M Elizabeth Magill, from her University of Pennsylvania biography page.

At least as of 9:58 AM this morning, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill still had a job, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story, “Penn President Liz Magill faces mounting pressure to resign from Capitol Hill as university backs her: The school says president Liz Magill is staying put while rebukes increase over her comments on antisemitism on campus.” But the hits keep on coming, From The Wall Street Journal:

Penn Donor Threatens to Rescind $100 Million Gift Unless President Is Ousted

Warning from financier Ross Stevens comes as congressional panel announces investigation into antisemitism at Penn, MIT and Harvard

By Melissa Korn and Joseph De Avila | Thursday, December 7, 2023 | 11:26 PM EST

The turmoil engulfing the president of the University of Pennsylvania over her handling of antisemitism on campus intensified Thursday as a major benefactor threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation.

The warning came as a congressional panel opened a probe into how harassment of Jewish students is addressed at Penn, as well as at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ross Stevens, founder and chief executive officer of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, a financial-services firm, informed Penn in a letter that he would cancel $100 million of Stone Ridge shares held by the university if it didn’t replace President Liz Magill.

The letter was delivered hours after some board members met virtually to discuss the current controversy involving the president. There was no formal vote, but attendees were overwhelmingly supportive of Magill, according to a person in attendance.

For those of you who do not subscribe to the Journal — I do so that you don’t have to! — you can find the story for free here.

We have documented the firestorm around the remarks of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth, and Dr Magill previously, and do not see how these university presidents can keep their jobs. We have previously reported how University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill has completely fouled up the school’s response to the antiSemitism on campus, costing the Ivy League university the good will of its many deep-pocket alumni donors. Some have sent the messages personally, sending the school $1.00 donations, rather than the big money sent in the past, just to let the schools know how angry they were. Mark Rowan, who had donated $50 million to Penn’s Wharton School, led the charge, and was quickly followed by television producer Richard Wolf, creator of several police or courtroom drama television series. Mr Wolf’s father was Jewish, and his mother an Irish Catholic; he was an altar boy growing up.

Ross Stevens has disagreed with the University of Pennsylvania’s policies before, having previously redirected a $100 million donation to his alma mater to the University of Chicago. That was prior to Dr Magill’s tenure at Penn, but it shows the seriousness of his threat.

With a previous $50 million donor, and now a $100 million donor angered, how does Dr Magill ever survive?

How can Mr Stevens claw back the donation?

Stevens, a 1991 Penn graduate, donated shares now worth $100 million to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance at the university’s Wharton School, according to the letter his firm sent the school Thursday. The donation was made in 2017.

Stone Ridge has grounds to cancel the shares based on Magill’s recent congressional testimony, the letter said. The company has the discretion to cancel the shares if Penn engages in conduct that is materially injurious to Stone Ridge’s business, reputation, character or standing, the letter said.

In other words, Mr Stevens did not donate cash, which he couldn’t rescind, but ‘partnership unit’ shares the University could sell, or hold onto for a share of Stone Ridge Asset Management‘s profits.

Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY 21), Chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, was the one who directed the questions to the three university presidents, and she also wrote in the Journal just how different the colleges respond to their ideas about discrimination:

Harvard Bans ‘Cisheterosexism’ but Shrugs at Antisemitism

College presidents are directly responsible for the hatred that has flourished on campus since Oct. 7.

By Elise Stefanik | Thursday, December 7, 2023 | 4:41 PM EST

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

“Fatphobia”? What constitutes that? The Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of the required training:

“Fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” perpetuate “violence.” “Using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” And “any words used to lower a person’s self-worth” are “Verbal Abuse.” Those are just a handful of the things the school told all undergraduate students in a mandatory Title IX training session, according to materials reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The online training, which all undergraduates were required to complete in order to enroll in courses, includes a “Power and Control Wheel” to help students identify “harmful” conduct. Outside the wheel are attitudes that “contribute to an environment that perpetuates violence,” a voiceover from the training states, including “sizeism and fatphobia,” “cisheterosexism,” “racism,” “transphobia,” “ageism,” and “ableism.”

Inside the wheel are behaviors that the school says constitute “abuse” and could violate its Title IX policies. “We all have an essential role to play in creating a community that cultivates gender equity and inclusion,” Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana told students in a video introducing the training. “Completing this course is a critical step in establishing a shared understanding of the values here at Harvard College.”

You can click on the “Power and Control Wheel” to enlarge it, but it sure has some interesting features. “Culture/Identity Abuse includes “Any attempt to limit a person’s sense of self based on identity and/or culture e.g. objectifying identity, language, religion, culture, gender expression, etc, or using the wrong pronouns.” So, Hahvahd students are required to refer to a he as a she if the subject thinks he’s a she, even if the student does not accept the cockamamie notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, and specifically bans discrimination based on religion, language, and culture, which would certainly seem to include being Jewish, something that Dr Gay seemed to think was really “context” based.

Laughably, under “Sexual Abuse” is included “unwanted or withholding affection”, which can only mean that if affection is unwanted, you can’t express it, but if it is wanted, “withholding affection” that you don’t feel is a problem as well. How does that work?

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

This lack of moral clarity is shocking. If only it were surprising. In the months since Oct. 7, the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish hate has been on full display at the poisoned Ivy League and other so-called elite schools, as has the gutless lack of response from university leaders. When 34 Harvard student groups signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ms. Gay and other Harvard leaders were silent for days.

Since then, we have heard reports of Jewish students being spat on, verbally accosted and, in a widely circulated video, physically assaulted. We’ve seen students march chanting “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” a call for violence against Israel. They follow that with a chant of “Globalize the Intifada,” implying that the hatred of Israel is a hatred of Jews everywhere, including on campus.

The Penn, Harvard and MIT presidents’ refusal to identify these calls for violence as policy violations is revealing, and their attempt to justify it with feigned concern for free speech is insulting. Just this year, Harvard placed dead last among 248 universities on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings, receiving the only score of zero out of 100.

It seems that Dr Gay believes that there is some sort of exception to the rules her university has promulgated when it comes to the Joooos.

Sadly, this is all unsurprising. In Germany in the early 1930s, as the writer Herman Wouk put it in The Winds of War, the universities went over to the Nazis “in a body.” Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism was just plain crazy,^[1]In The Winds of War, fictional character Byron Henry is depicted as reading Mein Kampf, and saying something along the lines of, ‘Don’t they have any insane asylums here, and if so, who … Continue reading blaming the Jews for everything, but the Germans swallowed it whole. A nation of good, white Christians, even though the majority of Germans were not Nazis — the Nazis never won anything close to a majority in elections, but did win pluralities — they accepted the Nazis and their virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric and policies. The Holocaust could never have happened, to the extent that it did, were not the good Christians of Europe, in Germany, France, the Low Countries, Poland and Ukraine actively helping the Nazis round up Jews. Even in this hemisphere, where the Nazis never took power, Cuba, Canada, and even the United States under President Franklin Roosevelt, refused to let the Jewish refugee ship MS St Louis, berth and discharge its passengers, who were eventually forced to return to Europe.

Today’s anti-Semitism is spiraling in the same place it did in Germany in the early 1930s, in the universities. In a confrontation between Western civilization and the forces of savagery, too many college students are siding with the savages, out of some stupid, ‘intersectional’ notion that the ‘Palestinians’ are somehow victims of oppression, when they are actually the purveyors of it, purveyors of a culture which would subjugate the very leftists who infest those college campuses. The university students know, full well, that women’s rights mean very little in the Islamic world, and that homosexuals get jailed or hanged or thrown off tall buildings, but they somehow refuse to see what they already know, in a mindset not that dissimilar from Europeans a century ago, blaming all of their troubles on the Jews. Presidents Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill are letting themselves be sucked into what the noisiest and most stupid students, the Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything, on campus are rioting about.

At some point Harvard and Penn and MIT, along with dozens, if not hundreds of other colleges around this country are going to have to stop and realize that if they want to be the institutions of civilization that they purport to be, they are going to have to educate their students in that tradition. As for Presidents Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill, they’re toast, and their careers are over; it’s just a matter of counting down the days.