Liz Magill's downfall at Penn

Some thoughts on the aftermath of the campus antisemitism hearings

Liz Magill, who recently resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania, was in my class when we were both undergraduates at Yale University. I didn’t know her well, but many of my friends from those years think highly of her and are deeply distressed about her removal as well as the circumstances that led up to it. I feel sympathy for my classmate in the way that you do when someone you know blows up their career, as Magill blew up her administrative career in higher education with her disastrous testimony before last week’s House hearing on campus antisemitism. (She’ll stay on at Penn as a tenured professor in the law school.) But I agree with her critics that this was a clarifying moment.

I had the opportunity to hear then-president Magill talk about university leadership at our college reunion in May, along with Jim Ryan (the president of the University of Virginia, where Magill had served as provost) and three classmates who are now on Yale’s board of trustees. The basic message from our classmates, at least as I heard it, was that there were no problems at elite universities that couldn’t be solved through the massive application of empathy, equity, and equities.

Reunion panels of this sort tend to be more self-congratulatory than self-searching, so I didn’t expect much in the way of far-reaching analysis — and Magill had only been in her position at Penn for less than a year at that point. But even at the time I thought it significant that few of the biggest and most troubling questions about the current state of higher education even came up in the discussion.

Were these leaders bothered by accusations that their monolithically left-wing faculties increasingly value activism over scholarship, that speech on campus has become less free than in the world outside, or that growing numbers of their students consider it acceptable to use violence to suppress opinions with which they disagree? Did they foresee any problems that might arise from their universities taking sides in political controversies rather than acting as neutral forums for debate? Did it occur to them that declining public confidence in higher education, among Democrats as well as Republicans, has something to do with the growing perception that American university students are being taught to disdain their country, its history, and its values — as well as many of their fellow citizens?

I suppose I could have gone to the microphone at that panel and asked the presidents and trustees something along those lines. But I didn’t feel like being a skunk at the garden party — even a polite, just-asking-questions skunk. As it turns out, though, one of the consequences of academia purging itself of right-of-center professors and administrators is that university leaders don’t have anyone around them who might raise uncomfortable questions about the current trajectory of higher education. And this in turn left them unequipped to deal with public outrage at the anti-Israel and frequently anti-Semitic demonstrations — a predictable manifestation of the regnant campus ideology that sees Israel as a “white,” “colonialist,” “settler-state” — that followed the Hamas terrorist atrocities of October 7.

One could certainly argue that Rep. Elise Stefanik was acting in bad faith when she asked Magill and the presidents of Harvard and MIT, at the now-infamous Congressional hearing, for a yes-or-no answer on whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their universities’ codes of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment. Stefanik is not, let us say, widely known for her fidelity to principle or the ideals of higher education. And she probably understood that most students who chanted “intifada” or even “from the river to the sea” during the campus demonstrations don’t see themselves as modern-day Nazis demanding another Shoah — even if those slogans can be interpreted as calling for Jews to be eliminated from the land of Israel.

But the university presidents, for their part, should have better understood that many Jewish students on their campuses legitimately felt endangered, and that the humane response would have been to assure them that the authorities were listening to them, were deeply concerned about their well-being, and were determined to protect them from physical violence and intimidation. And the presidents also should have known that the public would perceive their dismissive, legalistic answers to Stefanik’s question about calls for Jewish genocide — variations on “that’s a context-dependent decision” or “depending on whether the speech turns into conduct” — as a monstrous moral abdication.

Normal people outside the higher-ed hothouse, if asked how they feel about calls for the genocide of Jews, would express horror and condemnation. The university presidents instead responded with evasion and casuistry. As many commentators have pointed out, universities for years have censored opinions and speakers with which they disagree and have backed the idea that disagreeable speech is harmful, just as they have been quick to issue institutional statements on events like George Floyd’s murder. It’s transparently hypocritical of them to claim a sudden conversion to free speech and institutional neutrality now that it’s Jews who are under attack.

Everyone who speaks in public is prone to saying things that they wish in hindsight they could take back, and Magill looked not just regretful but devastated in her post-Capitol Hill video in which she attempted to clarify her remarks. I am sure that she is a better person than she appeared at the hearings, and I’m sure that’s also true of the presidents of Harvard and MIT. But it’s reasonable to conclude that they responded in the moment as they did because that’s how the leaders of elite universities (along with the people who advise them) think nowadays. And whatever elements go into making that groupthink, I believe that it’s lethal to common sense and non-selective empathy, and ultimately to higher education itself.

The job of a university president is difficult under any circumstances and nearly impossible in times of crisis. That at any rate was the conclusion I reached in the book I wrote long ago about Kingman Brewster Jr., the president of Yale from 1964 to 1977. But I do think that Brewster would have responded differently to the current crisis than his present-day peers, and that his example has some lessons worth considering. I’ll write about that in my next post.