The Gaza war has claimed its most important institutional victim in the United States. The rector of the board of trustees of the University of Pennsylvania -the fifteenth best in the world according to the Shanghai ranking- presented her resignation this Saturday in the midst of a donor boycott. It was the reaction to the statements of Elizabeth Magill before the House of Representatives on whether calling for the genocide of the Jews is anti-Semitism (in the US the word “anti-Semitism” is used to refer to attacks on Jews, even though that is an obsolete term that includes Phoenicians, or that is, Lebanese, Arabs, Eritreans and Acadians from northern Iraq).
Magill’s appearance at the Education Committee last Wednesday put the final nail in his coffin. The former rector gave a statement at the same time as her counterparts from Harvard (Claudine Gay) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or WITH (Sally Kornbluth). All three gave very similar answers to questions from Representative Elise Stefanik, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent defenders.
Las answers were legalistic, technical, cold and dispassionate, possibly excellent for an academic exercise but not for a televised political event in the age of social networks. In a country, the United States, in which, for the first time, there is a part of the population that openly sympathizes with the Palestinians and questions the total identification that Washington has with Israel, and which is made up mostly of young university students.
If Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth made anything clear, it is that the top representatives of academic institutions that charge $100,000 per year in tuition, not counting accommodation, health insurance, or academic materials, live, literally, in an ivory tower.
So, when asked about Whether calling for the genocide of the Jews violates the code of conduct of their institutions, Gay and Magill responded that “depends on the context”, while Kornbluth denied that there had been any such call at MIT. Not content with that, Magill added that “if statements are transformed into actions, it could be considered perhaps”.