Engaging with students can come with its own risks, especially now that everyone has a camera in their pocket. I’ve been on CC long enough to remember when this incident ruffled feathers, for example:
I remember during the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The US, policeman of the world and with a strong interest in keeping Kuwait’s oil resources out of Saddam’s hands, invaded Iraq. Saddam launched missiles at Israel, (there was a fear that they would carry chemical warheads) to try to turn the war into a larger conflagration, and to try to win over the other Arab states, since he was attacking the Jewish state. It was tremendously terrifying for the residents of Israel. Anyway, my friend’s granddaughter went to Purim parties in Israel right after that, dressed as a scud missile, with a placard saying, “I come to kill you in your beds!” She was making fun of what had been a truly horrifying situation. Point is, going to Halloween dressed as a suicide bomber could have been seen as making fun of a frightening thing, to mock it, to take away its terrifying power.
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Penn stood out generations ago as the Ivy League school that did not impose quotas and barriers to discriminate against Jewish applicants. In recent times, however, the percentage of students on campus who identify as Jewish has declined. Although there may be demographic shifts in the composition of Penn’s applicant pool to explain this, there is a growing sense of concern and loss. This backdrop was mentioned in Mr. Lauder’s letter to President Magill.
Then you have the Palestine Writes festival, which was scheduled by outside groups, but had the involvement of some Penn faculty and students and was held at Irvine Auditorium. (There were classes that wrote the festival into the syllabus as a mandatory event, though the faculty for those classes were forced to drop that requirement.) That event included speakers who have made anti-Semitic statements. The Palestine Writes X/Twitter account continues to unabashedly call Israel a racist, genocidal, colonial project.
In the lead-up to Palestine Writes, a very disturbed person gained entry to Hillel and trashed the lobby while ranting anti-Semitic slogans. Around this time, Swastika graffiti was found elsewhere on campus. These events were not condoned by the festival organizers, but some have connected them to the festival for encouraging a kind of “permission structure” for anti-Semites.
Should Penn have banned the event from campus as some donors, parents and students demanded? Well, go back to 1988, when Louis Farrakhan spoke at Irvine. President Sheldon Hackney did not ban Farrakhan, despite the Nation of Islam leader’s record of vile anti-Semitic statements and praise for, um…Adolph Hitler.
Hackney understood he could not police ideology and speech, short of any direct incitement to take violent action, and that the role of the university was to let students assess the quality of ideas for themselves.
Now you have the bloody and chilling terror attack by Hamas and the follow-on protests and vigils. Penn’s first statements were weak sauce. And I will never understand the tone deaf social media approach of President Magill, who clung to her usual Instagram script, posting pictures of herself walking with her dog in the rain when other leaders were using their platforms to express grief and solidarity.
Even before this all went down, I felt Magill was out of her depth in her new role. It seems like she was a fine dean or provost but I don’t see any sign that she understands how to lead a massive, complex, high-profile, multi-billion-dollar operation, and she lacks a leader’s sense of urgency when urgency matters.
She is not, however, responsible for the protest marchers on Locust Walk, and no academic leader can or should make content-based prohibitions against rally speakers. The issue of policing speech on campus is very much a problem, on the right and the left, whether it’s restricting what can be taught about the role of race in American history, or anxiety about getting shamed for not remembering people’s pronouns.
I guess what I am trying to say is there is a broader context to what is happening at Penn. There is a confluence of concerns that appears to be roiling the Jewish and Muslim (and broader) communities at the school.
I think Magill is vulnerable for a lot of different reasons, but canning her for not curbing speech on campus seems like a bad precedent. The hypocrisy, of course, is that the chairman of Penn’s board is policing dissent by pressuring board members critical of Magill’s missteps to leave.
And then there’s the Amy Wax controversy, where discipline is being considered over racist teaching. Penn is rudderless on these speech questions, which is a sign of “feckless” leadership, indeed.
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