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I'm in grad school at Penn, which has recently hit the news for former Penn president Liz Magill's responses to the congressional hearing on anti-Semitism (even making it to the SNL cold open!!). The question about genocide wasn't even supposed to be the "gotcha" question in the hearing; the follow up was going to be "is the river to the sea advocating for genocide", which was where things were going to get dicey. Instead, Liz and the presidents of Harvard and MIT did not get past the first question.
Liz was under fire for a bit, starting with the "Palestine Writes" festival back in September. The recent confessional hearing was more so the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. Since September, we've lost almost $1b in donations, from donors with names adorning buildings such as Huntsman, Lauder, and more. The most recent is $100m joint venture that included a non-discrimination clause, and a lawsuit by two Penn students about their experiences (which, even before Oct. 7, included swastikas drawn on campus buildings and an individual breaking into the Jewish center on the campus; we had a day of solidarity on campus to stand against antisemetic hatred, and the progressives who participated have all quietly removed those pictures from their social media).
Liz's administration has also refused to show the pro-Palestine movie "Israelism" and has changed certain policies to make an ongoing pro-Palestine "teach in" more difficult at Houston Hall. The middle east director resigned in protest. It isn't that Liz is pro-Palestine; she's just... Not doing a good job of attempting neutrality.
Penn is ranked the second worst school for freedom of speech by FIRE, a ranking that focuses less on stated policies and more on students' subjective experiences. Liz will stay on until a replacement is announced, and remains a tenured law professor at Penn regardless.
The new YikYak, known as sidechat, has provided a not-so-scientific look into the undergrads' anonymous processing of events. The following stand out to me:
It baffles me how much students (specifically, students without a personal connection to the conflict; those with a personal connection I completely understand) are getting so emotionally frothy about a conflict halfway around the world that Penn has zero influence over. Instead, we are able to influence how students, here on campus, are treated, and we are willing to sacrifice that to rant about the Middle East. Why?
As an European coming from the outside, I had no idea how much power is in the hands of Jewish and pro-Zionist donors in the matters of american academia. And, reasoning about it, I think that for European-Americans it should be a clear bell of alarm; the Jewish donors will tolerate whatever anti-European, child mauling or intersectional feminism, but will never falter at Jewish interests.
This has been the biggest complaint albeit some donors said something to the effective of “I failed when I was silent when woke wasn’t hitting my group.” Question will be whether they put their money where their mouth is today
Like who? Whom dost thou quote?
My recollection which I will try to dig up is one of the Apollo founders
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