University of Pennsylvania president resigns

New York, The Gulf Observer: University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who came under fire for her stance on antisemitism on campus, has resigned, the Ivy League school said on Saturday.

Magill was one of three top university presidents who were criticized after they testified at a congressional hearing on Tuesday about a rise in antisemitism 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 President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. 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.

“One down. Two to go. This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism 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.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia have risen sharply in the United States and elsewhere since October