Scott L. Bok is the Chairman and CEO of Greenhill, a global investment bank and, until this week, he was also Chairman of the Board of Directors at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater. (Bok has an undergraduate degree from the Wharton Business School at Penn and a law degree from Penn Carey Law.) Bok resigned the chairmanship in the wake of Penn president Liz Magill’s resignation — Magill resigned under enormous pressure after a disastrous performance in a congressional testimony that went viral.
During the testimony, Magill repeatedly refused to condemn a call for the “genocide of Jews” on campus as an action that transgressed against the university’s code of conduct.
For Magill, the testimony — during which she and the presidents of Harvard and MIT were interrogated by legislators including Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) — was the culmination of a brutal two months that saw Penn’s campus, like others across the nation, riven by protests both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian after the Hamas attacks on October 7, with free speech under the microscope.
Bok said Magill had essentially been overextended, leading her to forsake her principles in a challenging moment. He wrote: “Worn down by months of relentless external attacks, she was not herself last Tuesday. Over prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong.”
[The New York Times reports that Magill was “over prepared” — in Bok’s term — by the white shoe law firm WilmerHale, which also prepped Harvard President Claudine Gay.]
While decrying the moment when Magill gave the “wrong” answer, he also pointed out that it was one part of a more than 5-hour testimony.
Magill herself changed her answer soon after the testimony, writing on social media: “I want to be clear: A call for genocide of Jewish people … would be harassment or intimidation.” But the opportunity for her to be clear had passed.
Rep. Stefanik replied to the news of Magill’s resignation by sharing a post from fellow GOP congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO), which asserted “one down, two to go,” a reference to the Harvard and MIT presidents who gave essentially the same answer, saying such a murderous antisemitic statement’s being deemed harassment would depend on “context.”
.@EliseStefanik exposed the disgusting antisemitism that is in our “elite” colleges last week and today the President of Penn resigned.
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) December 10, 2023
One down, two to go. And many more in reality. We have to root out the wokeness out of our higher education system!
Great job Chairwoman…
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