Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights a former Ivy League president’s selective support for free speech.
The former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, who resigned in December after telling a congressional panel that calls for genocide of Jews did not necessarily constitute bullying or harassment, signed off last year on sanctions for a professor who had criticized diversity initiatives.
Magill accepted the recommendations of a Penn hearing board in August to suspend Amy Wax, a tenured law professor, for a year at half pay and to strip her of a named chair, according to a report from Philadelphia Inquirer and documents obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.
Wax had a long record of controversial statements that the school claimed violated its anti-discrimination policies, including her criticisms of diversity, equity, and inclusion officials, who she claimed “couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it.”
In a June memo outlining its recommendations to Magill, the hearing board cited that remark as an example of “inequitably targeted disrespect.”
Magill signed off on the penalties just weeks before she defended the right of Penn faculty to host the controversial Palestine Writes literary festival featuring prominent anti-Semites, some of whom have likened Israel to the Nazis, claimed “most Jews” are “evil,” and blamed Jews for destroying Europe’s economy. In doing so, Magill cited the paramount importance of free expression on campus. “We … fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission,” Magill said in a September statement. “This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”
The school has doubled down on that supposed free speech absolutism in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. Asked at a congressional hearing in December whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s code of conduct, Magill said it was a “context-dependent decision,” a remark that led to her resignation.
