It's been a year to the day since former Penn President Liz Magill testified in front of Congress, leading to nationwide fallout and her resignation just four days later. 

In the months that have followed, Penn's campus has seen monumental changes: an interim University president and new chair of the University Board of Trustees, sweeping new protest guidelines, and a shift toward institutional neutrality. But it's unclear if the changes on campus are the product of Interim Penn President Larry Jameson's efforts or a calmer political climate.

The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke with nearly a dozen students, faculty, and alumni to better understand how the University has evolved in the year since Magill resigned, with interviews suggesting a permanent shift in how the world views Penn and how the Penn community views itself.

Penn affiliates agreed that the presidential transition from Magill to Jameson was a necessary step for the community after constituencies from all sides lost faith in the direction of her leadership — while a source close to Magill and Bok said that both parties decided to resign independently of the Board of Trustees' decision-making. At the same time, a plurality of students view Magill's resignation as having had a negative impact on the direction of the University, according to a DP survey. 

Magill declined the DP's request for comment, while a request for comment was left with a University spokesperson.

Revisiting the resignation

On Dec. 9, 2023, Magill announced in an email to the Penn community that she would resign from the Penn presidency. 

Her resignation came days after her performance at a multi-hour United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. Minutes after Magill resigned, then-University Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok announced that he, too, was stepping down from his position. 

Bok declined the DP's request for comment.

At the hearing, Magill was asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people violate Penn’s code of conduct. Her response described the question as a "context-dependent decision." These comments sparked national scrutiny and increased calls for her resignation. 

At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Board of Trustees remained supportive of Magill at a virtual meeting two days after her testimony. A source close to Magill and Bok confirmed to the DP that the board was largely supportive of Magill during this meeting and that both parties decided to resign independently of the board.

Magill's resignation was the culmination of a tumultuous fall 2023 semester: Numerous alumni and donors pulled contributions due to her handling of the controversy surrounding the Palestine Writes Literature Festival and acts of antisemitism on campus, with the University at one point losing a $100 million donation. Dozens of faculty members also expressed “deep concern” for what they described as a failure by Magill to discern between Palestinian culture and antisemitism in her statements to the Penn community.

Reflections one year later

A recent DP survey of over 900 Penn undergraduates revealed that a majority of students perceive Magill’s resignation as having no significant effect or a somewhat negative effect on Penn.

41% of Penn students believe Magill's resignation had a somewhat or very negative impact on Penn

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"I would say her handling of the Palestine Literature Festival was as much as she could have done as president,” Engineering senior and Penn Muslim Students’ Association Marketing and Engagement Chair Abir Hossain told the DP in a recent interview. 

He said that while he agrees with Magill’s decision to resign, it’s “not because of what she said,” but rather, “because she lost the confidence of the people around her.”

“If the Board of Trustees no longer has confidence in you to run an organization, it's gonna make running the organization a lot more difficult,” he said. “It kind of feels like she kind of didn't have a choice."

Wharton senior Ryan Ghose said that Magill’s resignation allowed Penn to move past turmoil that occurred on campus following  the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

“The resignation was a necessary part of Penn being able to shed a lot of the negativity from last year,” he told the DP, describing the transition as a “reset” that allowed the University to reimagine its institutional image.

He added that after the soundbites from Magill's testimony went viral, "it was clear that any good faith effort to understand or critique the University’s handling of actions after Oct. 7 wasn’t going to be fairly judged.”

1980 College graduate and Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman — who taught Magill and eventually became a colleague of hers at the University of Virginia School of Law — wrote in a statement to the DP that the Board of Trustees treated Magill "horribly" prior to her resignation. 

“Unlike the boards at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which stood behind their presidents, the Penn board quickly caved to pressure from the McCarthyite inquisition and abandoned Liz,” he wrote. "I imagine the failure of the board to show even a modicum of support for a beleaguered president will affect the pool of candidates interested in becoming president of Penn."

Graduate School of Education professor Julie Wollman — who has served as a president, provost, dean, and faculty member across various public and private higher education institutions — also believes that an overall lack of support from the Penn community ultimately led to Magill's resignation.

“I think nobody was happy with her leadership, honestly,” Wollman said. “I do think that she wasn’t able to find the right balance and to find her own voice and what she believed. I think she was feeling like ‘I have to say this, I have to say that.’”

1992 Wharton graduate and Wharton Board of Advisors member Jacqueline Reses affirmed Wollman's perspective, telling the DP that she was “appalled” by Magill’s congressional testimony and felt she "lacked moral clarity."

Reses applauded Magill's decision to resign, describing it as a "very professional approach" that "spared Penn the embarrassment that Harvard suffered."

Reses was one of the many alumni and donors to pause her donations to the University amid last year's national controversy. Despite the leadership change, she told the DP that she wants to "understand what the University wants to become" before resuming contributions.

Klarman, who said he “knows of no finer and wiser person in academia” than Magill, said that Penn's treatment of her has led him to cease any future donations to the University. 

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“Universities are one of our nation’s strongest bulwarks against rising authoritarian forces in society," he wrote. "It is a tragedy when those institutions manifest anticipatory capitulation to such forces,” he wrote.

In a recent interview with the DP, Jameson said that his approach to the question would've been different from Magill's. He pointed to his training as a physician, explaining that his response to Stefanik's question would have been based more on empathy and less "on strict policy."

Jameson also said that “any call for genocide directed at anyone in our community, no matter what their ethnicity or religious affiliation, would violate our policies.”

At a panel on “Institutional Speech & Administrative Challenges” hosted by the University of North Carolina on Nov. 15 — Magill's first publicly advertised event since her resignation — she addressed the viral moment publicly for the first time. 

“I am empathetic and could definitely understand and have stepped in the shoes of someone who hears something like that on our campus,” Magill said at the panel. “It was a mistake not to do that, and I don’t think that’s who I am.”

The student and faculty experience on campus since Magill resigned

It is “insane that antisemitic university faculty continue to avoid consequences for their actions" in the year since Magill's resignation, Wharton and Engineering senior Noah Rubin wrote to the DP.

“The culture of normalized antisemitism must end, and there must be a single standard applied to all members of the community,” he added.

Rubin compared the sanctions against University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy Wax, which sparked both widespread support and warnings of threats to free speech from Penn community members, to the University’s treatment of Annenberg School for Communication lecturer Dwayne Booth — who publishes political cartoons under the pen name Mr. Fish. Booth faced backlash, including condemnation by Jameson, for his illustrations last academic year.

“NON-tenured lecturers who push blood libel, Holocaust revisionism, and perpetuate antisemitism, such as Dwayne Booth, continue to teach and have no consequences,” Rubin wrote. 

In a statement to the DP, Booth wrote that “any attempt to brand [his] work … as a political cartoonist … outside of [his] duties and responsibilities as a professor as being antisemitic is nothing more than a targeted effort to silence criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza while having absolutely nothing to do with [his] teaching."

Hossain told the DP that in the past year, he has also seen greater administrative concern with student groups organizing on campus. 

For example, Hossain said that while organizing MSA’s annual conference, the club had to notify the University of details much earlier in advance than in previous years. 

“Sometimes it feels like they're taking a closer look compared to some other clubs," he said. "I understand why they would, but at the same time doesn't make it feel any less hurtful. Just because we're Muslim doesn't necessarily mean we need to be under a bigger magnifying glass."

In a followup email, Ghose wrote that he "would like the administration to take a more active stance in promoting academic discussion.”

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“I feel that any administrative response to student advocacy regarding the Middle Eastern crisis is always reactionary,” he added. “I rarely feel that space is proactively created for students to hear others' stories or understand why others feel the way they do.”

When asked whether he believes he would have faced similar backlash to his political cartoons had Magill not resigned, Booth wrote that “there’s no way to know.” 

“I only wish the university leadership better understood the chilling effect of maintaining steel barriers all over campus,” he wrote.

Graduate School of Education professor Jonathan Zimmerman said he remained “deeply concerned” about the temporary Guidelines on Open Expression that Jameson introduced this summer.

The temporary standards contain updated guidance on “when, where, and how open expression can take place." The University also announced the formation of a task force to review the existing open expression policies. 

The Executive Committee of Penn’s Chapter of the American Association of University Professors condemned the temporary standards in a Oct. 30 statement, alleging the University failed to uphold academic freedom. 

The statement characterizes the policies as an “attempt by the central administration to strip faculty, staff, and students” of rights “necessary to education and to democracy itself.” 

AAUP-Penn did not respond to a request for comment.

Contrasting visions for Penn

On Dec. 12, 2023, Penn's Board of Trustees appointed Jameson — then the executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania the Health System and dean of the Perelman School of Medicine — as the University's interim president. In June, Board of Trustees Chair Ramanan Raghavendran announced that Jameson will remain in the role through the 2026 academic year. 

Since Jameson assumed the presidency, some community members feel there have been improvements and more attention to students' needs, while others explained that the different contexts of their presidencies makes comparison difficult. 

“We've been seeing that some parts of the administration are paying a lot more mind to us and the needs of our community,” Hossain said. “They can still tell that part of our community is not satisfied with how they were being treated." 

Hossain added that he believes the administration feels “guilty” for not being able to support students but says that it does not always feel authentic. 

Wollman said that she believes Jameson might be “more comfortable in the role” of president than Magill was. 

“I think President Jameson's messages, right up front, were very much about caring and compassion and community and healing," she said. "Coming from his medical background … I think he’s more comfortable talking with large groups of people." 

Wollman added that there has been a difference in how Jameson and Magill have approached communication with University constituents — including donors, faculty, staff, and trustees — but noted the “difficult” position Magill was in.

“President Magill was under lots of pressure to take a certain side … and part of it was just pressure from donors in particular,” she said. “President Jameson’s messaging when he started was much more, 'We’re a community, I care about this community.'”

Chair of the Faculty Senate and Penn Carey Law professor Eric Feldman also noted the differences in Penn's campus climate this year and last, writing in a statement to the DP that Magill and Jameson “found themselves at the helm of the [Penn] under very different circumstances.”

“Every leader has their own style of leadership, and that style is often the product of one’s personal disposition as well as one’s training," he wrote. “President Magill was trained in law, Interim President Jameson in medicine, and those fields have different approaches to how to ask and answer questions, how to approach conflict, and how to weigh evidence."

Feldman added that these circumstances have changed the Faculty Senate's priorities this year compared to last. He wrote that the Senate previously focused on "threats to academic freedom and open expression," while this year they have discussed the future of higher education.

He added that he believe challenges to higher education might “accelerate under President Trump.”