Our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, loaded up with the #woke as it is, has yet another story defending the University of Pennsylvania’s departing President, Liz Magill, who was forced out after she made a boneheadely stupid, as in dumb as a box of rocks stupid, statement in testimony to a congressional committee that calls to ‘kill all the Jews’ would be a violation of the University’s rules or code of context depending on the context in which such calls were made. Dr Magill, we are told, was new on campus, there for only 18 months, while Claudine Gay has been at Hahvahd for 15 years, and had a lot more friends and good contacts there. There were anti-Semitic incidents on campus even before Hamas’ October 7th attack, and Penn’s faculty didn’t write the support letters that Dr Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth got.
And, of course, Dr Gay is black, while Dr Kornbluth is Jewish.
“I do not think it’s a coincidence that the lone president who had to walk the plank was the white Catholic,” (Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education) said.
There’s more:
One major difference at Harvard was a letter signed by more than 650 faculty calling on the university to keep Claudine Gay; its board announced last week that she would remain. A group of current and former MIT faculty leaders also issued a letter of support for their president, Sally Kornbluth, and the board of trustees there also backed her, according to the Washington Post.
But faculty at Penn wrote no such letter for Magill, a former University of Virginia provost and lawyer who had begun her tenure less than 18 months earlier.
Now, however, the faculty senate is circulating a letter to the board of trustees, already signed by more than 880 faculty members, that opposes “all attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.”
I’m not certain how the Trustees are “external actors,” given that they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the safety and financial security of the University. And the donors? We already know that the students and faculty don’t particularly care for the deep-pockets donors giving multi-million dollars gifts to their alma mater, and the donors have no official power. The previously mentioned Dr Zimmerman, who is also an Inquirer columnist — something reporter Susan Snyder‘s original failed to note — who wrote, before October 7th that people ought not to lose their jobs because they have tweeted something the ‘other side’ finds objectionable:
The only solution is to let everyone tweet what they wish, whether you agree with them or not.
I have been fully supportive of people tweeting exactly what they wish, and do not want the anti-Semitic tweets censored, not because I support what they are saying, but because I very much want the anti-Semites to tell us exactly who they are, so that we can avoid them, and avoid doing business with them. I completely support the things we have previously reported about deep-pocket university donors closing their checkbooks due to anti-Semitism on campus, and creating ‘do not hire’ lists of the haters of Jews. Dr Zimmerman was similarly displeased that the deep-pockets donors were using their money to fight anti-Semitism.
“But if the donors have no official power to “interfere with (Penn’s) academic policies and to undermine academic freedom,” they do have one very important power, that being to either contribute or not contribute to the University. You’d think that a University which houses the
Wharton School, the oldest and most prestigious business school in the country, which is arguably better known that the University itself, and the one which has produced a very substantial portion of the deep-pockets donors, would understand that.
We do have and should have freedom of speech and of the press, but if people can speak freely, then others have the right to listen to them, and if they disagree, choose not to support them. Yes, the students and faculty at Penn have a perfect right to say or publish anything they want, but the donors have the right to decide not to support them.
