Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: House Committee on Education and the Workforce
From left: Claudine Gay (Harvard University president), Elizabeth Magill (University of Pennsylvania president), American University professor Pamela Nadell and Sally Kornbluth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology president) testify during a House committee hearing about antisemitism on campus on Dec. 5, 2023
(JNS) — The University of Pennsylvania — whose embattled president Liz Magill resigned in December after testifying before a House committee that it wouldn’t necessarily violate school rules to call for genocide of all Jews — has created a new Title VI office of “religious and ethnic inclusion.”
The entity responds to recommendations of the Philadelphia school’s Jew-hatred task force and its Presidential Commission on Countering Hate and Building Community, it stated.
The office “ensures that Penn can continue to fulfill its obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and under Penn’s own policies, to protect students, faculty and staff from discrimination based on their religion, ethnicity, shared ancestry or national origin,” the university stated. The office also provides a “critical central point of contact for Title VI training and compliance,” it said.
“Over the past year, our campus and our country witnessed a disquieting surge in antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of religious and ethnic intolerance,” stated Dr. Larry Jameson, the school’s interim president. “This type of prejudice is simply unacceptable, and has no place at Penn.”
The school expects to open the office this fall under the co-leadership of Majid Alsayegh, who founded a project management firm and who works in interfaith dialogue, and Steve Ginsburg, a former Anti-Defamation League executive.
