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From: Rick Seltzer
Subject: Daily Briefing: An ex-board chair dines on ashes
Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, May 1. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch:
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Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, May 1. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
Too often, governing boards’ perspectives are absent from accounts of consequential moments in higher education. The former chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s board has changed that in one case, as The Chronicle’s Francie Diep reports.
Penn’s board was in chaos in the days leading up to M. Elizabeth Magill’s resignation as president in December 2023, writes Scott L. Bok, the university’s former board chair, in a forthcoming book, Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy and Timing. Details about board meetings were leaking. Bok wound up resigning alongside Magill.
Trustees split after Magill delivered disastrous congressional testimony on alleged campus antisemitism, Bok recounts. In a statement after the hearing, Bok said Magill had “provided a legalistic answer to a moral question.”
The board had been relatively unified up until then, in Bok’s telling — despite tensions set off by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and subsequent debate about a Palestinian literature festival, held weeks prior, that included speakers accused of antisemitism. Only two of 48 active trustees wanted Magill and Bok out before her congressional testimony, Bok reports.
But a donor campaign had taken a page from the corporate world, in which activist investors try to force changes at companies they don’t control, Bok told The Chronicle. He recounts seeing drafts of an advertisement comparing him and Magill to Nazis and 9/11 terrorists.
An investing bigwig heaped on the pressure. Marc Rowan, a billionaire Penn donor who is chief executive of Apollo Global Management, criticized Magill on television and in writing. He called for major donors to drop their contributions to Penn to $1.
Bok suggests the antisemitism allegations were at least partially a proxy for other issues. “What animated the people who were very unhappy was really a political view that a place like Penn had become too woke,” Bok said.
These consequential months at the end of 2023 planted the seeds of today. The Trump administration is citing campus antisemitism allegations as it withholds billions of dollars in research funding from prominent universities. However, the feds are now using a different charge — that the university violated Title IX by allowing a transgender athlete to compete on its women’s swim team — to hold back funding at Penn.
Bok casts the events as reflecting the growing power of Wall Street. He sees benefits from the financial sector’s “wealth creation,” which powered “significant philanthropic activity” and increased access to universities.
The problems came “when you saw donors start to think that they can perhaps dictate how universities are run, who they admit, what their faculty teach,” Bok said.
The bigger question: Donors who used the media and the power of their purses to influence colleges paved the way for the federal government to do the same thing at much greater scale. Did boards learn anything from a trying fall of 2023 that turned out to be a dress rehearsal for 2025?
📱 Read the full story here: How Things Fell Apart at Penn After the Antisemitism Hearing
To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com. You can also find Transitions online here.
Have you ever humble-bragged to a colleague about an athletic accomplishment, like running a few marathons, only to find out that their track record makes you feel as if you’ve been sitting on the couch the whole time?
Most of us would surely find ourselves in those shoes if we discussed running with Tim Cook, president of Clackamas Community College, in Oregon. He’s hit the courses of almost 50 marathons in dozens of states. As if the standard 26.2 miles isn’t enough, he’s also done ultramarathons that stretch about twice as long.
Those look like short walks in the park compared to the 56-year-old’s plans for this summer. Cook has mapped out a 1,500-mile route that will take him to each of Oregon’s 17 community colleges. Traversing it will take him more than 50 straight days at an average of 32 miles per day — an aggressive pace, even considering he will walk some of the route and have a trailing recreational vehicle for bathroom access.
Cook’s using the trek to draw attention to difficulties Oregon students face when seeking degrees. Surveys have shown community-college students struggle to secure enough food and housing. One report from 2019 found that 19 percent of Clackamas students had been homeless at some point in the prior year.
“It’s just this constant challenge for students to try to survive while they’re trying to get a degree or a certificate so they can actually get a good paying job for their families,” Cook told The Oregonian. “It’s not like they’re looking for handouts, they’re just trying to survive.”
Cook hopes to raise at least $150,000 for campus student-assistance funds with his “statewide jogathon.” It’s no stretch to say he’s going the extra mile.
Correction: Wednesday’s Briefing misstated that the House advanced legislation that would eliminate unsubsidized loans for undergraduates. It would in fact eliminate subsidized loans for undergraduates.
