Chair of Wharton board of advisers urges donors to stop funding UPenn, schools that profess support for terror group Hamas

The prominent billionaire and private equity investor took particular aim at the University of Pennsylvania leadership for failing to condemn a Palestinian literary festival that took place on campus just two weeks before the attack. He called on "all UPenn alumni and supporters who believe we are heading in the wrong direction" to "close their checkbooks until President Elizabeth Magill and Chairman Scott Bok resign."

"While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it," Rowan wrote in the Free Press. "Across academia, administrators issued statements on behalf of their institutions expressing a repulsive moral equivalence between victims of terror and the perpetrators of that terror."

In a letter submitted for publication to the Daily Pennsylvanian, Rowan highlighted the fact that far from discussing Palestinian literature, the aforementioned festival's speakers "repeated various blood libels against Jews" and "advocated ethnic cleansing," which he lamented as "a tragically prescient preview of the horrific events that took place just two weeks later."

"Magill's allowance of the university's imprimatur to be associated with this conference and her failure to condemn this hate-filled call for ethnic cleansing normalized and legitimized violence that ranged from the targeting of Jewish students and spaces here to the horrific attacks in Israel," he continued, pointing out that "words and ideas matter" and have real-world consequences.

He called on UPenn leadership, sponsoring academic departments, the Wolf Humanities Center, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and the Kelly Writers House to "pause for a moment of reflection to consider why they were unable to rise to a simple challenge and condemn hatred of Jews versus everything else the academic community has chosen to condemn."

Citing the fact that a number of multi-million-dollar grants had recently been awarded to other institutions instead of UPenn and that 4,000 alumni had signed a letter expressing concern over the school's direction, Rowan said he feared the current leadership were running things into the ground via their decision to trade academic excellence and truth for a "poorly organized pursuit of social justice and politically correct speech."

Rowan's article and letter quickly made the rounds on social media, and were praised by many, including influential business leaders who shared his sentiments on the matter.

"Marc Rowan says publicly what many [UPenn] grads have been thinking for weeks," Hudson Institute fellow Ezra Cohen wrote. "Liz Magill has brought her flavor of antisemitic lunacy from Stanford to Penn. The University has imploded under her leadership."

Former Miami mayor Philip Levine called Rowan "brilliant, self made and 100 percent correct."

TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk praised the billionaire for taking a stand, and said he hoped administrators overseeing campuses full of "anti-white, anti-Semitic lunatics" would "finally listen."