Tag Archive for: university of pennsylvania

Ivy League University Leaders Resign Amid Outrage Over Handling Of Campus Antisemitism

The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) president and Board of Trustees chairman both announced their resignation on Saturday, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian.

UPenn President Elizabeth Magill faced widespread criticism following a hearing of the House of Representatives Education and Workforce Committee on Dec. 5, where she refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the university’s policies. Scott Bok, the chairman of UPenn’s Board of Trustees, announced that Magill had resigned from her position in a community message before later announcing he would also step down.

“Today, following the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s President and related Board of Trustee meetings, I submitted my resignation as Chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, effective immediately,” Bok said in the statement, obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian. “While I was asked to remain in that role for the remainder of my term in order to help with the presidential transition, I concluded that, for me, now was the right time to depart.”

Magill will remain at her position until an “interim president is appointed,” Bok said in his original announcement. She will also “remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law.”

BREAKING: Liz Magill has resigned as the President of @Penn following her disastrous congressional testimony. pic.twitter.com/BxIP9kILsD

“It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution,” Magill wrote. “It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions.”

Magill’s testimony prompted one donor to UPenn, Ross Stevens, to withdraw around $100 million donation to the university. The board of the university’s Wharton School, its well-renowned school of economic and business studies, also explicitly called for her resignation.

UPenn’s board held an emergency meeting to discuss the fallout from Magill’s testimony on Thursday.

Over 70 members of Congress issued a letter calling for her removal, alongside that of Harvard University President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Kornbluth. Gay has since apologized for her testimony.

AUTHOR

ARJUN SINGH

Contributor.

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RELATED VIDEO: Congressional hearing with the University Presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Elite University Hosting Biden Center Took Money From School That Settled With US Gov’t Over Alleged Hezbollah Ties

The University of Pennsylvania, which hosts the Penn Biden Center, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2022, roughly five years after AUB paid a settlement to the United States government in connection with its alleged ties to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terror organization.

UPenn received $474,947 from AUB in 2022, with the donations earmarked as “Education/Tuition/Scholarship,” according to a 2021-2022 foreign gift disclosure obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. AUB settled a lawsuit with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, paying $700,000 and promising to revise its policies, following a suit alleging the university assisted organizations linked to Hezbollah, Reuters reported.

Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed terror organization that has attacked U.S. and Israeli embassies, was implicated in the assignation of a Lebanese prime minister and has carried out suicide bombings, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, according to the State Department.

Federal prosecutors said that AUB admitted to training members of al Nour Radio and al Manar TV, media outlets designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as branches of Hezbollah in 2006. “Al Manar and al Nour are the media arms of the Hizballah terrorist network and have facilitated Hizballah’s activities,” a press release from the Treasury Department reads.

“Hizballah” is an alternative way to transliterate “Hezbollah.”

The media organizations solicited donations for Hezbollah, aided in the terrorist group’s recruitment efforts and had their budgets managed and overseen by the secretary general of Hezbollah, according to the Treasury Department.

Prosecutors also said that AUB connected students to Jihad al-Binaa, a construction company the Treasury Department says was “formed and operated by Hizballah.”

AUB provided video production and blogging training to representatives of terrorist-linked groups alongside journalists, Reuters reported.

Some American universities have partnered with Israeli-designated terror organizations or had ties with Palestinian colleges that released pro-Hamas statements. Nonprofits financed by George Soros paid out millions to fund a partnership between Bard College and a Palestinian university that praised Hamas the day after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, law schools encouraged their students to work at organizations deemed to be terrorists by the Israeli government and Georgia State University cut ties with a college in the West Bank after the Daily Caller News Foundation reported on it praising deceased Hamas terrorists.

The University of Pennsylvania didn’t refer to Hamas as a terrorist group following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks until after a prominent donor said his family would cut off financial support to the university.

UPenn received millions in donations from Chinese donors tied to Hunter Biden.

The Penn Biden Center, established on Feb. 8, 2018, in honor of now-President Joe Biden, exists to “convene world leaders, develop and advance smart policy, and strengthen the national debate for continued American global leadership in the 21st century,” according to its website.

While UPenn received money from Chinese donors linked to the president’s son and AUB, there is no way to know whether that money funded the Penn Biden Center.

The University of Pennsylvania and AUB did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SCHMAD

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Hezbollah Calls For Day of ‘Unprecedented Anger’

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All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Soros Funded A Biden Center Report On Letting More Refugees Into The U.S. Some Of Its Authors Now Work For Biden

Several authors of a Soros-funded Penn Biden Center report advocating for increasing the number of refugees allowed into the country now work in the Biden administration, handling immigration and national security policy.

The Penn Biden Center and the National Conference on Citizenship published a 2020 report, which was funded by a $259,050 grant from Open Society Foundations, recommending increasing the number of refugees permitted to come to the U.S. and easing restrictions on refugee eligibility, actions the White House has since taken. The report was led by Ariana Berengaut, who now serves as senior adviser to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Eric Hysen, who was sworn in as chief information officer (CIO) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in February 2021; Rosanna Kim, who serves as senior adviser for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) since January 2021, also contributed to the report.

Soros, a major donor to left-wing causes and candidates, founded Open Society Foundations and remains a major funder of the organization.

Of the report’s recommendations highlighting how the U.S. government should expand the refugee system, several proposals have been implemented during the authors’ tenures in the Biden administration, including increasing cooperation with the United Nations (UN) to work with the U.S. to bring in more refugees, increasing the number of Latin American and Caribbean refugees and expanding refugee processing in the Western hemisphere.

For instance, the report recommended raising the refugee cap to 125,000, which President Joe Biden later did in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. The Trump administration had previously slashed the refugee cap to 15,000, a historic low for the U.S. government, which Biden increased to 62,500 in fiscal year 2021.

“The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) is at a crossroads. Under the Trump Administration, years of assault on the program have slashed admissions to historic lows, effectively eviscerating a bipartisan tradition of extending a lifeline to the world’s most vulnerable people. If a new president is sworn into office in January 2021, he will likely arrive with a mandate to significantly increase refugee admissions levels,” a summary of the report stated.

Consistent with the report’s recommendation, DHS and the State Department, during Hysen and Kim’s tenures, jointly expanded “processing of refugees from the Western hemisphere” by recently announcing the creation of processing centers in Latin America ahead of the end of Title 42, a Trump-era border policy, on May 11. The centers, which have UN officials working there, determine whether a migrant is eligible for refugee status in either the U.S., Canada or Spain.

The Biden White House also raised the number of Latin American and Caribbean refugees the U.S. would accept to 15,000 in fiscal years 2022 and 2023.

“Under the Obama Administration, the average size of the LAC regional cap was roughly 4,400 with projected arrivals consistently falling significantly short (in FY16, a cap of 3,000 was set with only 1,500 refugees projected to arrive). A new administration should significantly raise the regional LAC cap for admissions as an early demonstration of U.S. commitment to addressing the magnitude and severity of protection needs in the region, particularly in response to refugees fleeing the Northern Triangle countries and Venezuela,” the report stated.

Moreover, the White House restarted the Central American Minors Program, which the report requested, to allow children living in Central America to seek refugee status and live in the U.S. in March 2021. In April, DHS announced that it’s expanding the program to allow certain previous program applicants to reapply.

The White House, the National Security Council’s office, DHS, Hysen and the State Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Texas AG Sues Biden Admin Over Major Immigration Program

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.