University of Pennsylvania president resigns in anti-Semitism row

Washington — University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who came under fire for her stance on anti-Semitism on campus, has resigned, the Ivy League school said on Saturday.

Magill was one of three top university presidents who were criticised after they testified at a congressional hearing on Tuesday about a rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

She has agreed to stay on until an interim president is appointed, Scott Bok, chair of the Philadelphia-based university’s board of trustees, said on Saturday in a statement posted on the university’s website. Bok also stepped down.

“I write to share that president Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as president of the University of Pennsylvania,” Bok said in the announcement released by the university. Magill will remain a tenured faculty member at the university’s law school, Bok said.

Magill, Harvard University president Claudine Gay, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth testified before a US House of Representatives committee on Tuesday.

As they tried to walk a line that protected freedom of speech, they declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican representative Elise Stefanik’s question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.

Calls for Magill’s and Gay’s resignations in particular mounted in the days after that testimony. Magill released a video on Wednesday in which she expressed regret, Gay apologised on Friday.

Jewish students, families and alumni have accused the schools of tolerating anti-Semitism, especially in statements by pro-Palestinian demonstrators since the jihadist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and killed 1,200 people. That attack prompted a huge counterattack by Israel that has left more than 17,700 Palestinians dead, according to the Gaza health ministry.

“One down. Two to go. This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of anti-Semitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America,” Stefanik said on social media site X after Penn's announcement.

She said Magill’s resignation was the “bare minimum of what is required” and urged Harvard and MIT to take similar action.

David Magerman, co-founder at Differential Ventures, a venture capital fund specialising in artificial intelligence, previously posted in an October 15 letter on his LinkedIn account that he was a Penn alumnus and a major donor but was “deeply ashamed” of his association with the university and “refuse to donate another dollar to Penn”.

Magerman said late on Saturday in an emailed response to a request for comment: “All of my philanthropy is going to support Israel in our war efforts and recovery. I will also be giving major gifts to Israeli universities and supporting education in Israel.”

Antisemitism and Islamophobia have risen sharply in the US and elsewhere since October.

Anti-Semitic incidents in the US rose by about 400% in the two weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said this week that in the two months after the war began, incidents motivated by Islamophobia and bias against Palestinians and Arabs rose by 172% compared to the same period in 2022.

Eyal Yakoby, a University of Pennsylvania student who has sued the school alleging insufficient response to antisemitism, said on CNN that Magill’s resignation was one step towards a broader change at the university.

“This has been something that myself and many alumni and fellow students, parents been working on for a while ... (but) this is just the first domino in a culture for many leaders including chairman Bok who have allowed this to happen,” Yakoby said.

Reuters