For weeks, the University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill has been facing calls for her resignation.

So the pressure on McGill had been building for months

and we had some very outspoken donors.

You know, these are not people who donate anonymously. These are folks with

their names on buildings across campus. That's our colleague Melissa Korn, who

covers higher education. And they had been really frustrated with how the school was handling a number of issues, including

the response to the October 7th Hamas attack, and felt that the school wasn't taking their

concerns seriously about anti-Semitism and

that there needed to be a leadership change. What was at the heart of this standoff?

The Controversy at Penn. It's two things. One is how the school deals with questions

regarding free speech and academic freedom

and the line between free speech and anti-Semitism.

And then the other big issue is what role,

what power donors have over how a school runs itself.

And on Saturday afternoon, those donors got what they wanted.

McGill resigned.

And what would that mean to yield to that kind of demand? I think that's where some of the more interesting questions about this all come in, right?

Who's pulling the in, right? Who's pulling the strings? Right, do you do

whatever a big donor tells you to do because they're a big donor or have been in the past?

How much power should they have?

And these are all questions that I think Penn

and many other universities are grappling with right now.

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