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.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies at the hearing on Tuesday in Washington. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
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 the 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 appease critics.
The presidents’ testimonies have reinvigorated a broader debate about where colleges draw the line between offensive speech and threatening conduct – an always thorny topic that has been rendered more so by the passions inflamed by the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza.
Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law and philosophy at Penn, said she thinks the university’s guidelines on open expression would prohibit a call for genocide against Jews. And she’s troubled that anyone would suggest otherwise. Some lines need to be drawn, she said.
“The place to start is by ruling out calls for violence against members of ethnic, religious, or racial minorities,” Finkelstein said. “That’s my own view, and I’m quite shocked to see it’s not the dominant view apparently of college presidents.”
Magill has seen notable erosions of support in powerful places. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro described Magill’s comments as “absolutely shameful,” telling reporters, “It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” The Wharton board, whose members include some members of Penn’s board of trustees, said in a letter to Magill this week that Penn needed a change in leadership. And lawyers representing Ross Stevens, founder and chief executive of Stone Ridge Asset Management, said in a letter Thursday that he had grounds to rescind $100 million in shares donated to Penn. Stevens would discuss the matter “if, and when, there is a new university president in place,” the letter said.
In contrast, the MIT Corporation, which is the board of trustees for the institute, expressed its “full and unreserved support” for Kornbluth.
Still, on Friday, a letter signed by more than 70 members of Congress called on the governing boards for Harvard, Penn, and MIT to remove the presidents.
At Penn, Jewish students on Friday said they were disappointed in Magill and some echoed calls for her to resign or be forced out. But they spoke more broadly of the fear that they and many other Jewish students nationally have reported experiencing since the Israel-Gaza war began in October. Several said they worried that forcing out the president was an overly simple answer to the much more complicated problem of antisemitism.
“If Magill does resign or get fired, I don’t want the world to think that we have reached a solution,” said Eyal Yakoby, 21, a senior at Penn majoring in political science and Middle Eastern studies. “While Magill’s actions have allowed hatred to fester on campus, Magill isn’t the source of such hatred.”
Yakoby is one of two students who is suing the university for failing to respond to antisemitic incidents on campus. The suit, filed early this month, alleges Penn has become “an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred.” The two plaintiffs say Penn has run afoul of the federal Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race and national origin, among other protected categories.
Yakoby, who is American-Israeli and Jewish, said the lawsuit came after months of inaction from administrators. He described a string of antisemitic acts over the past three months: a swastika on campus, then the hosting of what he called antisemitic speakers, then a break-in at Penn Hillel, then the vandalization of Chabad House, then a bomb threat against Hillel.
In addition to the lawsuit, Yakoby also testified before Congress about antisemitism on Penn’s campus – on the same day Magill did.
Two days before the hearings, Penn junior Noah Rubin said he was hiding inside his dorm room and listening to chants of “From water to water, Palestine will be Arab!” Hundreds were rallying for Palestine in a march near Penn’s campus and the city of Philadelphia. Demonstrators carried Palestinian flags and at one point chanted, “Intifada, intifada! Long live the intifada!” – an Arabic word meaning “shaking something off” and which is associated with two long Palestinian uprisings against Israel.
Rubin, 21, who studies electrical engineering and economics, was supposed to be headed out to finish a lab. But he said he was too scared to move – as were many of his Jewish friends, who also stayed sheltering in their rooms. Rubin said he interpreted the chants he was hearing as direct calls for the extermination of the Jewish people.
In his comments to reporters Wednesday, Shapiro said he had spoken to Magill and the chairman of Penn’s board “multiple times” about steps they needed to take to make students feel safe. But “they have seemingly failed every step of the way,” the governor said, according to audio of the conversation provided by his office. Magill’s testimony, he said, “took it to the next level.”
For students such as Rubin, Magill’s hearing was disqualifying. In a now-infamous exchange from Tuesday between Rep. Elise Stefanik and Magill, Penn’s president would not answer directly whether a call for “genocide of Jews” would violate university rules related to bullying and harassment. The answer would be “context-dependent,” Magill said. But such a scenario “was not a hypothetical for our campus,” Rubin said. “And Liz Magill completely failed that question. It was embarrassing.”
Gay and Kornbluth, of Harvard and MIT, respectively, gave similar answers as Magill’s when questioned by Stefanik. The congresswoman from New York said, “These are unacceptable answers across the board.”
In her video message Wednesday, Magill said she was focused in the hearing on long-standing Penn policies, which say “speech alone is not punishable.” In her view, however, a call for genocide against Jews “would be harassment or intimidation,” Magill said.
NUANCES OF FREE SPEECH
For all of the outrage the president’s remarks at the congressional hearing have engendered, free speech advocates say they worry about colleges cracking down on protected speech because of political pressure. Unsatisfying though the answer may seem, deciding whether speech violates a university’s code of conduct “does depend on context,” said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“A call for genocide is a form of advocacy – advocacy of violence,” Terr said. Advocacy is generally protected by the First Amendment and free speech principles, he said. There are only narrow exceptions to those protections, Terr said, including a true threat of violence, incitement to imminent unlawful action, or speech that meets the legal standard for discriminatory harassment.
“A lot of the speech that we’re seeing on campus now wouldn’t fall into these exceptions and should be protected,” Terr said. “So the university presidents are right.”
Much of the criticism the presidents are getting now is “misguided,” Terr said, and coming from people who have been frustrated by other past incidences of censorship on college campuses. “The pressure should be on them to protect free speech consistently, not expand the censorship,” he said.
Private universities, like Penn MIT, and Harvard, are not bound by the First Amendment. But leaders of private institutions say they are guided by principles of free expression that are critical to academic freedom.
Discussions about where free speech ends and harassment begins are nuanced – and a congressional hearing isn’t a great place for nuance, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school.
“Even advocacy of genocide is protected by the First Amendment,” Chemerinsky said. “And some believe that defending what Israel is doing in Gaza is defending genocide. Some believe that supporting abortion rights is defending genocide.”
Campus officials should condemn hateful speech, Chemerinsky said, “and there’s a point at which the advocacy is so pervasive it constitutes harassment.”
“But this is what I mean by there’s a need for nuance – and [the hearing] just wasn’t a forum to express nuance.”
Rick Fox, a rabbi who leads a Jewish empowerment and education group on Penn’s campus, said Friday he was sickened by Magill’s testimony before Congress. At the same time, he said he worried that, if Magill were forced out, she’d be replaced by someone just as fond of legal platitudes.
“I don’t want Liz Magill to be sacrificed so they can say, ‘Okay, we did something’ and they actually did nothing,” Fox said. “I’d much prefer she be courageous and stay and stand up for the Jewish people – but if she’s not able to, then that’s when she needs to step down.”
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