Former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill will join Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession this fall just nine months after resigning from her previous role following a congressional hearing in which she downplayed a culture of antisemitic harassment on her campus.
Magill’s role with the law school will focus on research rather than teaching, and the former university president will not receive a salary for the temporary position, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported. Magill joins former Harvard president Claudine Gay on the Harvard faculty. Gay resigned the Harvard presidency in January over a drawn-out plagiarism scandal that began after her questionable performance during the same hearing that led to Magill’s resignation.
In bringing Magill aboard, Harvard Law School will have among its fellows a former administrator who oversaw a sharp rise in harassment against Jewish students at her previous institution.
Even before Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel and the subsequent burst of antisemitism in higher education across the United States, UPenn made news for the climate on its campus. The university hosted, sponsored, and funded a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” in September that included several speakers with histories of endorsing and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews. Just before the conference began, students found a swastika spray-painted on a classroom wall and a man broke into and vandalized the campus Hillel building while shouting “F–k the Jews.”
After October 7, the university Magill oversaw was the site of mass vandalism, with student activists writing words like “intifada” on buildings across UPenn’s property — including next to a Jewish fraternity house — and Arabic-language chants of “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab” and “the gate of Al-Aqsa is made of iron; only the martyr in spirit and in blood can open it.” A student at a post-October 7 rally described how the Hamas attack made her feel “so empowered and happy” as she led the crowd in shouts of “intifada revolution.”
Faculty members joined in as well, with assistant professor of Arabic literature Huda Fakhreddine clapping when a speaker told Jews they could “go back to Moscow, Brooklyn, Gstaad, or f–king Berlin where [they] came from” and spoke in favor of “resistance by any means necessary.” Creative writing instructor Ahmad Almallah directed the mob in “intifada” chants and medical-school professor Mohammed Alghamdi was caught on camera destroying posters of hostages held in Gaza.
Magill’s resignation came after bipartisan pressure from lawmakers over her congressional testimony, in which she refused to say definitively whether calls for genocide against Jews violated the university’s anti-discrimination policy. Magill’s testimony also prompted a statement from the Wharton School of Business board of directors accusing Magill of permitting a “dangerous and toxic culture on our campus.” A major UPenn donor canceled a $100 million gift after the hearing, citing Magill’s “permissive approach to hate speech calling for violence against Jews and laissez faire attitude toward harassment and discrimination against Jewish students” and the need “to prevent any further reputational and other damage” by associating with the university and its leadership.
Harvard University currently faces a lawsuit over its own handling of antisemitic harassment and discrimination, with a judge rejecting the university’s motion to dismiss the case and holding that the school had allowed “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment” toward Jewish students while failing to “evenhandedly administer its policies.”