She Resigned As Penn President After A Controversial Hearing. Now She’s Back.

Liz Magill’s comeback has begun — and she’s moving from one fraught arena to another.

On Friday, Georgetown University will announce that Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania who resigned in December 2023 after a contentious congressional hearing on antisemitism, has been named the new dean of its law school.

Magill’s appointment comes at a precarious moment for both higher education and the legal profession, with President Donald Trump pressuring universities and law firms to bend to his agenda. In her new job, instead of navigating campus protests over Israel, she’ll be training the next generation of lawyers with the rule of law under attack.

However thorny the task ahead is, it offers Magill a chance to return to a top-tier academic post in a familiar role; she served as dean of Stanford Law School before making her way to Penn. The position also gives her a chance to move beyond the 2023 hearing. That episode ricocheted throughout Washington and beyond after Magill, MIT president Sally Kornbluth and then-Harvard president Claudine Gay were asked whether advocacy for Jewish genocide would violate campus speech policies. Each of the three presidents said that the answer depended on the context, a legalistic response that may have been accurate but fell flat in a tense moment.

In an exclusive interview before beginning her new job, Magill told me that she’d spent a lot of time thinking about “the correct congressional testimony” that could have been offered in response to the questioning from New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik.

“My testimony in Congress left people distressed, and it particularly did that for Jewish students back on the Penn campus,” Magill told me. “I take very seriously the response that people had to my testimony, and I regret that I conveyed a lack of compassion and care and good sense to those people.” She added, “I want every Jewish student, a student of every faith, every view, every single student to feel they are in a secure environment and they’re in a place where they can flourish.”

Expanding upon the reflections she’d offered on her congressional testimony when I profiled her for POLITICO Magazine in June, 2025, Magill said, “I think the clearest lesson for me from that experience is you need to lead from what you stand for — values and principles.” Last year, Magill told me that she’d wished she’d begun her response to Stefanik with “humanity and common sense,” as she said she had many times earlier in the hearing.

Ultimately, Magill said she believed that her experiences at Penn would make her a stronger leader, a sentiment echoed by Georgetown’s interim president, Robert Groves.

“Having testified before the committee myself, it was a tough hearing, as Liz herself acknowledges,” Groves told me. But Groves said that he believed Magill’s experience “had caused her to reflect deeply on the event and learn a great deal.” Befitting a Jesuit university, Groves connected this to the Jesuit model of “discernment,” where one prayerfully reflects on the past in order to do better in the future.

“In the end, I think that experience will make her an even more effective leader for these times,” he said.

Indeed, these times are vastly different than when Magill left office a little over two years ago. When I profiled Magill, I fashioned as her the first casualty in the war against elite universities. These casualties are now legion.

The Trump administration and its allies have relentlessly attacked Ivy League universities and their equally well-funded peers as bastions of left-wing ideological indoctrination, rife with antisemitism. Several schools — including Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia — have struck deals with the administration, sometimes paying fines of millions of dollars in order to end federal investigations and restore research grants.

Magill said she’d been watching with interest. “Universities are facing enormous challenges,” she told me. “Their leaders are trying to navigate a genuinely difficult landscape where there’s a lot of underlying disagreement about the relationship between the government and universities. And I think they’re trying to do that in good faith with their legal obligations, their institutional concerns, the protection of their mission, the research that they're trying to do.”

Magill said that her focus would be on Georgetown. “My goal is to make sure Georgetown Law is a place that does rigorous scholarship, is committed to open inquiry, and is the professional training ground for lawyers who are going to go out and practice law with an ethical compass.”

Meanwhile, the legal profession has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration almost as much as elite universities.

Since re-taking office last year, Trump has launched unprecedented assaults on major U.S. law firms — including Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale — which are widely viewed as retaliation for the connection of these firms to Trump’s political adversaries or people who represented his political adversaries. These attacks have generally taken the form of executive orders that cancelled government contracts, revoked security clearances and restricted access to federal buildings.

This is part and parcel of a broader pattern of behavior with respect to the legal system — also without precedent — that includes attacks on judges, politically motivated prosecutions and an assertion by the solicitor general that presidents might rightfully defy court orders in “extreme cases.” In May, 2025, Chief Justice John Roberts called the rule of law “endangered,” although he declined to point a finger directly at Trump.

The responses of the legal profession have varied widely. Many law firms struck deals with the Trump administration, even though courts blocked several executive orders as unconstitutional. At the same time, many government lawyers have resigned in protest. Sometimes these have been over the politically motivated dismissal of charges, as when Danielle Sassoon, interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, quit rather than follow what she viewed as an improper order to drop corruption charges against New York City’s then-mayor Eric Adams. Others have resigned rather than bring forward politically motivated charges, such as Erik Siebert, former interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who quit amid pressure to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“It’s a challenging time for the profession,” Magill said. “Firms and lawyers have been faced with extremely high-stakes choices, intense public attention and an enormous amount of pressure in a whole range of settings.”

While Magill said that it wasn’t the job of a law school dean to dictate the choices that people make, she sees law schools as having a vital role to play in protecting the rule of law. “Law schools prepare people to make those choices,” she told me. “They teach the highest ideals of the profession, fidelity to law, to facts, to professional and ethical obligation.”

Magill’s connection to Georgetown runs back to her father, Frank, who worked on his family’s farm during the Great Depression before attending Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and later Georgetown University Law Center.

“Until I was about eight or nine, I thought Georgetown was the only institution of higher education that existed in the United States,” Magill told me. Her father would go on to become a circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. “The School of Foreign Service and the Law Center changed the trajectory of his life,” she said. “He thought Jesuit education was the best education you could possibly get.”

“A core Jesuit value is educating the whole person,” Magill added. “Another is the dignity of every individual. To me, that suggests respect for others who profoundly disagree with you, which of course the profession is committed to, but so are those Jesuit values.” Groves emphasized Magill’s connection to these same principles. “Throughout it all, she’s demonstrated unwavering commitment to the principles of academic freedom, rigorous inquiry, and institutional independence — values that are foundational to Georgetown’s Jesuit mission.”

These values have never been more challenged.