Leaders of three prestigious US universities remained under pressure on Friday as a controversy about antisemitism on campus, inflamed by their appearance at a congressional hearing earlier in the week, showed little sign of abating, with free speech advocates and billionaire college donors wading into the fray.
Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), survived an emergency meeting of its board of trustees on Thursday amid backlash to her “disastrous” comments to the hearing investigating rising campus antisemitism since the beginning of the Israel-Gaza war.
However, her future at the university is still in question; on Friday, the board of UPenn’s Wharton business school asked her to resign, Axios reported. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, a non-voting member of the university board of trustees, said the group would meet again over the weekend.
Magill was accused of being “evasive” in her answer to the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik about whether calls by students for the genocide of Jews would constitute harassment under the school’s codes of conduct.
Her position that it depended on the “context” of such calls, rather than the straight “yes” answer Stefanik was seeking, drew swift bipartisan condemnation, calls for her resignation, and the threatened loss of a $100m grant from the billionaire philanthropist and UPenn alumnus Ross Stevens, who denounced the university’s “permissive approach” to hate speech and discrimination against Jews.
Separately, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, apologized for her similar testimony at the same hearing in which she said antisemitic speech was actionable under university policy only “when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation”.
“I am sorry. Words matter,” Gay said in an interview published on Friday in the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper.
“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret. I got caught up in an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures [and] what I should have had the presence of mind to do was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community, threats to our Jewish students, have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged.”
Gay, also facing demands for her resignation, further attempted to limit the damage in a statement saying that calls for violence or genocide against Jews were “vile”. It did not, however, assuage David Wolfe, a rabbi and member of Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group, who resigned saying the “evil” ideology of placing Jews as oppressors “grips far too many of the students and faculty”.
A third university president, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT), like Magill and Gay was accused of being evasive during the hearing, answering that calls for genocide constituted bullying or harassment if they were “targeted at individuals, not public statements”.
MIT issued a statement defending Kornbluth’s “ability to unite our community”. It said: “She has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, which we reject utterly at MIT. She has our full and unreserved support.”
The Republican-led House committee on education and the workforce opened an investigation into the three universities on Thursday, saying the schools were not doing enough to address antisemitism on campus.
Stefanik, meanwhile, has come under scrutiny for her line of questioning, frequently using the word “genocide” and linking it to chants heard during pro-Palestine protests on several US campuses calling for “intifada”, a word that in Arabic means uprising, and has been used in reference to both peaceful and violent Palestinian protests.
While some Jewish student groups see “intifada”, and other phrases such as “from the river to the sea”, as calls for violence, pro-Palestinian groups argue they relate to a more general message for Palestinian freedom.
The New York congresswoman was keen to take credit for creating a viral moment during her often heated questioning of the three university presidents. “I thought, ‘How can I drill down on this and ask this question in such a way that the answer is an easy ‘yes’? And they blew it,” Stefanik told the New York Times.
Civil liberties advocates on Friday defended the presidents for what they saw as their intended efforts, however clumsy, to speak out for free speech rather than any wish to become embroiled in a public fight over antisemitism.
“There is no ‘controversial speech’ exception to the first amendment,” Jenna Leventoff, the senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a statement.
“The first amendment and the principles of academic freedom require higher education institutions to safeguard all protected speech, even when that speech is contentious or offensive. Therefore phrases like ‘from the river to the sea’, ‘no ceasefire’, ‘make America great again’ and ‘no justice, no peace’ are protected.
“Speech that contains a serious and imminent threat of violence, incitement to violence, or that pervasively harasses someone based on their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or other protected characteristics is not protected by the first amendment or academic freedom principles … but Congress cannot expect university administrators to be in the business of deciding which deeply held beliefs may be censored and which views may be expressed.”
Harvard and UPenn in particular have been in the spotlight since the commencement of hostilities in Gaza for rising antisemitism on campus. In October, a rightwing mega donor, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, was reported to be behind an organization that placed a billboard at Harvard identifying a number of individual students as antisemites.
At UPenn, this week’s controversy has also reopened a debate about the influence of wealthy benefactors on college policies and politics and hiring decisions. Steven’s withdrawal of the $100m award for a new finance center, for example, was not the first time philanthropic funding had been cut by donors protesting against its stance since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
Marc Rowan, the chief executive of Apollo Global Management, who with his wife has given $50m to UPenn, according to the New York Times, announced he was cutting off funding in part because the university had allowed speakers with a reported history of antisemitic remarks to appear at a book festival.
Since the start of the most recent Israel-Gaza war, Muslim and Arab students also have reported an increase in instances of discrimination on campus, along with a crackdown on expressions of support for Palestinians. A number of universities, including Columbia and Brandeis, have suspended the group Students for Justice in Palestine. Last month, the ACLU sued Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, for ordering the state’s university system to “deactivate” the group.
