybe Biden will pick up some swing voters in the middle who support Israel but not, you know, Red Heifer Project support them and they look at the Republicans and the Republicans support Israel way way waaaaaay too much.Report
Maybe. I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong, but my gut is that anything getting a lot of traction among extremely online, political junky types is more likely than not a red herring. Democrats running for national level office should err to the right on whatever that issue is. That’s what Biden is doing, and when he’s done that so far it has typically worked out for him.Report
I think all three of those are compatible with each other. Yes, Stefanik and the GOP did their best to paint this in the worst possible light, and yes, optics matter (see the Covington Catholic students and how the “smirk” affected people’s reactions). And yes, what the presidents actually said at the hearing is broadly speaking what enlightened people should champion — oriented toward maximizing free speech and setting a high bar for interference with that. But what they said at the hearing is quite opposite to the trend of the last decade on private college campuses.
The question for those of us who truly value free speech is, what’s the best reaction to these presidents — cheer them because they’re saying the right thing now, or boo them because it’s a blatantly political change of heart? Ideally I think we would want an admission that the more restrictive policies of the last several years were a mistake and that there will be a correction towards freer speech for all; but unfortunately the way it’s going seems to be trending more to say that this is just about anti-Semitism and that the solution is to make sure Jewish people are crammed in under the same umbrella of protection as other “oppressed” groups (and hope that the people under the umbrella stop fighting with each other).Report
From a free speech perspective these people aren’t salvageable. Everyone knows what they’ve done and endorsed. The best to hope for is a lot of fresh starts.Report
It’s not so much these people specifically, but the system that put them in their positions. What are the lessons that the university administrations and trustees will be learning from this affair? Just need people with better political instincts? Need to take visible actions to point away from anti-Semitism? Or need to reorient policies and practices towards freer speech? My hope is the last one, but that’s not where I’d put my money.Report
Me either.Report
I happened to catch some of the hearings. The presidents came across as smug, legalistic, and deigning to be questions, and refusing to answer straight forward questions, or even try to rebut the how the questions were phrased. They get paid a lot of money and this is one of the foreseeable responsibilities. It looked like they all failed hard.Report
With tongue only partially in cheek, the accurate answer would have been even worse: “We don’t know, there’s no court decision on that precise question yet.” There are plenty of examples of a college president saying that action X violates (or doesn’t violate) university rule Y, only to be told by a judge that they are wrong.Report
It was a combination of factors. First, they were prepared by lawyers. That isn’t bad. You don’t go into a Congressional hearing without several hours of practice. They were prepared by the wrong types of lawyers. They were prepared by the most elite lawyers when they should have been prepared by a local personal injury lawyer, who would tell them the importance of answering a yes or no question with a yes or no answer. The personal injury lawyer would have also told them to emote more.
Another issue is that it was decades since the university professors had to communicate with normal people. They acted like they were in front of academics and would be academics.Report
From the NYT: As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment
Remember: The story isn’t what happened. It’s how Conservatives responded to what happened.
This is even worse than pouncing. This is seizing.Report
It helps Times readers to focus on the real problem, that lack of unity could weaken them against the real Other.Report
Headline:
As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Step On Their D!ck
Two months after a prominent conservative activist and fundraiser was caught hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas have voted against barring the party from associating with known Na. zi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.
In a 32-29 vote on Saturday, members of the Texas GOP’s executive committee stripped a pro-Israel resolution of a clause that would have included the ban. In a separate move that stunned some members, roughly half of the board also tried to prevent a record of their vote from being kept.
In rejecting the proposed ban, the executive committee’s majority delivered a serious blow to a faction of members that has called for the party to confront its ties to groups that have recently employed or associated with outspoken white supremacists and extremists.
In October, The Texas Tribune published photos of Fuentes, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, entering and leaving the offices of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right candidates and movements.Report
I swear, if no one had ever discovered whataboutism, half of these comments would never have come into existence.Report
Were you unaware of the Texas resolution fiasco, or did you think we were?
Or didn’t it occur to you that these two things might be in , ah, shall we say, tension with each other?
In this case, what conservatives are doing over HERE, is precisely a cogent response to the assertion that they are “seizing the moment” over THERE.
Can someone here explain how responding to antisemitism with a resolution, which had to be edited so as not to offend antisemites, constitutes “seizing the moment”?
Looks more like “Having a seizure”.Report
Did you know that Ethiopia is *THIS* close to serious financial difficulties due to the possibility that they’re going to default on one of their international bonds?
“But that’s not the topic!”
“Yeah, well.”Report
Seems germane to me.Report
In a discussion of the college president kerfuffle and how it’s being covered by the media, pointing out that the Texas Republican Party is not barring its members from meeting with odious people as reported by The Texas Tribune… is germane?
Is there anything that wouldn’t be?
Lemme guess: Further discussion of the college presidents.Report
So an article about conservative reactions to the college presidents actions is in no way related to conservatives internal governing body reactions to dealing with legit anti-Semites?
Fascinating.Report
No, it’s showing how the New York Times is framing the topic.
The headline was *NOT* “Liz Magill resigns”.
It was “Conservatives Pounce”.Report
It’s an interesting moment politically because Israel/Palestine is causing a big riff in the Democratic Party but the Republican Party is in utterly no position to get a bunch of defections from either side because of certain prominent associations.Report
I suspect there are fewer defections to be had then one would think.Report
At some point we are going to have to accept that colleges cannot operate off students ‘feeling’ unsafe in some random sense that is completely unmoored from reality, but will have to actually look into whether those things _actually_ make students unsafe.Report
Of course I agree.
But why in the hell would the students agree to this?Report
Perhaps more to the point, why would the *DONORS*?
Especially given the last, oh, decade or so.Report
I think we have just discovered a major problem (1) of having a certain sort of education in this country that exists to perpetuate wealth people all giving each other jobs under the groups they are most qualified, aka, Ivy League colleges, and how that operating off donors is itself one of the problems.
The problem is that the wealthy a) own everything, and b) have created a system where you have to do things they approve of to be allowed to play in that system, which is mostly just used to get their own kids though that system to validate their insane biased behavior while _pretending_ to have some sort of objective standards.
A reminder, in case anyone is wondering: Harvard is not bowing to donors because Harvard needs the money. Harvard, under no possible circumstances whatever, needs donor money. They are _incredibly_ wealthy. As I pointed out the last time we talked about Harvard, Harvard could literally go _free_, charging no tuition and getting no donations whatsoever, off of the mere interest of its endowment fund, which is currently 10 billion dollars.
The donors are just a proxy for the extremely wealthy class of people who have decide that they will recognize Harvard as a gatekeeper into their own circles. And both they and Harvard know they could stop that if they wanted.
1) I mean, those of us playing attention already knew it.Report
Hey, I know! Get rid of the legacy system!
Anyway, we’re not going to return back to the Denis Leary “Life Sucks. Get a freakin’ helmet.” way of doing things.
Quite honestly, the way I see it playing out is that the DEI will have a small truce offer of “Okay, Jews are members of a protected class (again) and we’ll have speech codes about Jewishness but they have to tone down the Israel stuff” and we’ll see if that offer is accepted.Report
MattY has a take from his yute:
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I think there’s a lot to this. At a certain point if you train people that the remedy for any kind of interpersonal issue or bad feelings is to go call in some authority you can’t be too surprised when their response to everything is to go call in some authority. It’s up to authorities to say de minimis non curat lex. The law doesn’t concern itself with trifles.
I believe Yglesias went to Harvard, and it’s always worth remembering that the students in these places are among the safesf, most protected people in the history of the species to date.Report
Would you be surprised to learn there are states where it is against the law to have any teaching curriculum which makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin”?
Maybe someone should tell them to shut the eff up.Report
No, that’s just Classical Liberalism in practice.Report
Two Jewish students from Penn have filed suit under Title VII for Penn’s refusal to do things about anti-Semitism since 2015. A lot of the current round of Pro-Palestinian activism involved either acts of vandalism or outright confrontation with Jews in order to pressure them to shut up.Report
Tomorrow’s Headlines Today: “Has Title VII Gone Too Far?”Report
Actually, the legacy system isn’t really the problem there, the entire infrastructure _of_ Ivy Leagues exist so there is some way for wealthy people to check that someone is the ‘right sort of person’, aka, related to other wealthy people.
It’s a ‘credentials’ thing, something we invented when the amount of people we need to keep track of exceeded the amount we could personally know, so we said ‘Hey, let’s give them a piece of piece of paper’.
But it isn’t keeping track of who can do well at school. George W. Bush went to Yale…and, look, I don’t think Bush was as stupid as some people made him out to be, just somewhat incoherent sometimes, but he was not some sort of elite thinker that should have a Yale diploma if that is what a Yale diploma is supposed to represent…but it’s _not_. His disploma perfectly indicated ‘Someone in a powerful family’, as it was intended to.
Demands to remove the legacy system are not really going to stop ‘A way that rich and powerful people know each other so they can continue to only associate with each other and help each other out’, but it will sorta make it harder _and_ reveal the hypocrisy of what’s going on.
In fact, that’s already happening, as more and more pressure has been applied to the system to let in ‘lesser people’, the elites have _already started_ to back away from using as a measure of someone’s worth. I don’t know what they’re actually using now, maybe they can just google people, but I suspect it’s going to revert to ‘elite boarding schools’.Report
Well, in tech, they’re using “certs”.
You have to be able to pass a test that requires you to study before they give you the certification and you have to renew it periodically with proof that you’ve been keeping up on your studies.Report
oh, so “feel unsafe” now gets analysis as to whether it’s a true feeling or a fake feeling?
congratulations, you invented privilege.Report
What would be interesting, and what, if anything, should prevail, is a serious presumption that any student is among the most privileged in the history of humanity, regardless of identity, background, or whatever else. At least that would be a lot closer to objectively true.Report