Liz Magill is in a ‘perilous’ situation. Can she still lead Penn?

The question heard on University of Pennsylvania’s campus, in the halls of government and beyond, is can Liz Magill survive and emerge as an effective leader of the school amid bipartisan calls for her resignation and donor backlash.

Much of the job of a college president is about fundraising and relationship building among key campus groups, both of which have taken a serious hit under Magill in recent months.

And as they speculate, Penn’s board of trustees, who have scheduled another full board gathering for 5 p.m. Sunday, likely are weighing the same question as the Ivy League university weathers perhaps its greatest leadership crisis in many decades.

» READ MORE: Penn President Liz Magill faces mounting pressure to resign from Capitol Hill as university backs her

“I don’t know what the odds are of president Magill surviving, but it’s a dreadful situation,” said John E. Jones III, president of Dickinson College, who watched portions of Magill’s testimony. “The board is probably going to measure what they hear and what they see both in the campus community and among their alumni network, and they have to make a calculation whether she still has the credibility … to be able to weather this.

“That’s a judgment that’s difficult. If she’s lost her constituencies or a major part of a constituency, can she retrieve it? It’s a pretty perilous situation from afar.”

The board has remained mum on its next steps in the face of a congressional committee investigation, scrutiny by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the White House, and a threat of further loss of donations. But an email from chairman Scott L. Bok obtained by The Inquirer said the Sunday phone call was set up at the request of many members and that he understood they would want to have input on statements going out from Magill or the board.

» READ MORE: Penn president Liz Magill is facing criticism from Gov. Shapiro, White House and others for comments at a congressional hearing on antisemitism

Bok did not respond to a request for comment.

Since Magill’s testimony, a group of Republican U.S congressmen from Pennsylvania, the board of advisers of Wharton, and others have announced they want her gone. As has been the case for weeks, trucks with ads calling for her ouster are parked around campus. No one knows — or is saying — who is paying for the ads but what’s clear is that Magill’s future is in doubt.

“As a college president, I can’t imagine that it’s a good thing for your school to be in the forefront of this issue in such a negative way and specifically because of your own testimony,” said Rep Susan Wild (D., Lehigh) who serves on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which held the hearing. “… I don’t think she can stay on and I’d frankly be surprised if this is even a question by the end of the weekend.”

Wild said Magill has “lost the trust of the people who matter.”

Joni E. Finney, retired director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at Penn, said it would be very difficult for someone to come back from such an onslaught of widespread criticism.

It would take a majority of the board to firmly support her and a willingness to give her more time to grow into the presidency, she said. Magill’s been on the job just a year and a half, and only last week released her strategic plan for the institution.

“It might take years,” Finney said, “and I don’t know if the board would give her a chance to do that.”

Finney acknowledged the difficult position Magill and the presidents of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found themselves in, up against a congressional committee that “trapped these presidents in a place where they were asked to draw a line between free speech, hate speech, and speech that incites violence.”

“Quite frankly, the whole country hasn’t figured that out,” Finney said.

But Jones, a former federal judge who spent seven years in former Gov. Tom Ridge’s administration and has gone before legislative committees, said those who testify have to be prepared “for that sort of performative nature.” Republican Rep. Elise M. Stefanik of New York, who asked the presidents to say whether the call for the genocide of Jewish people would violate their campus codes, demanded yes or no answers.

“I would not have tolerated the yes or no box,” Jones said. “I would have had my back up. I guess [Magill] was being deferential. But there comes a time you’ve got to stand up and not be rolled over.”

He also said that while Magill’s testimony about the school’s code was probably true from a legal perspective, he would not have handled it that way.

“You have to answer that question with your heart first and then your head,” he said. “The proper answer to the question is not to lead with a technical description of what’s allowed or prohibited under your speech code, but rather to decry that kind of rhetoric and to pledge as the leader of the college to not tolerate it.”

During her testimony, Magill gave a “context-dependent” answer to Stefanik’s question. In a video released a day later, she walked that back and said she considered a call for genocide to be harassment or intimidation and would launch a review of the university’s policies.

That just angered Ania Loomba, a professor of English and comparative literature, who has participated in campus rallies for Palestinians.

“It would have been better for her to have stuck to a principled stance about academic freedom,” she said. “The truth is I don’t think she has done enough to protect Palestinian faculty and their allies. So the very group who might have supported her, she’s alienated that group as well.”

A former Penn administrator, who asked not to be identified, said Magill doesn’t seem to have significant support among donors and others.

“She has no reservoir of goodwill anywhere. Where does she turn?” the administrator said. “There’s no influence she can grab right now.”

Some are quietly wondering where Penn would be if it were still under former president Amy Gutmann, who is Jewish and whose father was a Holocaust survivor, and who had served at the school for 18 years, building bedrock relationships with donors and alumni as well as those on campus.

“It just wouldn’t have gotten here with Amy,” said one educator who declined to be identified because she is not authorized to speak to reporters.

Magill, one of six children who grew up in a Catholic family in Fargo, N.D., was just beginning to build her network. In the span of a few months, she’s had to express regret over her words twice. First, in October, she said that the school should have moved faster to condemn some speakers at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival who had a history of making antisemitic remarks and this week issued the video about her congressional testimony.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education, who has ardently defended free speech, said though she has misstepped, Magill should be allowed to continue to lead. She may have wells of untapped support, the so-called “silent majority,” he said.

“If the critique of her is that she didn’t show enough empathy, how much empathy does it show for her to demand that we fire her,” he said. “Where is the empathy for Liz Magill?”

Staff writers Julia Terruso and Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.