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<\/div>\nSeventy-four lawmakers had demanded the removal of the three university presidents. (File)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Washington: <\/b><\/p>\n
The president of an Ivy League university stepped down Saturday in the wake of a firestorm of criticism after a congressional hearing on the rise in anti-Semitism on US campuses.<\/p>\n
University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill “voluntarily tendered her resignation,” the chair of the university’s board of trustees Scott Bok announced.<\/p>\n
Bok then stepped down himself, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus student newspaper.<\/p>\n
Magill was among three presidents of elite universities who faced withering critism for their testimony Tuesday during a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n
The trio gave long-winded, lawyerly and seemingly evasive answers at the hearing when asked whether students who call for the “genocide of Jews” on their campuses violate codes of student conduct.<\/p>\n
Blowback was rapid and intense.<\/p>\n
Seventy-four lawmakers wrote letters demanding the immediate removal of Magill and the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n
Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, apologized afterward for failing to more strongly condemn threats of anti-Semitic violence on her campus.<\/p>\n
“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” Gay later told the Harvard Crimson newspaper.<\/p>\n
Magill faced even more scathing criticism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor called her performance “absolutely shameful,” and a major donor said he would rescind a $100 million donation to the university’s Wharton School of Business.<\/p>\n
Bok, who helms the university’s board of trustees — a body that handles major governance issues — said Magill made “a very unfortunate misstep” as he announced her departure.<\/p>\n
“She was not herself last Tuesday,” Bok said in the statement published by the school paper.<\/p>\n
“Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong.”<\/p>\n
“It made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony.”<\/p>\n
He said his own resignation was “effective immediately.”<\/p>\n
In Bok’s note to the campus, he said Magill would stay in her post until an interim president is appointed and would remain on the faculty of the university’s law school.<\/p>\n
Anti-Semitism and hate crimes have risen in the United States and on university campuses since the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants and the ensuing war in Gaza.<\/p>\n
With passions inflamed on campuses, a broader debate has taken place about when freedom of speech on campuses turns into conduct that threatens others.<\/p>\n
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n