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What Do I Do with my Penn Sweatshirts?
Ross Stevens thinks he has a problem. He’s given 100 million smackers to the University of Pennsylvania and now he wants them back. As a lawyer, I can only say “What fun!” But as a Penn grad (Col ’67, as we say), I have bigger, nonjusticiable fish to fry. I wear Penn sweatshirts. I have three of them. They help merchants and medical receptionists put a name to my otherwise unprepossessing presence. Today, I feel a bit icky about them.
A context-dependent decision?
None of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, or Penn distinguished herself at the recent show-trial in Congress. The consensus is that MIT’s Prez did badly, Penn’s did worse, and Harvard’s did worst. Most galling, the fiasco made Trump’s useful idiot Elise Stefanik seem OK. (She isn’t.) But there she was, deftly pretending that everyone carrying an “Intifada” placard intended genocide against all Jews and then asking each of the presidents whether calls for genocide on campus violated her school’s code of conduct. Sadly, Penn’s president Liz McGill said the decision was “context-dependent.” (It isn’t.)
Ms. McGill may have been wrestling with Stefanik’s conflation of “intifada” and genocide. The two are not equivalent, and whether a call for “intifada”…