UPenn trustees call emergency meeting as calls mount for president to resign over remarks about Jewish genocide

The trustees’ emergency meeting Sunday comes on the heels of major donors’ calls for Liz Magill’s resignation

Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, during a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023. Photo by Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By Lauren Markoe December 9, 2023

The University of Pennsylvania board of trustees will hold an emergency meeting Sunday to deliberate over the fate of President Liz Magill, as calls for her ouster have escalated following her widely panned testimony to a House committee this week about responding to antisemitism on campus.

The trustee meeting, plans for which were reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, comes on the heels of a call for Magill’s resignation from Penn graduate David Pottruck, the former CEO of Charles Schwab, for whom the university’s health and fitness center is named.

Pottruck spearheaded a letter from alumni expressing no confidence in Magill, and sent it to the school’s trustees on Friday, according to the student newspaper the Daily Pennsylvanian, which obtained a copy.

On Thursday, the board of Wharton, the university’s business school, said Magill needed to resign. That same day Ross Stevens, CEO of the financial services firm Stone Ridge Asset Management, told the university in a letter from his attorneys that he would rescind about $100 million of a 2019 gift to Penn.

Additionally, more than 70 members of Congress Friday called for the trustees of Penn — as well as Harvard and MIT — to fire their presidents, according to Reuters.

A lawyer’s reponse

Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth had appeared with Magill at a House committee meeting on Tuesday, during which they were asked whether calls for genocide against Jews would constitute harassment on their campus according to their universities’ codes of conduct. All three said it would depend on context.

Their answers might actually be true according to those policies, some legal scholars pointed out. But to many, they came off as insensitively legalistic.

Magill, a lawyer and the former dean of Stanford Law School, at one point in the hearing said Penn’s code of conduct would categorize a call to genocide against Jews as harassment under certain circumstances. “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment,” she said.

MIT’s board issued a statement of support for Kornbluth earlier in the week. Gay apologized on Friday for her remarks, and in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, Magill also tried to temper her comments, describing the call for the genocide of Jews “evil, plain and simple.”

On her now viral moment before the House commitee, she said in the video, “I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable. 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.”

A Video Message from President Liz Magill pic.twitter.com/GlPE3QZU4P
— Penn (@Penn) December 6, 2023

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff have both criticized Magill for her statements in front of Congress; both are Jewish. Neither, though, have said she should lose her job.

Lauren Markoe is news editor of the Forward. A Bronx native, she reported for The Patriot Ledger, several McClatchy newspapers in the South, and Religion News Service, where she was also managing editor. She also produced live radio shows at WAMU in Washington, D.C., where she lives.

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