While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it. Do not just take my word for it; read their statements. Across academia, administrators issued statements on behalf of their institutions expressing a repulsive moral equivalence between victims of terror and the perpetrators of that terror. The antisemitic rot in academia is unmistakable.
At the University of Pennsylvania, where I sit on the Wharton School’s Board of Overseers, leaders have for too long allowed this kind of anti-Jewish hate, which sanitizes Hamas’s atrocities, to infect their campuses. There must be consequences.
I call on all UPenn alumni and supporters who believe we are heading in the wrong direction to close their checkbooks until President Liz Magill and Chairman Scott Bok resign.
It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival at the University of Pennsylvania to the barbaric slaughter of innocent civilians in Israel. Foreshadowing Hamas’s massacre, speakers at the gathering—hosted by various university departments and affiliates—advocated ethnic cleansing of Jews, referred to them as “European settlers,” and repeated various blood libels.
UPenn President Elizabeth Magill and Board Chair Scott Bok permitted UPenn to sponsor this conference and failed to condemn its hate-filled calls for violence. This is not a matter of free speech, but University-sponsored hate speech.