Documents have surfaced detailing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and his representative’s involvement in internal affairs at the University, including efforts to influence faculty decisions and governance.
Credit: Maya Pratt
Documents acquired by The Daily Pennsylvanian show that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and his representative at Penn sought the firing of one professor and the public condemnation of another, embraced an expansive definition of “antisemitic speech,” and intervened in the University’s January 2024 Board of Trustee chair election.
The documents follow an August report by the Chronicle of Higher Education which revealed that Shapiro has gained an unprecedented level of influence at Penn over the past two years, with his office helping guide Penn’s response to antisemitism concerns. Many of the documents focus on the role of 1982 College graduate Robert Fox, who served as Shapiro’s representative to Penn during and after the University’s fall 2023 leadership crisis that ended with the resignations of then-Penn President Liz Magill and Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok.
Per an archaic Penn statute, Pennsylvania’s governor is allocated a nonvoting observer seat on its Board of Trustees through which the governor could attend and chair any meeting. While this right has not been exercised in the recent past, and Penn has not let the governor send a representative in their stead, Bok told the Chronicle that the University changed its precedent and relented to Shapiro’s desire for a representative as pressure built on Penn during the fall 2023 semester.
In statements to the Chronicle both Shapiro’s office and a University spokesperson defended the decision, citing the governor’s role in Penn’s charter and the importance of combatting antisemitism and other forms of hate.
“The University of Pennsylvania is committed to ensuring that Jewish students, faculty, and staff continue to feel safe, valued, and empowered to flourish and lead within our community,” a Penn spokesperson wrote to the DP, pointing to recent progress through ongoing efforts by the University Task Force on Antisemitism and the Commission on Countering Hate including “policy and security changes,” kosher dining options, and “new academic and social programs.”
Divisive stances on Penn’s antisemitism task force
In January 2024, Fox — a Philadelphia-based lawyer and former adjunct professor at Penn — joined the University’s antisemitism task force as a nonvoting member on behalf of Shapiro two months after its initial formation. Shortly after, several task force members contacted the task force’s chair with concerns about him maintaining meetings’ confidentiality.
Penn Dental School dean and Task Force chair Mark Wolff met with Fox to pass along the concerns, and later drafted a message to the group — which he ran by the governor’s proxy prior to sending — to note Fox’s awareness.
“He also expressed to me that he recognized and would respect that Task Force meetings are strictly confidential, and that our group is advisory to the President,” Wolff wrote. “He does look forward to sharing his, and the Governor’s, thoughts on managing events on campus.”
Fox later forwarded the email to Amanda Warren, Shapiro’s director of external affairs and his main point of contact in the governor’s office.
“I have no problem with this but what was the faculty concern” Fox wrote. “That I would not treat the meetings as confidential? Jeez.”
In addition, according to the Chronicle, two anonymous members of the task force — who were granted anonymity due to the task force’s policy of strict confidentiality — detailed frustration among its members after Fox’s arrival.
“The general concern was around perceived politicization once the governor or someone from his team were to have their hand in it, and that they would push for certain outcomes … based on the political hopes and preferences of the governor,” one member told the Chronicle, adding that “[Fox] would, numerous times, make a point of invoking that he was trying to represent the governor’s position.”
Wolff declined to comment for this piece, citing the task force’s confidentiality policy.
According to one member of the antisemitism task force, Fox was aligned with the faction of its members who supported the strongest university action against perceived antisemitic activity on campus, according to the Chronicle.
On February 26, 2024, Fox — apparently as part of the task force’s ongoing efforts — drafted an email to Warren with “examples of antisemitic speech to be used in a definition.”
The email included 12 examples, ranging from traditional forms of antisemitism — such as “Jews as child killers or the blood libel” to anti-Israel rhetoric. Included in Fox’s list was “calling for the destruction of Israel,” “denying Israel’s right as a sovereign state to self-determination,” “denying Jewish indigeneity in Israel,” and “Zionists are oppressive and hateful and must be fought by any means.”
Desire for discipline and condemnation of Penn professors
Fox, in his capacity on the antisemitism task force and Board of Trustees on behalf of Shapiro, also demonstrated a willingness to advocate for public repercussions for those he believed to be using antisemitic rhetoric.
In early February 2024, two months after Magill and Bok’s resignations, antisemitism concerns again erupted on campus over cartoons published by Penn lecturer Dwayne Booth. Critics denounced the cartoons as antisemitic — though Booth has defended them as satirical and taken out of context — with Jameson later condemning them “as reprehensible, with antisemitic symbols” in a University-wide statement while defending academic freedom.
Fox, in a message to Warren following Jameson’s email, wrote that the University-wide message was “inadequate,” and seemed to call for Booth’s firing. Fox referred to the cartoons as “virulently anti semitic,” saying that Jameson’s response “signals to me that to the faculty their rights are absolute.”
Booth, in response to a request for comment, wrote that Fox’s “willful misreading of my anti-genocide cartoons as being antisemitic” and characterization of his work as “on a public website” rather than in professional publications “is so uninformed and cloying that it doesn’t deserve further comment.”
“Additionally, to suggest that President Jameson was not doing enough to crush the voices of those students and faculty members expressing concern over the growing genocide in Gaza is likewise ludicrous,” Booth wrote.
Ultimately, Jameson and the Annenberg School of Communication refrained from firing Booth, who remained in his position through the end of the 2024-25 school year.
Later in the semester, after Penn’s antisemitism task force had finalized its final report but before its publication, Fox sought to add a note condemning Beth Wenger — Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences’ associate dean for graduate studies and a fellow member of the task force — for her remarks at SAS’s graduate student commencement ceremony in May 2024.
At the ceremony, a student speaker concluded an extended speech about his scholarship by criticizing the “interconnected, white supremacist, imperial, and hypermilitarized violence waged on the people of Gaza… and even the protesters on our own campus.” Wenger, afterwards — appearing to read from a pre-prepared script — thanked the speaker and said that “it gives us so much pleasure to send scholars like this in the world.”
Wenger did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this piece.
While regularly updating Warren on his drafts and progress, Fox circulated several draft statements among task force members to attempt to get signatories. Fox’s initial draft condemned the students’ statements as “both false and anti-Semitic,” later writing that “The undersigned strongly condemn the statement of the associate dean [as] entirely antithetical to the work of the Task Force and Penn’s values.”
“We make this statement so there is no ambiguity that this language should not be tolerated, let alone endorsed by a dean at the University,” Fox continued.
Over the next two weeks, Fox revised and softened the statement, apparently gaining various levels of support from four other task force members.
“To me the issue is not whether people are making a fuss about this. It is whether we are doing the right thing,” Fox wrote to the four other members. “And I think by doing nothing Penn is repeating its failure to respond proactively, which continues to create a negative perception.”
He proceeded to propose the members send their statement to the Anti-Defamation League in hopes that Wenger’s rhetoric would not harm Penn’s grade in its upcoming campus report card on antisemitism.
One of the task force members, when asked about this incident, said that they did not particularly remember Fox advocating for the condemnation of Wenger.
“But I believe it,” they added.
Involvement in Penn’s board chair election
In January 2024, only two months after Fox’s appointment to the Board of Trustees and several weeks after Magill and Bok’s resignations, the group was set to elect a new chair to lead the group — and, eventually, the selection process for Penn’s next president.
Shortly before the planned election, nine members of the Board — including Fox — sent a letter to all trustees requesting a postponement of the chair election scheduled for the following day, calling the search process insufficiently “transparent and inclusive.”
Fox penned a message of his own to the Board requesting the delay and criticized the process as a failure of “good governance and unity,” particularly citing a rushed elections process and the removal of previously planned written statements by candidates.
“From what I have observed and read, the process has not met that standard,” Fox wrote.
Nonetheless, after pushback from Interim Board Chair Julie Beren Platt and at least one other trustee, the vote continued as planned. Then-chair of the board of advisors of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences Ramanan Raghavendran was elected to replace Bok.
Platt did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Raghavendran declined to comment for this piece.
Frequent complaints about Penn’s administration
While heavily involved in Penn’s affairs, Fox often noted his dissatisfaction with his level of involvement and Penn’s senior leadership at large.
When first added to the task force, Fox complained to Warren that the task force was “aiming to treat [him] in the same fashion” as the other external presenters to the group. Fox also protested to Warren that the task force had not shared with him its interim recommendations to Interim Penn President Larry Jameson.
At one point in March 2024, Fox questioned a Penn administrator about why he was not allowed to sit with the Board of Trustees at official meetings nor be assigned to any of its committees, later writing to Warren that “it comes from the top as we expected” — appearing to blame Raghavendran.
The next month, Jameson and Raghavendran authored a confidential note to the trustees including updates on the work of Penn’s task forces against antisemitism and hate. The two wrote that they extended their “continued thanks” to six trustees and one former trustee — all listed by name — for their participation on the two committees, but did not include Fox in the list.
“Again note the absence of a representative of me in Larry’s note,” Fox wrote to Warren. “They don’t get it.”
Coordination with other elected officials
As they enmeshed themselves in Penn’s governance, Fox and Shapiro worked closely with students in the Penn Israel Public Affairs Committee — a Penn student pro-Israel advocacy group — to a great enough extent that the students thanked the governor’s office for their “partnership.”
In September 2024, after one of many calls between the students and Fox, a PIPAC member sent Fox a message with six “actions items.” The list included working with Penn’s newly-announced Office of Religious and Ethnic Inclusion “regarding accountability for students and professors,” coordinating with the “sympathetic” Matt Bradford (D-Worcester) — the Majority Leader of the Pennsylvania House — and planning a vigil to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7.
The communications also indicated support from Shapiro’s office for the students’ push to codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been denounced by some for allegedly conflating antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel.
The student also highlighted an October 1 “activism day” to discuss “passing legislation supporting IHRA, mask protocols, and accountability for universities.”
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On the Oct. 1 visit, the students also met with Warren and TJ Yablonski, Shapiro’s Secretary of Legislative Affairs.
“I will work with him ahead of time to identify some key legislators that would be good targets for a meeting and where we can help,” Warren wrote to the students prior to the meeting. “I am sure we can be helpful with Leader Bradford, among others.”
Bradford’s office did not respond to several requests for comment for this piece.
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