Penn faculty fear the donor who started the effort to oust Liz Magill is attempting to set the agenda for trustees

The deep-pocketed donor who started the successful effort to oust University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and board chair Scott L Bok is now attempting to set the agenda for the university, some faculty said, as he is questioning its instruction, faculty hiring and political orientation.

In an email to trustees Tuesday morning titled “Moving Forward,” Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management in New York, attached a list of 18 questions, some with five parts. Among the questions, he asked whether the school should look at eliminating some academic departments — though he didn’t name which — and examine “criteria for qualification for membership in the faculty,” citing a provision in the charter that allows trustees to set general policies around admission to the faculty.

He also asked: “What are the Board’s criteria for the instruction of students and recommendations for degrees in course and in faculty?”

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The letter begins by questioning the very mission of Penn, asking whether the “process for evaluating whether the university’s actions are consistent with its mission?”

Hearing about the four-page list of questions and cover letter drew immediate concern from some faculty, who already were worried that donors’ attempts to wrest control of Penn’s direction wouldn’t end with Magill’s and Bok’s resignations this past weekend.

“It’s menacing,” said Harun Küçük, former director of Penn’s Middle East Center and associate professor of history and sociology of science. “They’ll turn this into something other than a university.”

Küçük had not seen the letter. Neither had several other faculty contacted by the Inquirer.

Upon reading it, though, the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors sounded an alarm.

“Today, unelected trustees with no academic expertise are evidently attempting a hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania — functions related to curriculum, research, and the hiring and evaluation of faculty,” the group’s executive committee wrote. “The questions being considered by the trustees represent an assault on the principle of academic freedom, which was first articulated a century ago to safeguard the educational mission of universities.”

Below are the questions Rowan posted to the board:

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The board, through a spokesperson, did not respond immediately to a request for comment. Penn Provost John L. Jackson Jr. also did not respond.

Rowan’s spokesperson said the questions Rowan raises are areas that trustees have jurisdiction over in the school’s charter.

“He’s saying these are questions,” the spokesperson said. “He’s not trying to provide answers... In no way, is it what Marc wants... Ultimately, it’s what the trustees and the faculty want.”

But faculty saw it differently.

“We unambiguously reject Mr. Rowan’s view that the trustees are responsible for determining the University of Pennsylvania’s academic policies,” said Tulia G. Falleti, Eric A. Feldman and Vivian L. Gadsden, tri-chairs of the university’s faculty senate, who said they were speaking on their own behalf, not the entire faculty senate. “Penn’s academic excellence builds upon 70 years of shared governance in which the faculty plays a central role in crafting policies that involve teaching, research, and all other aspects of the university’s intellectual life.”

They wrote in a statement that shared governance “ensures effective collaboration and mutual respect across the administration, faculty, staff, students, the Trustees, and the larger Penn community. Such institutional mechanisms, grounded in academic freedom, are critical to the open expression of ideas, and they both strengthen our process of knowledge creation and distinguish us as one of the foremost leaders in higher education in the U.S. and globally.”

Rowan, who leads Wharton’s board of advisors and had given a $50 million gift to the business school in 2018, the largest single gift in its history, had been sending daily emails to the trustees for months as efforts to oust Magill and Bok intensified.

Tuesday’s missive was viewed by some as the billionaire’s attempt to exert influence as board members contemplate their next steps in the leadership crisis. On Tuesday afternoon, they named J. Larry Jameson, executive vice president of Penn’s hospital system and its medical school dean, as interim president.

“This letter is an example of once again the problems of parties who are external to the university functions seeking to control how the university and the faculty engage in the basic functions of the university, which is research and teaching and public speech,” said Risa Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University and general counsel for the national AAUP.

» READ MORE: Penn donor who gave $50 million calls for university leaders to resign over ‘embrace of antisemitism’

Magill stepped down Saturday after renewed calls for her resignation in the wake of her congressional committee testimony last week. When asked if calls for the genocide of Jewish people was a violation of the school’s code of conduct, she testified that it was a “context-dependent” decision. The presidents of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who testified alongside her, also used the word “context” when answering the question.

» READ MORE: Penn president Liz Magill got grilled by Congressional committee over the university’s response to antisemitism

But pressure to remove Magill began in October in the weeks after the Palestine Writes literature festival was held on campus, criticized by some for including speakers who had a history of making antisemitic remarks. Rowan in a letter urged donors to “close their checkbooks” until Magill and Bok stepped down. The controversy escalated after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Bok, who has left the board altogether, not just its leadership position, in an opinion piece published on the Inquirer’s website Tuesday warned of undue influence from donors and the impact it could have.

“Donors should not be able to decide campus policies or determine what is taught, and for sure there should not be a hidden quota system that ensures privileged children a coveted place at elite schools,” he wrote.

Bok wrote that for nearly all 19 years that he served on the board, there seemed to be “very broad, largely unspoken consensus on the roles of the various university constituencies: the board, donors, alumni, faculty, and administration.

“Once I concluded that this longtime consensus had evaporated, I determined that I should step off the board and leave it to others to find a new path forward,” he wrote.

In his email Tuesday, Rowan said to trustees that Penn has a “culture” problem that must be addressed.

“While antisemitism has received the most attention, I believe this is just a symptom of a larger problem...,” he wrote. “A culture that allowed antisemitism to take root and be accepted inside UPenn, that has allowed for preferred versus free speech, and one that has distracted from UPenn’s core mission of scholarship, research, and academic excellence.”

He said it was the board’s failure that Magill did not succeed because it didn’t address questions he identified as key “based on the roles and responsibilities of trustees as dictated in UPenn’s Charter” and “the outcome of numerous conversations with Trustees, Faculty, academic leaders at other institutions, and elsewhere.”

The board, which includes more than 40 members, should consider whether it needs to be smaller and have a formal process for removing members, he wrote.

“What are the criteria for deciding when and how the University speaks out on national or international issues?” Rowan asked.

He also asked about the university’s policies on free speech and code of conduct violations and the importance of “viewpoint diversity” in the hiring of faculty and administrators.

“What is the University’s policy on faculty and administrators promoting a particular viewpoint in their official capacity?” he asked. “Is academic discipline appropriate in the event if a professor or faculty member abuses their official position?”

He also asks about the university’s policy on direct and indirect foreign donations from countries, an issue that has drawn the scrutiny of Republican lawmakers who have questioned Penn’s donations.

“Is the University aware that its policies on foreign donations could jeopardize its tax-free status, potentially resulting in taxes on endowment gains, real estate taxes and other such levees?” he asked. “Further, has the University considered that its current political orientation has exposed UPenn to significant risk in the event of political realignment in Congress?”

His questions about the university’s mission come less than a month after Penn put out its latest strategic plan under Magill that was the result of a widespread process involving faculty and administrators who spent a year setting the agenda.

“If the trustees seriously address these questions [from Rowan], I would question whether they can be entrusted with steering the university or any university,” Küçük said.

Faculty must collectively resist, he said.

“Liz Magill was ousted in a putsch and we need a counter-putsch,” he said.

The AAUP-Penn executive committee said: “Any attempts on the part of Penn’s trustees to close academic departments, constrain hiring, discipline faculty members for political reasons and without due process, censor faculty’s intramural or extramural speech, or impose new McCarthyite speech codes on faculty and students would constitute the most flagrant violations imaginable of the core principles of academic freedom and faculty governance.

“Those principles are not negotiable.”