U. Penn President Liz Magill Resigns (Update: Chair of Bd of Trustees Scott Bok Also Resigns)
Announcement from Chair of Board of Trustees: “I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as President of the University of Pennsylvania. She will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law.”
Here is an announcement just posted and emailed by the University of Pennsylvania:
December 9, 2023
Dear Members of the Penn Community,
I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as President of the University of Pennsylvania. 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.
We will be in touch in the coming days to share plans for interim leadership of Penn. President Magill has agreed to stay on until an interim president is appointed.
President Magill shared the following statement, which I include here:
“It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution. It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions.”
Best,
Scott L. Bok
Chair, Board of Trustees
University of Pennsylvania
This pushed her off the cliff:
🚨🚨🚨Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND… pic.twitter.com/hUY3SgoOOi
— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023
This didn’t help:
A Video Message from President Liz Magill pic.twitter.com/GlPE3QZU4P
— Penn (@Penn) December 6, 2023
Related posts:
- Congressional Campus Antisemitism Hearing: “The three presidents were, frankly, fairly pathetic”
- U. Penn President: On Second Thought, Campus Calls for Genocide Against Jews Would Be “Harassment or Intimidation”
- UPenn Loses $100 Million Donation Following Disastrous Hearing on Campus Anti-Semitism
UPDATE
Scott Bok, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, also has resigned:
Today, following the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s President and related Board of Trustee meetings, I submitted my resignation as Chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, effective immediately. While I was asked to remain in that role for the remainder of my term in order to help with the presidential transition, I concluded that, for me, now was the right time to depart.
Former President Liz Magill last week made a very unfortunate misstep—consistent with that of two peer university leaders sitting alongside her—after five hours of aggressive questioning before a Congressional committee. Following that, it became clear that her position was no longer tenable, and she and I concurrently decided that it was time for her to exit.
The world should know that Liz Magill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team. She is not the slightest bit antisemitic. Working with her was one of the great pleasures of my life. Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday. Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong. It made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony.
I wish Liz well in her future endeavors. I believe that in the fullness of time people will come to view the story of her presidency at Penn very differently than they do today. I hope that some fine university will in due course be wise enough to give her a second chance, in a more supportive community, to lead. I equally hope that, after a well deserved break, she wants that role.
I likewise wish my innumerable friends across the Penn campus well as they forge ahead in this challenging time.
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Comments
I know it’s been covered before but the backstory around her resignation isn’t included here?
See “Related posts.”
It wasn’t there at first. I see it now though.
All those 3 Presidents should resign, all of them
Any alumni sending money is nuts
Burn it all down
Water will seek its own level. So will quality. Enough with this AA nonsense. Each one of these females was chosen simply because of AA, not quality.
Hey hey, ho ho
Affirmative action’s the way to go
Who wants to hear this as your taxi-ing for take-off,
“Whassup folks there on Flight 154B. This is yo capt’n Jameel. In addition to me welcomin’ you, yous should be welcomin’ me too as this b my first flight”
I see the usual 2 downvotes
Get a life
I think we actually figured out a while ago that they are just bot accounts.
Perhaps the downvotes are not for the sentiment regarding the university presidents, but for the foolish addition of “Burn it all down.”
The country has some serious problems, to be certain, but the best course of action is not to burn it all down, but to get back to our founding principles. Had we followed them all along, we wouldn’t be having the issues we are having today.
Those universities deserve to burn to the ground – and decent society would benefit from that.
The country could use good universities, rather than the garbage it has now. I’m not sure if it is possible, but academia should be corrected to align with our founding principles, not simply burned to the ground.
Reply to ChrisPeters:
The key is federal money. There should be no federal money going to pay for any student’s tuition (outside of military programs and the like) and no federal loan guarantees. That is the key to the problem, as I would assume you are well aware.
What a lot of people don’t know is that whereas the federal government used to give mostly loan guarantees to students, through private lenders, the feds took over the whole racket with BarkyCare. They needed all the profits from the student loan business in order to be able to twist the numbers to claim that BarkyCare was revenue neutral (which was a pathetic joke, even then). SO the feral government took over the entire student loan business, soup to nuts, in order to force national socialized medicine on us. And it’s kind of weird that no one even brought this little ditty up in public in all the debates about Traitor Joe now wanting to give away our money to the student borrowers and let them skate from their loan obligations. Funny how that all ties together …
Anyway, if federal money came out of student expenditures and federal loans disappeared, then every college and university would start making major changes right quick and lots of those joke departments would disappear, along with the marxists and maoists and trotskyites and idiots filling them up. Take that public student loan/grant money away and everything changes. But as long as the feral government money flows the insanity at these schools will grow more and more grotesque and dangerous.
See the memo written by the now Harvard president. It’s DEI on steroids—and that is actually why she got the job.
Burn it all down it exactly right.
I dunno. Hillsdale College could be the model for the losers to use in recovering intellectual respectability.
Every president of every IVY should resign… they have all turned their institutions into nothing more than anti American self loathing factories churning out idiots incapable of independent thought
Well, it seems like the Law School is the lucky beneficiary of Ms. Magill’s continued “professorship.”
Looking forward to her upcoming seminar with Amy Wax.
Resigned but will stay on as a Temp until a replacement is found means she will be there for another 1-2 years most likely 2 at the minimum. At which time she will then collected a golden parachute pension and move on to some other University.
She is but a symptom. The real disease likely lies within the BoD. Like Brandon, she is just a disposable figurehead who distracts from the real evil.
In my world “resigned” means “gone,” right effin now. Were she a straight white christian conservative male, her desk contents would have been on the front stoop of the admin building, with the locks changed, before she even got off the train back from DC.
“wish her well”?? She’s not going anywhere, as right before that it was stated that “She will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law.”.
Who is the idiot who wrote this letter? He wrote “President Magill” four times in a half-page letter.
LOL. It’s idiots from the top to the bottom at Penn. I can’t wait to see what sort of retard they pick to replace Magill. Obviously, leftist, anti-American policy is not going to change one little bit.
Belated
Happy Hanukkah
1) As noted by Woody 57, she will remain as interim president for as long as needed. I have to wonder if she will be still drawing the same pay?
2) She remains a tenured member of the faculty of the School of Law in any case. Will she be drawing the pay of a regular professor, or still drawing the pay of the president of the university? I admit to being a suspicious sort.
3) What indication is there, if any, that her resigning the presidency of the university makes any change in any way in the university’s stand on Die Endlösung der Judenfrage?
Subotai Bahadur
>>> #3 <<<
The conditions that allowed antisemitism to flourish are still deeply rooted.
And the next candidate may be more adroit at navigating hearings but even more leftist.
Still, a scalp has been claimed and that is worth celebrating. One very small victory in a very long war.
Wish her well…
Like she’s going on a cruise around the world. One down (sort of), many many more to go. I bid you adios or in the language of my peeps, bye Felicia!
Hallelujah!
https://youtu.be/LRP8d7hhpoQ?si=e_1HXeO_wI9Nj3WM
Red Cross
Dear God, stick a fork in this evil organization
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2023/12/09/red-cross-disgracefully-wags-fingers-at-israeli-hostages-families-chides-think-of-the-palestinians-n2167366
Disgusting people.
Are we in Monty Python skit world, now?
… those responsible for sacking the President .. have just been sacked.
What a mollycoddling statement from the head of the board about her: “Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday.” He sounds like he’s talking about a cranky baby who didn’t get enough sleep. She was President of a college making a huge salary. Elise Stefanie gave her multiple chances to correct herself. And Magill’s smirk didn’t help
They’re trying to make her out as a victim. She is the architect of her own downfall.
Of course she’s a victim!
She’s a female university professor so far out of her league, they have a separate affirmative action system for her (and the other two morons).
Maybe she should look at Trump to see what “Worn down” should look like but doesn’t. If her cushy job has worn her down in the last few months, maybe she look to see what he has been through for 7 years!
LOL. That is pathetic, in all possible ways.
Bets on whether Harvard’s Claudine Gay will step down?
Zero
Let us hope.
Black also, though.
“Over prepared and over lawyered”
I can’t stop laughing at this.
She was ill-prepared (for which there is no excuse) and she is a lawyer.
Over lawyered … from a guy sitting on the board of a friggin law school! Good advertising for the profession, there …
Of course, he couldn’t admit to the truth – she’s an AA appointment and an incompetent moron.
It’s a start. They say God works in mysterious ways, the atrocities of October 7 have helped many here see and understand the rot destroying our educational institutions and working to destroy western civilization. In the spirit of not letting a crisis go to waste, we need to keep the pressure on academia and keep revealing the evil within. Of the three presidents who got the short straws and had to testify to Congress, they should all be gone, now. But many more university leaders would have testified similarly had they been there. They all need to lose their jobs. And this trend needs to continue thru lower levels of leadership and faculty. Private and public universities are using tax dollars to employ those who seek to destroy us.
Not nearly enough
$100,000,000 will clarify some thinking. I wonder how much off the radar was pulled unless this affirmative action hire was pushed out. How much longer can the infamous 3 remaining stay up top? The intersectional winner will be the hardest to get rid of but money talks
Next up, the Governor of California, who has let the terrorists cancel a Christmas celebration.
Please ,show some respect to our next Potus. SMH…
“Former President Liz Magill last week made a very unfortunate misstep—”
Unfortunate in her true thoughts being exposed.
I’ve perhaps lost track of who is for free speech but it looks to me like the person in favor of free speech has been fired.
The right is as unprincipled as the left. Not that principles matter but it does affect the stability of the system to be against free speech.
Not everything is a free speech issue.
It’s a “she hates Jews and did’t mind letting them be harassed” issue. Enough that she personally contributed to the loss of millions of dollars.
So, please, you either accept that people call for the death of Jews, or we put a stop to it before they start loading them on trains.
Harassment is a crime. Saying what you think is not.
If you say what you think, somebody else will say what they think, and that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Your feelings get no say in what the other guy can say.
She has a duty to protect students, even Jewish students, who I guess you determine to be vermin and not worthy of protection.
Got it.
I normally agree with your commentary, but on this, I won’t even pretend to agree to disagree.
“Harassment is a crime. Saying what you think is not.”
Were she half that clear, even half way to that sentiment, there would be no issue. She was on the wrong side of that one, in public, in her role, and bad at blowing smoke.
On the plus side, she’s an excellent example of a product of the US Educatioal System, and of what that system aspires to produce.
You can’t yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theather…get it? Free speech does not include a call for incitement to violence against either an individual or a group. It’s not 1st Amendment protected speech. PERIOD.
Nothing’s more common that “Bomb Iran into glass” or “Turn Gaza into a parking lot” rhetoric. That’s free speech and is protected because of it.
“You can’t yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theather…get it?’
I wish people would stop citing Schenck. The decision and its underlying reasoning was so wrong that even its author eventually repudiated it.
Rhhardin: What part of “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater ” don’t you get?
Like almost all major university administrators today, McGill had a rich history of NOT protecting the free speech rights of people not of her political orientation. You can look long and hard for statements from McGill about the absolutely dreadful treatment conservatives faced at Penn through her tenure and you won[‘t find many, if any of those kinds of statements at all.
But more specifically to the issue of genocide, if over the summer students tried to form a Klu Klux Klan club on campus and pursuant to that effort, attempted to hold a ‘send them all back to Africa’ rally, do you think Ms. McGill, answering the calls to cancel the club and rally, would have claimed her hands were tied because of the University’s tradition of respecting the 1A rights of students?
Puhleeze.
That’s not quite how it is.
Sure, people are allowed to hate Jews and are allowed to express their hate of Jews. I don’t care. I don’t care what people think of me – especially not the idiots who happen to be Jew-haters. I don’t really care what they think about anything. And the Jew-hating isn’t their problem. Their problem is that they are, generally, sub-par idiots who have no business pretending their are doing anything academic and should basically be sweeping floors somewhere.
However, the problem is that there was never any sort of “free speech” at these schools. The concept just did not exist. If you said on e non-complimentary thing about one of their favored pets then you were disciplined and, usually, tossed out of school or hounded out. You could not express even obviously true facts about the universities’ favored pet people.
So the idea that free speech has anything to do with any of this is ridiculous. This is not about free speech.
Should these Jew-haters be allowed to express their Jew-hate without action by the university? Yes. But they never should have been accepted into the university, to begin with. They are jokes, for the most part. And the answers the university affirmative action presidents gave were obvious lies, free speech or not.
This Magill dirtbag represented nothing about free speech. She represented perverted society and totalitarian derangement, not free speech of any way, shape, or form.
This has not been a “free speech” issue for many weeks. Example – the Cooper Union Jewish students who got trapped in a library on 10/25. In other places Jewish students have been prevented or not felt safe in attending classes, etc. IMO there should have been mass expulsions of students and firing of administrators, by the Boards of Trustees, for harassment and failure to protect the rights of Jewish students. Take the lawsuits with the big endowments and effect a return to sanity. .
Very true – so far as the actual physical harassment goes. Speech-wise, the foreign students certainly should have been immediately kicked out (and their student visas revoked and them shipped back to the sh*tholes they came from). People who come here as guests have to behave like good guests or they should be summarily thrown out. we don’t need to bring people in to bad-mouth America and Western civilization … we grow more than enough of those sorts of dirtbags, here.
Yes, well the charge of hypocrisy is easy and in fact a child’s charge, the first that children learn.
Not being a hypocrite yourself is a good idea. Free speech is free speech even if the other guy is a hypocrite about it.
“Should these Jew-haters be allowed to express their Jew-hate without action by the university? Yes. But they never should have been accepted into the university, to begin with. They are jokes, for the most part.”
The world doesn’t work that way. Was Henry Ford unworthy of higher education? Was Thomas Edison a joke? Charles Lindbergh? Winston Churchill? Some of humanity’s greatest minds have been inhabited by singular manias and phobias. Germs, meat, insects, spiritualism, precious bodily fluids. Jews just happen to be a common one.
I was addressing this particular population of jew-haters at the universities, who are generally sub-par idiots who are only there because the universities are doing their racial/ethnic bean-counting and working to admit as many America-haters as they can. It isn’t the jew-hate that makes them idiots, it’s just the fact that they are idiots and enemies of America who just happen to hate Jews, too.
“The world should know that Liz Magill is a very good person and a talented leader who was beloved by her team,” but she despises Jews and prays daily for their demise.
FIFY.
Be gone hag, and take the other two Jew haters with you.
Would that she were “beloved” by the people she’s supposed to be serving; or the institution; or the people who suppport the institution and it’s professed misison.
Or at least respected.
It’s notable that a ‘tenured professor of law’ who was testifying in a House Committee NOT under subpoena and also not under any peril of criminal jeopardy was ‘over lawyered’ in her answers. Why was that?
Also, to any extent that the forum was ‘hostile’ it was only that way because Ms. McGill, on more than one occasion seemed somewhat nonplussed about calls for genocide at the university under her stewardship. Whatever hostility was directed her way, likely wasn’t enough.
Agree…it didn’t start out hostile but the stonewalling from the Gang of 3 created that atmosphere.
“It’s notable that a ‘tenured professor of law’ … was ‘over lawyered’ in her answers. Why was that?”
Rephrased, the question answers itself!
“ Why was that?”
Those who can’t, teach.
They will just replace her with the next woke progressive leftie almost like her, except they will be more careful not to say the quiet part out loud next time.
So the woman who couldn’t say if demands for genocide violated university policy is now going to be teaching law?
How is this not a major defeat for all that is true and good?
Will continue teaching law: “remain tenured faculty.”
Much is made of the withholding of a $100 million donation. U. Penn’s endowment is $21 billion (Billion!). Barely a rounding error. Amazing that they have that much money and still charge tuition. As others have said, these universities are international hedge funds that do a little teaching (indoctrination) on the side. Why any alumni would give money to them is beyond me.
And tax-scams. Serious tax scams.
Scott Bok’s comments above show that, using an appropriate adjective I learned from my late Dad, “a horse’s ass.
The first rule of an apology is to not include an excuse. She did. The obvious reaction to her comments was that her lawyers told her what to say. No lawyer ever cares about feelings, only the consequences of what is said. She and the other two came across as cold hair-splitting bureaucrats. Not one of them had the guts to come to the hearing and speak from their hearts. They were all covering their a$$es, especially the bitch from Harvard! One down, two to go!
These places are just not healthy for your children.
– – –
Why can’t a few of these mega donors get together and agree to fund non traditional paths for qualified students?
(rather than donating to institutions.)
It’s all so depressing
Who decides whether they’re “qualified” — the donors, or the school?
Either way has huge loopholes.
Reference the recent Hollywood scandal over rich celebrities’ kids.
Can’t help but notice that the resigning Chair of the Board of Trustees is weasel enough to blame the moral obtuseness of the resigning President on the multiple hours of aggressive questioning. See, it wasn’t her sleaziness, it’s the fault of the questioners. Give e a break!
With present day organizational structure of ivy league colleges, the real power and decision making is with the board of trustees. The president can’t do anything without their approval. The president is just the face to public, who is replaceable, and can and will be thrown under the bus if necessary. The truth is these presidents were saying what the trustees wanted them to say during those hearings. They were obviously coached and rehearsed in their answers.
Bok: “Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday.”
Shorter Bok: Liz Magill is a VICTIM.
Harvard’s President caught plagiarizing large swathes of her thesis:
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1733976372450853222
Because she’s POC, and therefore this is about equity of outcomes, woke progressive lefties will go silent and hope this goes away by itself.