The President of the University of Pennsylvania resigned over the weekend after her disastrous testimony at a congressional hearing investigating campus antisemitism. Can Harvard’s President, whose comments have also drawn an intense bipartisan backlash, survive?
Summary
The President of the University of Pennsylvania resigned over the weekend after her disastrous testimony at a congressional hearing investigating campus antisemitism. Can Harvard’s President, whose comments have also drawn an intense bipartisan backlash, survive?
- The House Committee on Education and the Workforce demanded then-Penn President M. Elizabeth Magill, President of Harvard Claudine Gay, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify about their administrations’ response to the surge of campus antisemitism since the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
- Magill and the other presidents refused to condemn calls for the genocide of Jewish people. Magill said while smirking that determining whether calls for genocide violated the school’s code of conduct was a “context-dependent decision.”
- Her remarks cost Penn a $100 million donation and earned scorn and condemnation from a White House spokesman, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and a majority of the state’s congressional delegation.
- Ultimately, her smirking, dismissive remarks would cost Magill her job. Magill became the shortest-serving president in the history of Penn on Saturday after she resigned in disgrace, followed shortly after by the resignation of Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok.
- A bipartisan coalition of 74 members of Congress called on all three university bureaucrats to tender their resignations after their “abhorrent” testimony refusing to condemn calls for genocide as violations of their policies on bullying and harrassment, instead choosing to be “evasive and dismissive.”
- MIT’s board and faculty closed ranks around Kornbluth, and she seems determined to hang on to her position despite her dismissiveness towards concerns about campus antisemitism at the hearing and testimony from MIT students who said they do not feel safe on MIT’s campus.
- Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay, has been confronted with an onslaught of demands for her firing from prominent donors, alumni, and politicians of both parties since her testimony on Tuesday. The board of the Harvard Corporation will meet later Monday to determine her fate.
- The New York Times noted that since their testimony, “Congressional Republicans have opened an investigation into the three institutions and major donors have threatened to rescind multimillion-dollar gifts — a rapid turn of events that has stunned academia and emboldened critics of elite universities who argue that campuses are not confronting antisemitic rhetoric in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.”
- NBC News covered the response from Rep. Stefanik after her questioning led directly to Magill’s ouster from her perch at Penn. “One down. Two to go,” Stefanik posted on X. “This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America.”
- CNN reported that Gay’s fate “hangs in the balance” after Sunday’s meeting of Harvard’s board of directors. CNN noted that Gay has at least made the appearance of understanding concerns of Jewish students – in contrast to Magill – and while “That has not made Gay less susceptible to criticism, but her willingness to take accountability in the face of criticism may be the determining factor in whether she ultimately steps down.”
- Breitbart covered comments from New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer calling for federal investigations into MIT, Penn, and Harvard to see if “they’re in violation of Title VI” and for the immediate resignations of the presidents of those institutions. Gottheimer, a Democrat, is considered a likely candidate for Governor of New Jersey in 2025.
- National Review observed that reports of antisemitic incidents have “skyrocketed” since the Oct. 7 attacks. “According to the Anti-Defamation League, at least 1,481 such incidents have been reported. Of those instances, 292 occurred on college and university campus grounds. Additionally, 73 percent of Jewish college students said they experienced or witnessed antisemitism on campus since their fall semester began, as found in a recent ADL-Hillel International study.”
- The New York Post reported that 511 members of the Harvard faculty signed on to a letter urging the university to allow Gay to remain in her position. The faculty urged the board “in the strongest possible terms” to resist what it called “political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of” Gay.
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
