A University of Pennsylvania donor pulled a $100 million gift from the university on Thursday over President Liz Magill’s comments at a recent House committee hearing on campus antisemitism.
Attorneys for Ross Stevens, the founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, wrote a letter to the university on Thursday explaining that Stevens would withdraw his donation of limited-partnership units in Stone Ridge that were intended to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. Stevens made the donation, which is currently valued at around $100 million, in December 2017.
Attorneys Neil Barr and Dana M. Seshens argued that the university violated the terms of its limited-partner agreement with Stone Ridge, including its anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.
“Mr. Stevens and Stone Ridge are appalled by the University’s stance on antisemitism on campus,” Stevens’s lawyers wrote to Penn senior vice president Wendy White. “Its permissive approach to hate speech calling for violence against Jews and laissez faire attitude toward harassment and discrimination against Jewish students would violate any policies or rules that prohibit harassment and discrimination based on religion, including those of Stone Ridge.”
The letter said Stevens and Stone Ridge are open to giving the school the opportunity to “remedy” the alleged violations.
Stevens wrote a note to his staff on Thursday saying he plans to rescind Penn’s Stone Ridge shares “absent a change in leadership and values at Penn in the very near future,” a move he said would be made “to prevent any further reputational and other damage to Stone Ridge as a result of our relationship with Penn and Liz Magill.”
“I love Penn and it is important to me, but our firm’s principles are more important,” said Stevens, a Penn graduate whose children have also attended the university.
Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) asked Magill at a House hearing this week if calls for genocide of the Jewish people would be considered harassment on campus.
“If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied.
“Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?” Stefanik asked.
Magill released a video one day later, saying a call for Jewish genocide would be harassment or intimidation.
“In that moment, I was focused on our University’s long-standing policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” she said. “I was not focused on, but I should have been, 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.”
She suggested that Penn and other universities should review their policies and said she plans to “convene a process” with the provost to take “a serious and careful” look at the university’s policies.
But Stevens seemed unmoved by the post, with his attorneys writing in the letter that Magill “belatedly acknowledged — only after her Congressional testimony went viral and demands for her termination amplified — that calls for genocide of the Jewish people constitute harassment and discrimination.”
Magill’s comments and those made by the presidents of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the hearing led House Education Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) to open an investigation into the schools on Thursday.
Stevens previously withdrew a separate $100 million donation from Penn’s business school because he believed the school was prioritizing DEI over the business school’s academic excellence, according to the New York Times. He instead gave those funds to the University of Chicago.