In the fall of 2023, Scott L. Bok was looking forward to a lower-key work life. He had spent his career in the high-tension field of company mergers and acquisitions, including 16 years as chief executive of Greenhill & Co., a small investment bank, which he was selling. After the sale, he expected to settle into less-demanding roles as the chair of the boards of two nonprofit institutions.
Instead, he found himself in “hostile takeover defense,” which merger and acquisitions “dealmakers universally regard … as the most demanding of assignments,” as he puts it in his book, Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy and Timing, out in May. One of Bok’s chair positions was for the Board of Trustees at the University of Pennsylvania, and the crunch was only beginning.
In the last two chapters of the book, Bok relates several events and details that have never before been publicly reported, including two hours-long meetings of the board that were not formally called “meetings” in order to circumvent state laws.
These happened at a pivotal time for Penn, and for higher education. Protests against Israel’s war in Gaza were sweeping campuses across the country, bringing intense public attention to colleges amid worries that protesters threatened their Jewish classmates. In December 2023, that attention came to a peak when Congress called the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Penn to Washington, D.C., to defend their institutions against accusations of antisemitism and other issues on campus. Four days later, M. Elizabeth Magill, then Penn’s president, resigned, as did Bok.
Bok’s book offers an inside look at how his and Magill’s leadership fell apart over the course of a few months. He describes a private meeting he had with Marc Rowan, a billionaire Penn donor who vocally campaigned for Bok and Magill to resign, and offers a play-by-play of the days leading up to his and Magill’s resignations, during which the board was in “chaos,” Bok writes.
Penn was the target of strategies “similar to those used in the corporate world, where a so-called activist investor tries to force change at a major corporation,” Bok told The Chronicle.
Colleges are still feeling the effects of these events today. Charges of unchecked antisemitism on campus from that time are a key rationale the Trump administration is using to justify large-scale actions against many institutions, including the withholding of billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. In 2024, Penn specifically faced several congressional investigations of leaders’ handling of antisemitic harassment on campus. However, the university doesn’t now appear on the various lists of colleges under investigation for antisemitism by the executive branch. Instead, the Department of Education said on Monday that it found the university had violated Title IX by allowing a transgender athlete to compete on the women’s swim team in 2021-22. (J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s current president, has said the university followed the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s rules at the time.)
The mess of grievances against higher education reflect Bok’s experience in dealing with the aftermath of pro-Palestinian activism on campus.
“The debate at Penn was not, in my view, a Jewish versus non-Jewish thing at all. It was easier to define the divide by politics than it was by religion,” Bok said. “What animated the people who were very unhappy was really a political view that a place like Penn had become too woke.”
“We ended up with a government that’s aligned with the views of a lot of those people.”
Last-Minute Divisions
A white first-generation college student, Bok thinks increased racial diversity among students at Penn is a positive change and that the influence of liberal activism on the university is “way overstated.” In an opinion essay in The Philadelphia Inquirer, he wrote that most Penn students “grow up to be good capitalists and taxpayers.”
Despite the debates playing out in public, in Bok’s telling Penn’s Board of Trustees in 2023 was fairly unified, until the last minute. In the weeks leading up to Magill’s appearance before Congress, a majority of Jewish trustees supported both of them, he writes. Before the congressional hearing, only two active and one emeritus trustee wanted Magill and Bok to resign, he said, out of 48 active and about 25 “reasonably engaged” emeritus trustees.
It was easier to define the divide by politics than it was by religion. What animated the people who were very unhappy was really a political view that a place like Penn had become too woke.
The Chronicle sought to corroborate Bok’s view with Julie Beren Platt, the board’s vice chair and a longtime trustee who also chairs the board for the Jewish Federations of North America. Platt didn’t return a request for comment in time for publication. But two months before the resignations, on October 11, 2023, she issued a statement saying the board’s executive committee “unanimously endorsed the actions taken by the university” and that she was confident in Magill and Bok’s leadership.
What support critics could not get in numbers they sought through a messaging and political campaign akin to what they might use to scuttle opponents’ business deals, Bok’s book argues. Bok saw a draft video ad, of unknown origin, that seemed to compare him and Magill to Nazis and the 9/11 terrorists. He countered it with his own quiet campaign to get the message to the producers that the video would be a step too far. Someone called the governor, who, under university statutes, has the right to chair board meetings if physically present. But Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who later criticized Magill to the press for not making all students feel safe on campus, never made it. Bok’s own sale of Greenhill came under fire, but the deal ultimately went through.
Meanwhile, Rowan’s campaign against Bok and Magill reflected not only a minority view among trustees but was an example of poor governance, Bok writes.
Bok tried to head off Rowan’s public criticism with a one-on-one meeting, but it seemed to accomplish little. During the meeting, Rowan said attempts to diversify the university had gone too far, Bok writes, and talked about “the broken alumni bargain,” which Bok took to mean that big donors weren’t getting their children and grandchildren admitted to Penn, as they expected.
Through a representative, Rowan declined to comment.
Shortly after the meeting, which occurred days after the October 7 attack on Israel, Rowan appeared on TV and published an opinion piece slamming Magill for allowing the university to hold a Palestinian literature festival that included speakers who have been accused of antisemitism. (Penn’s first pro-Palestinian encampment was still months away.) Rowan called on big-donor alumni to give $1 to the university in place of their usual contributions, to show their disapproval.
The weekend after Rowan’s TV spot, Bok called two board meetings that lasted several hours in total and included more than 50 people. He called them informal discussions, however, because, according to state statute, University of Pennsylvania board meetings must be noticed and open to the public.
In his interview with The Chronicle, Bok defended the choice by saying that the board often met informally but wouldn’t make major decisions while doing so. He also didn’t want the conversations to become “choreographed” due to trustees’ awareness of an audience. The board decided to put out an expression of unanimous support for Magill after these weekend meetings.
Rowan also complained publicly about Magill and Bok pressuring trustees who had signed a public letter criticizing Penn’s approach to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival to resign. “To silence them,” Rowan said on CNBC’s Squawk Box show. Bok writes that he had asked those trustees to resign because although board members can and should disagree in meetings with one another, they should present a unified front to the public, in the interest of protecting the institution.
Asked to comment, experts that advise college trustees were similarly divided in their assessments. Mary A. Papazian, executive vice president at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, said she couldn’t comment on any specific situation but echoed Bok’s view in her statement: “We encourage board members to think independently and act collectively.” In contrast, Michael B. Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which was founded to encourage trustee activism and often takes more conservative stances, wrote in an email: “The situation at Penn was not a normal situation, and in that circumstance, it was appropriate for group[s] of concerned trustees and donors to make their voices reverberate.”
In any case, as Bok is careful to point out in his book, Rowan is chair of an advisory board to Penn’s Wharton School of Business, not a trustee of the overall university with voting power and fiduciary responsibility to the institution. “Despite the impressive accomplishments and breathtaking wealth of the Wharton board,” Bok writes, “the truth was that resolutions from that kind of subsidiary board meant nothing.”
The Unraveling
But the minority disagreement presaged the unraveling that would come soon enough. In December 2023, the House Committee on Education & the Workforce called Magill and her colleagues at Havard and MIT to Washington to testify about accusations of antisemitism on their campuses. Bok, who defends Magill’s decisions throughout the Penn chapters of his book, wrote in a statement at the time that Magill “provided a legalistic answer to a moral question,” which “made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony.” The trustees, finally, in his telling, became divided on what to do next. At least one person was leaking details of board meetings to journalists, showing Bok the limits of his own leadership.
He and Magill decided together that she should resign. He moved the announcement up four times to maintain confidentiality, he writes. Then, at the end of the Zoom meeting where he dropped the news, he, too, resigned.
Magill had been president for about 17 months. Bok had been a trustee for about 18 years.
In his book and interview, Bok talked frequently about how he saw his last few months as board chair as a sign and culmination of the growth of the power of Wall Street. That’s why he added two chapters on Penn to the end of a book that is otherwise a memoir of his career as a banker. Over all, he considers that growth to be good for the country, and for universities. “The wealth creation led to significant philanthropic activity, which really powered the growth of universities in a number of ways: No. 1, in increased access,” he said. In other words, Wall Street’s giving made it possible for “Main Street” students to afford Penn.
Where problems lie, Bok said, was “when you saw donors start to think that they can perhaps dictate how universities are run, who they admit, what their faculty teach.”
Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Bok himself writes in his book that “private-equity chieftains are the modern ‘masters of the universe.’” They’re used to getting their way. Though Bok’s own more traditional understanding of the role of trustees perhaps shows corporate experience can coexist with a more hands-off approach to university governance.
In the near future, as the federal government flexes its considerable leverage over universities in a way that no individual billionaire can match, Bok said, trustees will grow quieter. They’ll take a page from their own corporate playbooks, he said, which dictate that, when their companies are under attack, boards should speak with one voice. They may not have done so in 2023 and 2024, but maybe they will now.
