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M. Elizabeth Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania Dec. 8 after a disastrous performance at a Congressional hearing in which she failed to denounce anti-Semitism and the genocide of Jews in relation to protests on her campus. As of Dec. 10, this photograph of Magill, who had only been in the post a year and a half, was still up on the university’s website.

Low tide for higher ed

December 10, 2023

My maternal grandmother had a phrase we could apply to Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth, the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) respectively, and M. Elizabeth Magill, the now-resigned president of the University of Pennsylvania — “book-smart and life-dumb.”

The once and future war: Israel and 'The Iliad'

October 15, 2023

Do we believe in coincidence or predestination? Is everything happenstance or is it a case that there are no accidents (Freud) and that “God does not play dice with the universe” (Einstein)?

Is that universe sending us a message by releasing a new translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” by University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson just as Hamas savagely attacked Israel and Israel responded with a ferocious declaration of war? It would seem so, for the ancient Greek epic has much to tell us about issues that speak to our time, not the least of which are overweening male pride and rage, power as a zero sum game and stupefyingly bad leadership.