Ousted UPenn board chair says donors shouldn’t decide school policy

Ousted University of Pennsylvania chairman Scott Bok is now arguing that donors should not get a say in school functions after several wealthy businessmen withdrew their donations to the college over its handling of antisemitic incidents on campus.

“I think donors are absolutely free to give to whatever organizations they want or not to, and to withhold for any reason they choose to,” he told Bloomberg TV.

“But they are not shareholders so I don’t think they should have a particularly loud voice on how universities are run.”

Bok, the CEO of investment bank Greenhill & Co., had previously expressed similar sentiments in an op-ed he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Donors should not be able to decide campus policies or determine what is taught…” he wrote, saying that “universities need to be very careful of the influence of money, especially one like Penn, which has a business school with a brand larger than the university itself.”

He claimed in the piece that for nearly all of his 19 years on the board of trustees, there was a “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 the others to find a new path forward,” wrote Bok, who announced his resignation as the chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s board of trustees earlier this month.

The decision came after several big-name donors withdrew their contributions of hundreds of millions of dollars to the elite university in an effort spearheaded by fellow Wall Street tycoon Apollo Management CEO Marc Rowan – a graduate of Wharton who along with his wife donated $50 million to the business school in 2018.

Rowan demanded in a letter to the board in October that Bok and now-former President Liz Magill resign in disgrace, and asked other business leaders to follow suit.

The efforts grew after Magill failed to definitively say that calls for the genocide of Jews on campus violated the university’s Code of Conduct, with even former Utah Gov. John Huntsman saying the school needed to cut ties with its leadership.

Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Thursday, Bok said the board was struggling to determine its best option as “we haven’t had any sort of crisis or controversy in a really long time.”

He cautioned that trustees — who are typically only focused on an institution’s financial health — “shouldn’t overreact” in such a situation.

“It’s a small fraction of 1% of the people at these elite schools that are actively involved in a way that anybody would find troubling,” he claimed of those who were engaging in antisemitism,

“We shouldn’t fundamentally tear up a governance model that has worked for a very, very long time and made our universities the envy of the world because of a very short-term crisis.”

Others at the Ivy League have also claimed that the donors overstepped their bounds, especially after Rowan sent an email to trustees asking them to examine the “criteria for qualification for memberships in the faculty,” according to the Inquirer.

Rowan claimed in the letter that Penn has a “culture” problem that the board must address.

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

He went on to say that Magill’s failure represented that of the entire board, because it failed to address questions he said were 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 and other institutions and elsewhere.”

Upon reading the letter, the UPenn chapter of the American Association of University Professors released a statement saying: “Today, unelected trustees with no academic experience 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 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,” the statement said.

But even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro slammed the board for its failure “to take concrete action” amid the antisemitism on campus.

He said he first met with Magill and Bok following a controversial “Palestine Writes” literary festival that was held at the school in September.

Shapiro would then go on to hold more meetings with university officials following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, wanting to learn what the university was doing to hold processors accountable if they made students feel unsafe, he told the Wall Street Journal.

Bok said he remembered that conversation, “but anything that involves limiting what tenured professors can say on campus is obviously going to take a lot of consultation with faculty and is not going to be something a president can unilaterally do.”

Shapiro said he also spoke with Magill and Bok about creating a more robust response to people ripping down Israeli flags or putting up antisemitic stickers on private property.

“Penn has a lot of work to do now, as they select a new chair and as they select a new president,” the Democrat governor said. “But we can’t wait on all that. We need a change in policy and approach that happens at Penn now.”

When asked how the university should try to find a balance between free speech and calls for genocide, Shapiro simply said: “That’s their challenge.”