Alumni, students and donors of the University of Pennsylvania called on Wednesday for Elizabeth Magill to resign as president of the school, a day after she testified at a contentious congressional hearing about campus antisemitism and evaded questions about whether students calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn’s code of conduct.
The people raising questions about her leadership included Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who said he found her statements “unacceptable.”
“It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else,” Governor Shapiro said Wednesday in a meeting with reporters. “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.”
“There should be no nuance to that — she needed to give a one-word answer,” he added.
Asked how the university should respond, the governor said, “I think right now the board and Penn has a serious decision they need to make,” and urged the university’s board of trustees to meet soon. No regular public meeting of the board is scheduled until February.
While the University of Pennsylvania is regarded as a private institution, the state’s governor is a nonvoting board member.
The university did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
On Wednesday, Marc Rowan, the chief of Apollo Group and the board chair at the Wharton School, Penn’s business school, wrote to the university’s board of trustees asking them to rescind their support for Ms. Magill.
“How much damage to our reputation are we willing to accept?” he wrote. “The call for fundamental change at UPenn continues.”
By Wednesday, a petition demanding her resignation had attracted more than 1,500 signatures.
During the congressional hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said there had been marches where students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.
Ms. Stefanik asked Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?”
Ms. Magill replied, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik pressed the issue: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”
After some more back and forth, Ms. Magill said, “It can be harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik responded: “The answer is yes.”
Mr. Rowan has been calling for the resignations of Ms. Magill and Scott L. Bok, the chairman of the university’s board, for some time. He began to raise questions about the university’s leadership in September, citing a Palestinian writers’ conference that Ms. Magill had allowed to be held on campus and, later, a tepid initial statement she issued in October against Hamas’s attack on Israel.
The president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has also come under fire from donors, students and alumni over her statements about whether calls for genocide of Jews would be a breach of Harvard’s code of conduct.
Dr. Gay said that this type of speech was “personally abhorrent to me” and “at odds with the values of Harvard.” But she said that Harvard gives “a wide berth to free expression, even of views that are objectionable,” and takes action “when speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies” governing bullying, harassment or intimidation.
Harvard released a statement from Dr. Gay on Wednesday.
“There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Dr. Gay said in the statement. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
Her statement did not say what would constitute a threat, or whether chants of “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution” would meet the definition, as Ms. Stefanik argued during the hearing.
A spokesman for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, said that whether speech rises to the level of harassment “is a complicated and fact-intensive issue” that stems from a pattern of targeted behavior.
“For example, it’s hard to see how the single utterance Representative Stefanik asked about during the hearing — no matter how offensive — would qualify given this requirement,” the spokesman said.