The president of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), Elizabeth Magill, resigned on Saturday, December 9, four days after her testimony before Congress on the anti-Semitic excesses that occurred on the campuses of Penn, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). ). She was questioned by a Republican representative from New York State, Elise Stefanik, to find out whether the call for the genocide of the Jews violated the university’s rules on intimidation or harassment.
Elizabeth Magill’s response, extremely calming, sparked a global outcry. “If speech turns into conduct, it may be harassment”she declared, Tuesday December 5, also explaining that the qualification decision “depended on the context”. This statement on “context” came on top of the lack of firm reaction to a Palestinian literature festival this summer during which anti-Semitic comments were made, and which she refused to cancel.
Elizabeth Magill, 57, is the first university president swept away by the turmoil. As of Wednesday evening, she had tried to limit the damage. “I was focused on our university’s long-standing policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which states that speech alone is not objectionable. I was not focused on the irrefutable fact, but I should have been, that a call for the genocide of the Jewish people is a call for the most terrible violence that human beings can perpetrate. This is evil, plain and simple,” she apologized in a video.
This lawyer, trained at Yale and passed through Stanford, arrived at Penn in 2022 as a champion of freedom of expression. The First Amendment to the American Constitution (“ Congress will pass no law (…) to limit freedom of expression »), makes it an almost absolute right, unlike Europe, where freedom of expression is limited.
Congressional hearings are prepared with lawyers, who require their clients not to deviate from the legal framework agreed in advance. Result: Elizabeth Magill ended up getting lost during her audition, like her colleagues from Harvard and MIT.
Angry billionaire donors
Elizabeth Magill had for several weeks been the subject of criticism from wealthy donors to her university. Roland Lauder, heir to Estée Lauder and president of the World Jewish Congress, announced the suspension of his donations in October: “I have spent the last forty years of my life fighting anti-Semitism around the world. I never thought in my wildest imagination that I would have to fight him at my own university. » Jon Huntsman, former American ambassador to China, also said that he “closed his checkbook”believing that “ [le] moral relativism [de l’université] » had returned it ” unrecognizable “.
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