UPenn reveals interim president after Liz Magill’s ouster over antisemitism row

Liz Magill resigned over the weekend following her controversial testimony before Congress about antisemitism on college campuses

The University of Pennsylvania has appointed J. Larry Jameson, its longest serving dean, to become the school’s interim president, following Liz Magill’s sudden resignation amid an antisemitism row.

Mr Jameson is dean of UPenn’s medical school and will take over as interim president on Tuesday until a permanent president is named, the school’s board of trustees said.

“Penn is fortunate to have the benefit of Dr. Jameson’s experience and leadership during this time of transition,” Julie Platt, the interim chair of UPenn’s board of trustees, said in the announcement.

It comes after the university’s president Ms Magill resigned over the weekend following her controversial testimony before Congress about antisemitism on college campuses. Board chair Scott Bok also tendered his resignation.

Ms Magill had appeared in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, along with the presidents of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to testify about their colleges’ responses to alleged incidents of antisemitism on campuses since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

During the hearing, Ms Magill, along with the two other college presidents, provoked widespread anger after failing to explicitly say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their colleges’ harassment and bullying codes.

Larry Jameson has been appointed as interim UPenn president (University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine)

Instead, they took the stance that it ”depends on the context” – something all three later apologised for.

Ms Magill then faced mounting pressure to stand down over her comments, with UPenn alum and Wall Street CEO Ross Stevens threatening to strip the university of a $100m donation if she wasn’t removed.

She announced her resignation on Saturday. Meanwhile, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth have so far held onto their jobs.

Despite the pressure campaign to ouster Ms Magill, the university did not have a succession plan in place.

As such, Ms Magill stayed on as president until Tuesday when Mr Jameson was appointed as her replacement, CNN reported. Ms Magill remains on Penn’s faculty as a tenured professor at Penn Carey Law School.

Mr Jameson, who was praised as a “collaborative, innovative and visionary leader” by the UPenn’s board of trustees, previously denounced calls for genocide as a form of hate, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Ms Magill, meanwhile, had been under fire for months prior to her resignation – even before the Israel-Hamas war.

Liz Magill resigned as UPenn president (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

A number of megadonors including Jon Huntsman Jr and Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan had been calling for her resignation since September and had vowed to halt their donations to the university after the college hosted a Palestine Writes Literary Festival to which polarising figures such as Professor Marc Lamont Hill were invited.

Mr Hill was ousted from CNN in 2018 after calling for an end to what he said was Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians and supporting a “free Palestine from the river to the sea”.

Following the event, more than 4,000 people signed an open letter to Ms Magill, saying that “platforming of outright antisemitism without denunciation from the university is unacceptable”.

Organisers of the festival have since denied that it embraced antisemitism.

At the time, the university disavowed the event, but supported its right for it to be held on campus, saying in a statement that “we unequivocally – and emphatically – condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values”.

But in the wake of Hamas’ surprise 7 October attack on Israel, many megadonors argued that the university’s response was not enough and urged fellow UPenn alumni to “close their checkbooks” until the institution’s leadership resigned.