Well, that took about 12 hours longer than I thought it would. I really thought they would go with the Friday afternoon news dump to get this done but for some reason Magill held on until today. But now at last it’s over.

The president of the University of Pennsylvania, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned on Saturday, four days after her testimony at a congressional hearing in which she seemed to evade the question of whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be disciplined.

The announcement, in an email sent to the Penn community from Scott L. Bok, the chairman of the board of trustees, followed months of intense pressure from Jewish students, alumni and donors, who claimed that she had not taken their concerns about antisemitism on campus seriously.

”I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as President of the University of Pennsylvania,” Mr. Bok wrote.

Here’s Bok’s complete statement which wraps up with a bland two sentence statement from Magill herself.

BREAKING

Liz Magill, the embattled President of the University of Pennsylvania, is resigning. pic.twitter.com/ptyrZ68SIJ

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) December 9, 2023

As I pointed out here, the pressure on Magill to resign started well before her congressional testimony. It began months ago after the school hosted the Palestine Writes Literature Festival featuring a bunch of openly anti-Semitic figures including Roger Waters. Since then, major donors like Jon Huntsman and Dick Wolf (creator of Law & Order) have withdrawn donations and demanded Magill resign. The congressional testimony just added fuel to that already existing fire, including the withdrawal of another $100 million gift by wealthy alum Ross Stevens and a vote of no confidence from the Board of Wharton.

Ed noted this morning that the University of Pennsylvania board of trustees had announced an emergency meeting would be held tomorrow. It seems likely that was the last straw for Magill who decided it was better to jump than be pushed. She will reportedly remain on as interim president until her replacement is selected.

As for the underlying issue, that remains controversial. I stick to to what I said here about it. The answer Magill (and the other presidents) gave during congressional testimony were a PR disaster because they seemed like bloodless responses to what was framed as call for genocide against Israelis. You can argue that chanting “globalize the intifada” isn’t a call for genocide but the efforts Magill and others made in that direction were only half-hearted at best. For the most part, they conceded that language was awful.

That said, it’s not great that a defense of free speech on campus, even a poorly given one, was drowned out by a host of people angry at hate speech on campus. In the long run, this is going to make speech less defensible the next time someone dares to say something the left doesn’t like.

That said, it remains true that the problem here was not Magill’s support for free speech, it was the fact that these schools don’t apply the rules evenly (or at all) when the speech in question is something the left dislikes. In other words, the real problem wasn’t what the presidents said, it was that they were all lying when they said it.

Would anything have changed if Magill had been allowed to hang on? My guess is no. These progressive schools are always going to be run by people who coddle the left and punish the right because that’s the culture they come from. Until we have a university president who defends free speech when really offensive things are said about other minority groups on campus, the decision to cling to it in this instance will always ring very hollow.

The best outcome here would be free speech, meaning free of any fear of punishment, for everyone. The worst outcome is maximal free speech for the left and minimal free speech for the right, which is what we actually have on most college campuses most of the time. What we seem to have collectively settled for is something in the middle, neither the best nor the worst case. No one really has free speech and everyone, even the school’s president, can be punished if people on the other side get angry enough. It’s not ideal but it’s closer to being fair.