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Harvard, Penn Presidents Do Damage Control After Disastrous Congressional Testimonies

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  December 07, 2023 8:00 AM

Antisemitism has become a growing concern on college campuses across the U.S. since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but the Ivy Leagues have seen a particularly alarming increase in incidences. Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday where they were grilled by lawmakers about their respective responses, which have been abysmal. Not surprisingly, their testimonies were just as bad, prompting some damage control on Wednesday.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik was stunned by the responses she received when she asked whether the calling for genocide and mass violence against Jews would be considered a violation of harassment and bullying policies.

The women more or less all said it “depends on the context” or “when speech crosses into conduct.” 


Their failure to "answer with moral clarity" shocked those on the left and right. 

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“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement Wednesday. "Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting — and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.” 

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, was livid. 

“It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else,” he told reporters. “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.”

“There should be no nuance to that — she needed to give a one-word answer,” he added.

By Wednesday afternoon, a petition calling for Ms. Magill’s resignation had grown to more than 3,000 signatures. Marc Rowan, the chief of Apollo Global Management and the board chair at the Wharton School of Business at Penn, asked the board of trustees to rescind their support for Ms. Magill.

“How much damage to our reputation are we willing to accept?” he wrote in a letter to the trustees.

Governor Shapiro, who is a nonvoting member of Penn’s board, urged the trustees to meet soon. University sources, speaking on background, said that efforts were underway to hold a board meeting by phone this week. The university did not respond immediately to a request for comment. [...]

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus, called on all three presidents to resign, citing the exchanges over genocide.

“It ‘depends on the context’ and ‘whether the speech turns into conduct,’ that is, actually killing Jews,” he wrote on X. “This could be the most extraordinary testimony ever elicited in the Congress.”

“They must all resign in disgrace,” he continued. “If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour.” (NYT)

With so many calls to resign, Gay and Magill did damage control on Wednesday. 

“In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” Magill said in a video statement. “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. It’s evil — plain and simple.”

She went on to say she believed "it would be harassment or intimidation" and said Penn is initiating "a serious and careful look at our policies."

Based on the replies to Gay, the clean-up effort is unlikely to assuage angry donors and board members. Penn shut off its replies to the video message, but the post engagements are just as awful.