(JNS) Apollo Global CEO Marc Rowan urges alumni of the University of Pennsylvania to halt all donations until its president, Elizabeth Magill, and board of trustees chair, Scott Bok, resign.

Rowan wrote an op-ed to UPenn’s student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian (it has not been published) criticizing Magill and Bok over their decision to allow the “Palestine Writes” literary festival to take place the last week of September. during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah.

“This is not at the end of the day about free speech,” Rowan said today on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” saying that this was about the inability of the university’s leadership to condemn antisemitism while allowing the program to proceed. At the last minute, Pink Floyd frontman and notorious antisemite Roger Waters was not allowed on campus to speak.

Rowan criticized Magill for “not being capable of exercising moral leadership” due to academic peer pressure. Magill and Bok have also asked trustees and board members to resign for “exercising their free speech” as part of signing an open letter criticizing Penn for holding the event, he claims.

“There are three trustees and one chairman—in my instance—who are being asked to step off the board. All of whom signed this open letter disagreeing with what the university is doing. And all four of us Jewish,” Rowan said.

He slammed Penn for not protecting freedom of speech but being “a bastion of preferred speech.”

“Imagine in the wake of George Floyd, a group of professors getting together and deciding that this would be a good night to hold a white nationalist rally. My guess is the university would have found its voice,” he said. It just so happened that “Palestine Writes” was held over the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah.

Rowan also said that more than 4,000 of Penn’s “most engaged alumni” say that the university is “heading in the wrong direction.”

He also said that while Magill did not create the antisemitism problem on campus, the question remains whether she is the right one to combat it. When asked, Rowan said he did not believe so.

The private equity head concluded by saying that being against Hamas was not merely a political difference of opinion.

“This is not about a political solution or disagreements over how Israel has treated Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” he said. “This is a group that is a terrorist group.”

By contrast, Rowan praised former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, president of the University of Florida, for his statement unequivocally calling Hamas a terrorist group.

‘Stunned, sickened’ by Harvard’s silence on Hamas, Wexner cuts ties

(JNS) The Wexner Foundation supports up to 10 Israeli “outstanding government and public service professionals” to study in a one-year, mid-career master’s degree in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School, per the philanthropy’s website. The goal of the Israel fellowship, per Wexner, is “providing Israel’s next generation of public leaders with superlative training.”

The webpage, which notes Harvard’s “rich environment that is conducive to reflection and dialogue about Israel’s policy challenges and the diverse leadership strategies that could address those challenges,” will need updating.

The billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, founder of the Wexner Foundation, receives the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. Credit: Wikipedia.

Wexner told the Harvard Kennedy School on Oct. 16 that it is cutting ties after more than 30 years. “We believed that at its core, HKS was a school with moral purpose, matching the core values we embrace in our own work,” wrote three Wexner leaders: Rabbi B. Elka Abrahamson (president), Ra’anan Avital (director general, Israel) and Abigail and Leslie Wexner (chairmen).

“We have observed that this cherished tolerance for diverse perspectives has slowly but perceptibly narrowed over the years. A disappointing consequence of this trend is that our Wexner Israel Fellows are increasingly marginalized, their voices and views even shouted down,” the philanthropy leaders wrote. “Disappointingly, HKS has been slow to craft a strategy to enable Israeli students to engage in productive—even if difficult—dialogue within the school. We believe this is an unfortunate trend for the entire MPA student community.”

Following Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, the Wexner leaders were “stunned and sickened at the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians by terrorists,” they wrote.

“Since then, many of our Israel fellows no longer feel marginalized at HKS. They feel abandoned,” the leaders wrote. “Our core values and those of Harvard no longer align. HKS is no longer a place where Israeli leaders can go to develop the necessary skills to address the very real political and societal challenges they face.”

Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, praised Wexner’s decision. “The leadership of Harvard have proven they have lost their moral compass. Not only do they allow Jew-hatred and pro-terror rhetoric to permeate their campus, but they cannot bring themselves to immediately condemn terrorism,” the diplomat wrote. “I call on every North American Jew and supporter of Israel to send this message to every university that behaves similarly.”

“If your child’s university thinks twice before condemning the murder of innocents or allows a culture of hate to grow on campuses unhindered, then it cannot receive one more cent from any of you,” Erdan said. “Whoever stays silent after the massacre of children does not hold the moral credibility to educate our children.”

“It shouldn’t have taken this long to realize what a morally compromised institution Harvard has become, but … better late than never,” wrote Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe op-ed columnist.Last week, Idan Ofer, an Israeli billionaire, and his wife Batia quit Harvard’s executive board. “We denounce those who seek to place blame on the people of Israel for the atrocities committed by the terrorist organization, Hamas,” the couple said