As president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill infamously said at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on Dec. 5, 2023, that calls for the genocide of Jews needed to be evaluated in “context.” She uttered those words less than two months after the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel and the kidnapping of 251 others into Gaza.
She testified along with Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, and Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all three of whom were asked whether advocating for Jewish genocide would violate campus policy. They responded similarly, stressing that the answer would depend on the context.
Magill resigned from Penn four days later, on Dec. 9. (Gay resigned the following month.) Now, she has just been named the new dean of Georgetown University’s law school.
In a Feb. 13 interview with Politico, Magill said her “testimony in Congress left people distressed, and it particularly did that for Jewish students back on the Penn campus.”
In the article, she said, “I regret that I conveyed a lack of compassion and care and good sense to those people. I want every Jewish student, a student of every faith, every view, every single student to feel they are in a secure environment and they’re in a place where they can flourish.”
Like many elite academic institutions in America, Georgetown has faced scrutiny over campus Jew-hatred since Oct. 7. Interim president Robert Groves testified in July before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on the issue.
Last March, Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at the university, was detained by federal immigration authorities. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security alleged that he spread Hamas propaganda, promoted antisemitism on social media and had close ties to a senior Hamas adviser. A court ruled in November that Suri is eligible for deportation, a decision he is appealing.
Groves was among those protesting the arrest, writing that Georgetown “needs students and faculty with different worldviews.”
Jonathan Brown, a tenured professor with a history of anti-Israel advocacy, was placed on leave and removed as chair of Georgetown’s Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies after posting last summer in support of Iran conducting a “symbolic strike” on a U.S. military base.
Brown is the son-in-law of Sami al-Arian, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to a terrorism conspiracy charge related to support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was deported in 2015.
Magill told Politico that her goal is to ensure that the law school remains committed to rigorous scholarship, open inquiry and training lawyers to “practice law with an ethical compass.”
