University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies before a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, Dec. 5, 2023. Photo: Reuters

Harvard University has hired disgraced former University of Pennsylvania (Penn) president Elizabeth Magill as a visiting fellow at its law school, a move that may be perceived as rewarding her alleged failure to manage the antisemitism crisis which crumbled her administration.

The news, first reported by The Daily Pennsylvanian, marks a change of fortune to an administrator whose career in higher education seemed all but over just nine months ago, when she was pushed out of office amid numerous antisemitism scandals and an exodus of some of Penn’s most generous donors. Magill has also signed a three-year contract with the London School of Economics to teach as a visiting professor, the paper added, commenting that her “life after Penn shapes up.”

As previously reported, Magill had several opportunities throughout her tenure at Penn to denounce hateful, even conspiratorial, rhetoric directed at both Israel and the Jewish community. However, Magill repeatedly declined to respond to the mounting incidents of antisemitism, especially anti-Zionism, on campus, according to an analysis by The Algemeiner of public statements she had issued since July 2022, when she assumed the presidency at Penn.

Only once did she comment on issues of race and identity, addressing in June the US Supreme Court’s restricting of race-conscious admissions programs through affirmative action. Up to that point, her public statements were limited to discussing climate change and marginal university business despite an anti-Zionist group, Penn Students Against the Occupation (PAO), regularly distributing literature blaming Jews for the world’s social problems and inviting to campus a speaker, Mohammed El-Kurd, who accused Israel of harvesting Palestinians’ organs.

Even the school’s hosting known antisemites at the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” which took place on campus from Sept. 22-24, did not immediately move her to address antisemitism. When she did, she defended the event — whose itinerary listed speakers such as Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, who previously said during an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them” — as an expression of free speech rather than cancel it and protect the university from extremists whose intellectual credentials were suspect and whose utterances violated principles of “diversity and inclusion” the school purported to uphold.

“We unequivocally — and emphatically — condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values,” Magill said at the time in a statement cosigned by two other high-level school officials. “As a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”

By the time Magill was summoned to testify before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce last December, anti-Israel protests at the university, precipitated by the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, had descended into demagoguery and intimidation of Jewish students. At one point, during a protest outside the Van Pelt Dietrich Library, a high school senior — referred to as “MJ,” who attends the Specialized Science Academy in Philadelphia — screamed: “The Israeli Jew has bastardized Judaism! Bastardized it! Trampled on it! How could you let this genocidal regime crap all over your God and your religion like this?”

However, it was her telling the education committee that she would not necessarily punish a student who calls for a genocide of Jews which tolled the death knell of her presidency.

“It is a context-dependent decision,” she said, responding to a question posed by US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). “If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes.”

“Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?” Stefanik asked, visibly disturbed by Magill’s answer. “The speech is not harassment? This is unacceptable, Ms. Magill.”

The following day, Magill apologized. Three days later, she resigned.