WASHINGTON: Uni­ver­­sity of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who came under fire for her stance on antisemitism on campus, has resigned, the Ivy League school said on Saturday.

Magill was one of three top university presidents who were criticised after they testified at a congressional hearing on Tuesday about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the unrest in October.

She has agreed to stay on until an interim president is appointed, Scott Bok, chair of the Philadelphia-based university’s board of trustees, said on Saturday in a statement posted on the university’s website. Bok also stepped down.

“I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as President of the University of Penn­sylvania,” Bok said in the announcement released by the university. Magill will remain a tenured faculty member at the university’s law school, Bok said.

Magill, Harvard Unive­rsity President Claudine Gay, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a US House of Representatives committee on Tuesday.

As they tried to walk a line that protected freedom of speech, they declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Represen­tative Elise Stefanik’s question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.

Calls for Magill’s and Gay’s resignations in particular mounted in the days after that testimony. Magill released a video on Wednesday in which she expressed regret, Gay apologised on Friday.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2023