The First Casualty in the War Against Elite Universities
Liz Magill goes deep, for the first time, on how a congressional hearing on antisemitism fueled her resignation from the University of Pennsylvania — and launched a broader war on higher ed.
By Evan Mandery
Liz Magill had survived five hours of congressional testimony, mostly unscathed. Then she was asked a simple but loaded question that would embroil her presidency at the University of Pennsylvania in national controversy and mark a new chapter in American politics.
It was Dec. 5, 2023, and Magill was appearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce alongside her Harvard and MIT counterparts, Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth. They’d been summoned by Republicans, in the words of Chair Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, to “atone” for the “vitriolic hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses.”
Magill felt “depleted,” as she put it in a series of interviews with me — her first extended on-the-record comments about the episode since she resigned four days after the hearing in a swirl of recriminations and political backlash. Foxx’s staffer had told her that witnesses were expected to remain seated throughout the entire hearing, and so Magill had eaten the lightest of breakfasts and allowed herself only a few sips of water until the committee broke after four hours for a floor vote condemning antisemitism.
Despite everything, Magill felt the first part of the hearing had gone well. She was particularly pleased with her opening statement, in which she condemned Hamas’ “abhorrent and brutal terror attack” in October and outlined steps she’d taken to combat antisemitism while stressing the importance of universities as forums for diverse viewpoints. “As a student of constitutional democracy,” she said, “I know that we need both safety and free expression for universities and ultimately democracy to thrive.”
But she sensed the dynamic in the chamber shift perceptibly after the break. Republican lawmakers started yielding their time to New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, the one-time Donald Trump critic turned enthusiastic MAGA supporter.
“The air in the room changed,” Magill recalled.
Stefanik repeatedly pressed Gay about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment, and Gay replied that the college took action when the speech crossed into conduct, a response many would deem unsatisfactory. Then Stefanik briefly interrogated Kornbluth, who answered similarly, before setting her sights on Magill.
Stefanik’s question would blow up Magill’s presidency. It would also represent a turning point in the politics of higher education. While Republicans had long used colleges as a liberal bogeyman, this had rarely translated into actions with consequences on campus. Stefanik’s question demonstrated the power of using charges of antisemitism as a cudgel, and how difficult — daresay near-impossible — the attack was to rebut. Stefanik’s salvo marked the opening of a new phase of the conservative war on elite universities that has culminated in Trump’s demands that they submit to his control over what and how they teach or be starved of federal funding.
In retrospect, Magill says, she would have responded differently had she known what was coming. “I wish I could’ve done it again because this harmed Penn’s reputation,” she told me. “I just didn’t seem like a person with common sense and humanity, and I am.” But in the moment, she had no notion of the force of the meteor hurtling toward her in the form of a simple but loaded question.
“Ms. Magill,” Stefanik asked, “at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct?”
Magill assumed the presidency of the University of Pennsylvania 17 months earlier, in July 2022, heralded by the school newspaper as a widely popular choice. “She was the clear consensus candidate,” said Jared Mitovich, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian who covered Magill’s presidency. “I heard echoed over and over from people on the search committee, faculty and students that Liz Magill made sense.”
Magill’s path to Penn’s presidency was textbook: Yale undergrad, UVA Law, a Supreme Court clerkship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and deanships at Stanford and Virginia. But what impressed friends and colleagues most wasn’t her résumé — it was her temperament. “She’s gifted in her ability to connect with people,” said Julie Goldsmith, a sociologist who roomed with Magill at Yale. “It’s her superpower.”
A native of Fargo, North Dakota, Magill caught the political bug in college, gravitating to mainstream center-left causes; she protested in support of South African divestment and phone banked for the doomed 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign. Her father, who’d been nominated to the federal judiciary two years earlier by Ronald Reagan, once called his daughter “tendentiously truculent.” Before she attended law school, Magill worked for North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad, a centrist Democrat.
Magill arrived at Penn with a reputation as an engaged, effective administrator. Ryan Daniels, former president of Stanford’s Jewish Law Students Association, who got to know Magill when she sponsored a Shabbat dinner following the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, recalled Magill being close to students. “She was caring and thoughtful,” he said, “and she was always present.” As provost at UVA, she was credited with helping the university navigate Covid and develop campus free speech standards. “She was a very strong provost,” UVA President Jim Ryan told me in an email. “She’s also one of the smartest and most compassionate people I know.”
When she began her tenure at Penn, college campuses were still emerging from the pandemic and Magill resolved to be “out and about,” hiring new deans and starting work on a new strategic plan. “I would characterize her first few months as a honeymoon period,” Mitovich said. Scott Bok, the chair of Penn’s board of trustees who oversaw Magill’s hiring, told me, “Liz had a great first year.”
Shortly after Magill returned from a summer vacation with her husband, Magill’s chief of staff, Mike Citro, showed her a letter from the Philadelphia Jewish Federation asking Penn to distance itself from an upcoming literature festival that was to take place on campus (but was not organized by the university) called Palestine Writes. The letter commended the goal of celebrating Palestinian culture, while raising concerns about the alleged prior antisemitic rhetoric of several speakers. These included Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who’d once reportedly proposed that an inflatable pig that floats above his concerts be adorned with an antisemitic slogan, and suggested “bombing” his audience with swastika-shaped confetti.
It was the first Magill had heard of the event. She thought, “This is something I’m going to keep an eye on.”
Over the following days, the festival began to attract national attention from the Zionist Organization of America, the Anti-Defamation League and several Penn alumni, including billionaire investor Marc Rowan. Soon billboard trucks began circling the campus demanding that the “hatefest” be canceled and saying that Magill “refused to protect Jewish students.” One depicted Magill standing behind Waters wearing an outfit that evoked a Nazi uniform.
Antisemitism is a real problem in America, and it can be found in the fetid corners of the left and right, both online and on college campuses. Penn is no different in that sense; it saw vandalism at a Hillel and a swastika spray-painted in one building in 2022. But prior to the festival, it had not been a major issue on campus. In its 2022 report card, the watchdog group StopAntisemitism assigned a grade of A- to Penn, finding that the majority of respondents to a survey felt they could “be open with their Jewish identity and their support for Israel.” By contrast, Harvard received a grade of D, and Yale and Columbia each earned an F.
On Sept. 12, nine days before the festival’s start, Magill and two other administrators took an unusual step of issuing a statement in advance. Without identifying anyone by name, the letter said that “many have raised deep concerns about several speakers who have a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism by speaking and acting in ways that denigrate Jewish people.” They condemned “antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values” while strongly supporting “the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”
The statement seemingly pleased no one.
A group of alumni circulated a letter on the internet demanding a stronger condemnation of the event, though the letter did not call for outright cancelation of the event. In a new book, Bok writes that Rowan, a Wharton alumnus who headed the business school’s advisory board, appeared to be spearheading an effort to garner signatures for the letter, and that other emails calling for cancelation of the “hatefest” flooded his inbox. Rowan declined a request for an interview.
Meanwhile, many faculty took exception to the suggestion that the thrust of the festival was antisemitic. These included Eve Troutt Powell, a MacArthur fellowship winner and history professor who’d served on the presidential search committee. Powell called Magill “delightful and personable.” But, Powell said, “I disagree with Liz about what antisemitism is. I disagree specifically about the evidence for why she was frightened of Palestine Writes.”
Powell characterized the festival as peaceful, an account confirmed by the Daily Pennsylvanian and CNN. CNN noted that some speakers acknowledged — and forcefully denied — charges of antisemitism, saying they were critical of Israel but bore no ill will toward Jewish people. Critics of the festival still said they found instances of antisemitism, but the allegations largely couldn’t be substantiated by CNN.
“So the [festival] happened,” Powell said, “But then, of course, two weeks later, we have October 7th.”
Magill learned about the Hamas attacks midday. From that moment, until her resignation two months later, dealing with the aftermath of Palestine Writes and the Israel-Hamas war dominated her life.
“That’s all I was doing,” she said. “All I was thinking about.”
The first question was whether to issue a statement. “In my experience, most of the time, people are dying to hear you speak and they are so disappointed in what you have to say,” Magill told me. “The amount of time presidents spend on those statements. It’s shocking.”
On Oct. 10, Magill issued a statement deploring the “horrific” and “abhorrent” attacks and cataloging the resources available to community members. Again, no one seemed satisfied. The next day, Rowan circulated a letter calling Palestine Writes a “tragically prescient preview” of Oct. 7 and urged donors to cease donations until Bok and Magill resigned. One day later, Rowan went on the CNBC show Squawk Box and reiterated his call for Magill to step down. Soon thereafter, Rowan began an email campaign to Penn trustees highlighting supporters of his position, Bok reports, equating it to a corporate takeover, only without SEC limitations.
“It was like a corporate proxy battle meets the political world,” Bok told me. “You can say anything you want, whether it’s true or not true, and even if you know it’s not true. So, it was less constrained in some ways than a corporate one.”
Asked for Rowan’s response to Bok’s corporate-takeover characterization, a spokesperson referenced his October 11 letter, in which Rowan urged Penn donors to close their checkbooks until Magill and Bok resigned. Five days later, Bok published his own letter in The Daily Pennsylvanian rebutting Rowan’s claims that Penn’s response to Palestine Writes had normalized violent ideologies. “Magill,” he wrote, “was unequivocal in condemning antisemitism in all its forms.”
Still, the storm continued. “It was relentless,” Magill said. “It was just wildfire on social media.”
Magill faced threats of violence. On Nov. 6, she received a letter saying, “I’m going to kill you and all the Jews on this campus.” Bok told Magill to move off campus, but she refused, saying she was determined to remain visible throughout the crisis.
Three days later, Magill received a notice to testify before Congress.
Still, as time passed, things cooled. Magill delivered a speech to the board, which Bok describes in his book as rousing and well-received. “By Thanksgiving,” he writes, “It felt like we, and Penn, were persevering.”
Magill spent the holiday working on her congressional testimony.
Before her appearance on Capitol Hill, Magill worked closely with the high-powered law firm, WilmerHale. Her preparation was led by Alyssa DaCunha and Lauren Moore, a pair of attorneys from the D.C. office of the firm, which regularly counseled Penn. DaCunha had a moderate-right leaning resume — she’d graduated from George Mason Law School (now named for Antonin Scalia) and clerked for appellate court judge J. L. Edmondson, a Reagan appointee. Moore, a Harvard Law School graduate, had served in the White House Counsel’s office under Joe Biden. Before that, she’d been general counsel to then-Sen. Kamala Harris on the Judiciary Committee.
DaCunha and Moore came to Philadelphia three times. The first, Magill recalled, was an orientation to testifying before Congress. The next sessions involved substantive discussion of a plethora of topics including the Penn Biden Center, a think tank founded after Biden left the vice presidency and which was a target of Republicans; a transgender swimmer who’d won a national championship for Penn; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and, of course, antisemitism. Ultimately Magill would be armed with what she called “a giant briefing book” and a big one-pager of the sort a lawyer might use in an appellate argument.
The final preps were held on the Sunday and Monday before her congressional appearance at WilmerHale’s D.C. office, where they arranged a conference room as a miniature congressional hearing. Several other partners joined including Jamie Gorelick, who’d served as deputy attorney general during the Bill Clinton administration; Seth Waxman, the former U.S. solicitor general under Clinton; and Susan Lagana, a communications strategist. Neither WilmerHale and its partners nor Lagana accepted an invitation to comment for this story.
“There were four or five people up on the dais,” said Magill, and she received all kinds of advice. “Be respectful, keep your poker face, be gracious,” Magill recalled being told. “And do not get mad at them no matter how they’re asking the question.”
“At one point, they said, ‘This is just like teaching a class.’ And I said, ‘This is nothing like teaching a class.’ If you’re asked a question in a class, you clearly answer the question.”
Still, she mostly received positive feedback, and, overall, Magill felt the prep went well. “They generally said that I was handling the questions fine.”
Magill wasn’t asked the specific question Stefanik asked — about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated college policy. “I know in retrospect it looks obvious, but before the hearing it didn’t. No one at Penn had said anything of the sort Stefanik implied.” Indeed, there have been no reports of anyone at Penn advocating for the genocide of Jews. Rather, where the frame of “genocide” had been invoked, it was to characterize Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.
Magill spent Monday evening in her room with Goldsmith, her college roommate who’d flown in for support, and her brother, Frank. Everyone felt the weight of the situation. “It was clear to me that she wasn’t going to be able to eat,” Goldsmith said. Eventually, ignoring the pit she’d felt in her stomach since arriving in D.C., Magill tried to get some sleep.
In the morning, she made her way to the House, where she waited in the majority staff’s conference room, joined by her chief of staff Citro and Wendy White, Penn’s general counsel. The presidents of Harvard and MIT were also there with members of their respective staffs.
“There were a lot of people in the room, but there wasn’t a lot of talking,” Magill said. “I was just trying to quiet my mind.”
As she entered the hearing room the next morning, Mitovich, covering the event for the Daily Pennsylvanian, said, “You could see the past few months on her face.”
Magill and her peers sat down in front of a gaggle of photographers and were sworn in. “It was a blur,” Magill said. “But I definitely heard, ‘You’re here to atone.’”
Then the questioning began.
Magill’s answer to Stefanik’s question is now well known: “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes.”
Stefanik pressed. “I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that
Constitute bullying or harassment?”
“If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.”
“So the answer is ‘yes’?”
“It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman,” Magill replied, finally.
What happened next wasn’t obvious to anyone in the room, except perhaps to Stefanik and her GOP allies.
Goldsmith, who was seated behind Magill, said, “I didn’t think the answer was going to be a big deal. I saw her as giving an answer that was in alignment with Penn’s policies.” Mitovich, who’d also attended the entire hearing, agreed. “The sound bite was not something that I would have predicted as being the defining moment.” Bok had stayed home to watch the proceedings, but he became bored, assumed “nothing too bad would come of this” and Ubered to work.
After the hearing, Magill immediately drove back to Philly. At first, she got messages from board members congratulating her on having done a good job. But, around five o’clock, Citro called and told her that her answer was “blowing up” on Instagram and that she might need to issue an apology. Stefanik has claimed that the video attracted over one billion views. (A spokesperson for Stefanik did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
“I hadn’t seen any of the Instagram stuff,” Magill said, “but it was quick.” Soon, she said, she understood that the situation was exploding.
“In the car, it became clear what had happened,” Goldsmith said. “I couldn’t believe anything she said could be interpreted that way.” But Goldsmith took a call from a close relative, a Republican, who asked how she could be friends with an antisemite.
“Liz Magill,” who held the ceremonial chuppah at Goldsmith’s wedding, “doesn’t have an antisemitic bone in her body,” Goldsmith responded, and thought to herself, “They could never do this to a man.”
Lost in the frenzy that followed: Magill’s reply to Stefanik was accurate.
“One of the ironies about Liz Magill’s testimony was that technically she was correct on the law,” said Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “It is a matter of context.”
Except when it comes to politics, obviously, technical accuracy can be the least important thing there is. It wouldn’t matter in the ensuing days in Washington, just as it wouldn’t matter in Philadelphia, as trucks once again began circling Penn’s campus, calling Magill “the best friend Hamas has ever had.” It wouldn’t matter that even Rowan, her harshest critic, had said during his appearance on Squawk Box before the hearing that Magill wasn’t an antisemite.
Magill worried about amplifying her response to Stefanik, but, nevertheless, began drafting a script the following morning for an apology video, which she released around 4 p.m. In answering Stefanik, Magill explained, she had been focused on university policy and constitutional law. “I was not focused on, but I should have been,” she confessed, “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.”
“I got positive and negative reaction to the video,” Magill said. “I don’t really feel particularly good about the video, but I was certain that I needed to put something out and have people see my face.” It didn’t quiet the storm. A social media platform for university students called Sidechat exploded both with calls for Magill to resign and concern that forcing her out might set a damaging precedent for government and donor interference with college affairs. “At that point,” Mitovich said, “everybody had reason to be angry with her.” Student and faculty supporters of Israel and Palestine were equally dissatisfied. Inexorably, events took their toll.
“I felt like I was in a maelstrom,” Magill told me. “It was a remarkable thing to experience.”
The Penn board was also in chaos. In his book, Bok describes the remainder of the week as a blur. On Thursday, the full Penn board, including emeritus members, gathered for a 90-minute Zoom discussion. Immediately thereafter, the executive committee spent five hours behind closed doors debating how to proceed. The views ranged from staying the course to the board issuing its own values statement to discipling students and faculty.
Everything played out in the media. “Things were just breaking down in terms of any consensus or willingness to keep things confidential,” Bok told me. “It was a frenzy, and it had become an unmanageable group of people.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a prominent Jewish Democrat, stoked the fire when he called Magill’s comments “absolutely shameful.” He added that if calling for the genocide of Jews didn’t “violate the policies of Penn, well, there’s something wrong with the policies of Penn that the board needs to get on, or there’s a failure of leadership from the president, or both.”
By Friday, Magill had decided to resign.
“The situation was utterly untenable,” she told me. “I couldn’t keep being president with the wide variety of board views about what I should do going forward.”
That evening, Bok called her from Palm Beach, Florida, and said he’d reached the same conclusion about her position. “This was not a case of my handing down a guilty verdict,” Bok writes in his book. “Far from it — in my view she was a new president caught in the crossfire of a culture war that was not of her making.” Magill recalled Bok saying, “‘We have to get you out of here.’ Then he has this line about this was not him issuing a command. This was two soldiers who’d gone through a fight.”
On Saturday afternoon — just four days after her congressional testimony — Magill resigned, followed by Bok, 15 minutes later.
It’s natural to wonder what Magill might have done differently. Nearly everyone I interviewed had an opinion. Goldsmith thought her friend received too much advice. “She was given guidance by such a diverse set of people and so much of it,” she said. “Liz didn’t have time or space to think.”
“My reaction was toward WilmerHale,” said Powell, the Penn history professor, who watched the testimony from home. “‘Why did they let Liz sit through this in the first place?’” she recalled thinking. “And why wasn’t she prepared to call out Elise Stefanik for lying? The question may have been hypothetical, but it was based on a lie. Nobody called for the death of somebody.”
Bok wonders whether Magill would’ve been better prepared by political consultants than lawyers. “I don’t want to throw into the bus, as many have, those who prepared the three presidents,” he said. “But clearly, I think a little more political answer, as opposed to a legalistic answer, would have worked better.”
Three photos of Elise Stefanik speaking during a hearing.
“Ms. Magill,” Stefanik asked at the hearing, “at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct?” | Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP (2); Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Dan McGinn, a highly regarded crisis consultant who followed the hearings closely, advised against Monday morning quarterbacking. “Going in, I felt there was a high probability that one or more of the witnesses would lose their jobs,” McGinn told me, calling the hearing an “impossible situation” that was “destined to be a train wreck.” McGinn also said, however, that briefing books can distract witnesses from offering clear value statements. Each president, he said, should have had a set of “simple, real-world themes” as a guide. “They needed answers that were less legalistic and academic and more passionate and sensitive,” he said.
Magill somewhat shares this view. “I knew intellectually I was speaking to an audience who were not lawyers,” she said. “The best answer on the genocide question would have been
to start with my genuine reaction to those vile words, to say, ‘That’s abhorrent. That’s against my values.’ If I could do this part again, I would start with humanity and common sense, as I did many times earlier in the hearing.”
But Jon Ronson, perhaps the world’s leading authority on disproportionate public punishment and the author of the bestseller So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, says that after Magill’s response began circulating on the internet there was nothing she could’ve done. “Explaining yourself doesn’t work,” he said. “You would think it would since humans are social creatures, but people are bastards. Ideology trumps humanism.” According to Ronson, the most sensible course of action is to go completely silent until everybody forgets. He added, “I’ve always thought that’s very depressing.”
Ronson says things have changed in the 10 years since he published his book, most notably that power has shifted from the left to the right. “The era of someone being destroyed on Twitter for some minor transgression by the left is over,” he says. “Now it’s the right that’s doing the exact same thing.”
Among the right’s tactics is using the charge of antisemitism as a bludgeon. This is a remarkable turn given Trump’s history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes and once dining with the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Stefanik has used language playing on themes of the “great replacement” theory, which holds that elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to supplant white Americans. Yet, both Trump and Stefanik are treated as credible — or irrebuttable — arbiters of the pervasiveness of antisemitism on college campuses.
Such claims are overstated, says Rabbi Shaul Magid, visiting professor of modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, who observed the campus protests at Harvard, Columbia, NYU and Williams. “Columbia was clearly the most problematic on a lot of levels,” Magid says, but other protests he saw were tame. “The Harvard campus protest was mostly students in tents, sitting around doing their homework on computers.”
None of this is to suggest that antisemitism isn’t a problem on many college campuses and in America, where two Israeli embassy staffers were recently killed. In January, the Anti-Defamation League published a campus climate study in which just 49.6 percent of the Jewish students surveyed reported being “very” or “extremely” comfortable with others on campus knowing their Jewish identity. The survey also found that 66.2 percent of students were not confident in their university’s ability to prevent antisemitic incidents and that 83.2 percent of students had witnessed some form of antisemitism since Oct. 7. A spokesperson for the ADL said in an email, “This alarming surge highlights the widespread normalization of antisemitic rhetoric and incidents on campuses.”
Julia Jassey, CEO and co-founder of Jewish on Campus, a student-funded nonprofit focused on fighting campus antisemitism, says that following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Jewish students — particularly those who supported Israeli self-determination — faced ostracization. “Every campus is distinct,” Jassey said, “But students who believed that Israel should exist, no matter how critical they were or supportive they were of Israel, were finding themselves excluded from campus life. Students found themselves isolated and struggling to find the community that they once had.” Jassey says “nuanced conversations” are essential because “how antisemitism is manifesting is really complicated.”
But nuance has been elusive in the debate over antisemitism on campuses — and the ways in which its rise is attributable to the colleges themselves. For instance, does anti-Zionism inherently count as antisemitism? The ADL says its methodology for measuring antisemitism does not include anti-Israel activism or support for Palestinian rights, and the ADL spokesperson said that the organization “takes a conservative approach to counting antisemitic incidents.” But the group has publicly taken a hard line against criticism of Israel and its interpretation of the data has been the source of controversy even among ADL staff.
Part of the problem many universities face in trying to defend themselves and lower the temperature of the conversation is that they’ve been inconsistent defenders of free speech on campus. “Penn had no credibility on freedom of speech,” Lukianoff said — referencing Penn’s second-to-last performance in FIRE’s free speech rankings. I myself have been critical of colleges for embracing the language of safe spaces and microaggressions and, with some notable exceptions, failing to establish clear guidelines to protect academic freedom and free speech. If campus conflicts surrounding the Gaza war prove anything, it’s the terms of fair debate and free expression need to be established by cool heads and not amidst conflict.
And it’s not unfair to ask whether attacks against the Jewish community and Jewish interests have been condemned with the same moral clarity by the academy as has racism. Rowan referenced this inconsistency in his Squawk Box appearance. “There’s been a gathering storm around these issues,” he said. “Microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage and yet violence, particularly violence against Jews — antisemitism — seems to have found a place of tolerance on the campus.”
“If the question is, is there a double standard in condemnations of racist speech and antisemitic speech,” says Magill, “I think that’s a fair critique.”
Another key element that Rabbi Magid cites as a reason the right has been able to weaponize antisemitism: the growing opposition to DEI based in part on a dissatisfaction with the exclusion of Jews from DEI rhetoric.
Magid ranks among those who think that the exclusion of Jews from DEI is not an example of antisemitism; most American Jews are seen as white at this point and far less in need of the kind of support that DEI programs are intended to provide. But the perception that Jews have been unfairly excluded from DEI persists nevertheless.
And so a motley alliance has formed between conservatives eager to target elite universities, some people legitimately concerned with antisemitism on campus, others concerned with rebuffing any criticism of Israel, and still others disgruntled by the exclusion of Jews from DEI. Under the terms of this silent treaty, the right can take up and somewhat overstate the cause of antisemitism to advance its broader agenda in the name of anti-wokism and meritocracy.
Some on the left question whether this tradeoff subverts fundamental Jewish values and, more deeply, whether American Jews are being used by the right. “It’s about attacking wokism,” Magid says, “and I don’t think it serves the Jews particularly well.”
“I am deeply concerned that Jewish fear is being instrumentalized and weaponized against the very interests of the American Jewish community,” says Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of J Street, a liberal Zionist advocacy group that maintains an extensive student network. Ben-Ami offers a simple explanation for why exaggerations of widespread antisemitism have been politically successful.
“Fear is woven into the individual and communal DNA of the Jewish people based on reality and historical experience, and fear is the number one tool in the toolkit of the right,” he said. “It’s a match made in heaven, unfortunately.” The much-needed fight against antisemitism, he says, is now being used as a pretext for the far right’s assault on higher education — a long-term authoritarian objective.
“This is what makes it so insidious,” Lukianoff agrees. “Antisemitism is a problem on campus. But the way it’s being used by the Trump administration to justify colossal paralyzing fines against universities, unless they adopt, for example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Act definition of antisemitism is something I’ve never seen before. They are using this as a way to punish higher ed.”
The fallout has been staggering. Under the guise of combatting antisemitism, 60 universities have been targeted for investigation by the Trump administration, which has either frozen or is reviewing billions in funding. This justification — and actions taken in its name — have the potential to end or at least curtail the independence of the academy, just as it claimed the nascent presidency of Liz Magill. All under the battle cry of fighting antisemitism.
I asked Ben-Ami whether at any point he thought that Magill was antisemitic or had acted antisemitically.
“No,” he replied.
Magill spends most of her time these days in Charlottesville, Virginia, where her husband, Leon Szeptycki, is a professor at UVA law school. Last year, she held a fellowship at Harvard and gave lectures at Stanford, Cornell and Georgetown. At the moment, she’s a visiting law professor at the London School of Economics. She’s been speaking, advising and is writing essays on academic freedom and a current Supreme Court case dealing with the separation of powers. She’s also helping bring together thought leaders for confidential discussions about how to protect universities at a time when their future is uncertain.
“I want to be a constructive voice on higher education and the legal profession at a moment when each is under serious threat,” she told me.
Things have died down somewhat, and Magill says that she’s received many supportive emails and messages over the past year and a half. She says she also still receives the occasional hate mail and voicemail accusing her of being antisemitic.
Her admirers and loved ones I talked to focus on how unjust her treatment was. “Liz is the most fantastic, ethical, generous person I know, and they were demonizing her,” says Szeptycki. “It was terrible to see her go through that.” “We hadn’t ended in a great way,” Powell said, “But it broke my heart to see her face on that truck.” Bok says that while he has no regrets about his actions, he does about Magill’s fate. “I got through this whole thing largely unharmed,” he told me, “but that’s not the case for Liz and I feel very bad about that.”
But in two days of in-person interviews with Magill, and dozens of subsequent conversations, she never once displayed any hint of anger or resentment over her fate. At first, I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so phlegmatic, but I think that’s at the essence of who Magill is. “I would be so angry, but that’s not Liz,” said Eleanor Magers Vuono, a law school friend. “She doesn’t let bitterness or anger or hurt drive her behavior.”
“It may have been an impossible situation,” Magill says, “but it was my job to steer Penn through.”
Magill has been watching Trump’s assault on universities with great interest and concern. Looking back, she wishes things had gone differently but remains committed to the core beliefs that animated her actions. “I defended higher education and constitutional principles under extraordinary pressure. If anything, one year later, those values seem more important than ever.”
