In two public interviews over the past two weeks, Mark Rowan, the billionaire donor who led the effort to oust former Pennsylvania leaders for their handling of anti-Semitism, said: He continued to harshly criticize the university.
He is targeting the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences squarely. The faculty has 27 faculties, including several that sponsored sessions at the Palestine Light Literature Festival last September. Critics criticized the presentation, saying it included speakers with a history of anti-Semitic comments, but supporters defended it. A celebration of Palestinian art.
In a Feb. 27 interview with the Economic Club of Washington, Rowan said faculty at Wharton (Pennsylvania's business school, where Rowan graduated), the engineering school, and the medical school are interested in academic excellence and research. Ta.
“If you go to our School of Arts and Sciences,” Rowan said, “not so much.”
He echoed much the same opinion about the school, which includes everything from physics and chemistry to economics and math, in a speech Wednesday at the Anti-Defamation League's national convention.
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This statement, along with others on Ivy League campuses, including the claim that students rallying for Palestinians is a reflection of “anti-Americanism” and “anti-meritism” rather than anti-Semitism. continued to raise concerns about Rowan, who was chaired within. Wharton's Advisory Board. Questions also arose about the propriety of a leader on Penn's board of trustees publicly criticizing another school at the university.
“It is possible that Rowan does not respect or understand the principles of academic freedom, the purpose of the university to advance knowledge and educate students in all academic fields, or the quality of the university’s research and teaching. “This is not the first time this has been shown. Penn,” said the Penn Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We question whether someone so ill-informed and clearly involved in undermining the mission of our university should serve on Wharton’s advisory board.”
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In a statement Thursday, the group said AAUP is working to prevent “wealthy donors with no academic qualifications…from attempting to suppress research and education deemed inconvenient to their business interests or politics.” He pointed out that he defined the concept of academic freedom more than a century ago. agenda. The organization says faculty should be the ones who “make academic decisions and evaluate the quality of scholarship within their disciplines.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Rowan declined to comment. In his comments, Rowan said support for his initiative is growing, claiming that 27,000 people have shown support for his ideas.
“The overwhelming majority of responses have been incredibly positive,” he says.
“It is well within the bounds of a free society and an open university for Mr. Rowan to criticize anyone,” said Michael Poliakoff, president and CEO of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. .
“The sad fact is that the humanities really suffer from the intrusion of a huge amount of theory, including intersectionality, postcolonial theory, and oppressor-oppressed frameworks,” he says. “These should be subject to much more rigorous scrutiny. …The criticisms that Mr. Rowan is making are very valid.”
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Poliakoff noted that research has shown that the majority of Harvard's liberal arts faculty identify as liberal.
“It's hard to have a diversity of perspectives,” Rowan said at the ADL conference.
Stephen J. Fluharty, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
“Penn represents academic excellence in all aspects of teaching, research, and scholarship, which is why we attract the brightest students and faculty who will make a meaningful impact on the world,” a Penn spokesperson said in a statement. It continues.''
Scott L. Bok, former chairman of Penn's Board of Trustees, disputed Rowan's claims.
“The College of Arts and Sciences is the core of the university, with a large and diverse faculty teaching everything from biology to history,” he said. “The idea that these people are not absolutely committed to academic excellence is simply false.”
Dagmawi Oubshet, an associate professor of English at the Pennsylvania School of Justice in Palestine who attended a vigil on campus in January to honor the lives lost in Gaza, also took exception to Rowan's remarks. And so.
“To say that only pre-professional schools are intellectually demanding and meritocratic is at best a glib and self-serving characterization,” Oubshet says. “This belittles the extraordinary value of arts and humanities education, which is the lifeblood of our distinguished universities.”
In an interview at the Economic Club, Rowan made it clear that he will continue to pay close attention to Penn. he asked and he answered “100%.”
This raised concerns in the Penn community about how much influence Rowan would seek to wield. Mr. Penn is already facing an investigation by a congressional committee over his handling of anti-Semitism.
Campaign started in autumn
Rowan, CEO of New York-based private equity firm Apollo Global Management, wrote in October, weeks after Palestine wrote, and just days after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Palestine. launched a public campaign to ask donors to withhold funds. Israel. Rowan already had a high profile at Wharton, having made a $50 million gift to Wharton in 2018, the largest single gift in history.
He called on donors to “close their checkbooks” before then-president Liz McGill and I resigned over their handling of the festival. And he continued that effort for several months, emailing the board daily. McGill and Bok resigned in December after McGill's congressional testimony about the university's response to anti-Semitism sparked a backlash.
Following their resignations, Rowan sent what was said to be his final email to the board questioning the university's leadership, faculty hiring and political direction. In his questions, he asked whether the school should consider eliminating some departments, without specifying which ones, but a provision in the charter that allows the board to set general matters. “Standards for faculty membership'' should be considered, citing Undergraduate Admissions Policy.
The email, titled “Moving forward,” included 18 questions, some of which had five parts. This raised concerns among faculty leaders that Rowan was trying to set the university's agenda in a “hostile takeover” style.
A spokeswoman for Rowan said at the time that the questions Rowan posed were areas within the school's charter that trustees have jurisdiction over.
“He says these are questions,” the spokesperson said. “He's not trying to provide answers.”
“We are fighting anti-merit.”
In a recent appearance, Rowan claimed that students protesting against Israel chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” don't even understand the geography they're talking about.
“If you ask kids which river and which ocean, they don’t know,” he said. “They don't know who lives between the river and the sea. How did they get there? They don't know.”
Poliakoff pointed to a December Wall Street Journal op-ed by Ron Hasner, a political science professor at Berkeley, who said a survey he commissioned showed that among students who supported the slogan, fewer people named the river He said that less than half of them were able to name the river. A sea of problems.
This word refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. While it is a rallying cry for the destruction of Israel, some use it as a cry for the liberation of Palestinians from Gaza to the West Bank and inside Israel.
Rowan argues that the “accepted narrative” on campuses that began to promote social justice “has metastasized to postcolonial education, the oppressed and the oppressors, the powerful and the powerless. The facts are abhorrent. ” he said.
“Jews and Israelis are both seen as white. That's not good. They're seen as powerful. That's not good. They're seen as oppressing the Palestinians. That's not good. Therefore, according to these universities' claims, the facts should be condemned by any means necessary.”
He said the fight on campus is more about “anti-Americanism” than anti-Semitism.
“We are fighting anti-merit,” he said. “We're fighting against the establishment. We're really fighting for the soul of these institutions.”
At the ADL conference, he said universities have been hijacked by a “progressive narrative” that “evaluates everything in the context of victimhood.”
However, Oubshet said that critiques of power are not new and are “essential to the production of knowledge and to the fostering of just and democratic societies.” What we have now is a concerted policy of conservatives and right-wingers, an anti-intellectual policy that deliberately misinterprets the terminology of criticism and teaches anything that challenges our romanticized view of American civilization. This makes it considered anti-American. ”
Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn State professor of education history who has been an ardent defender of free speech, said Rowan had every right to express his opinion and addressed some of the questions he raised in his final email to the board. said it was worth asking.
“But I don't think Mark Rowan's opinion should carry more weight than anyone else's,” he said. “I don't think the role of the director is to make academic policy. That is the role of the administration, and mainly the faculty.”
