Three days after former university president Liz Magill announced her resignation, the University of Pennsylvania has named Dr. J. Larry Jameson as its new interim president, writes Campbell Robertson and Michael Corkery for The New York Times. 

Jameson is the dean of the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn.

He takes on the interim role after Magill resigned due to an intense campaign by donors and alumni who claimed she didn’t do enough to protect Jewish students at the university. 

Scott Bok, chairman of Penn’s board of trustees, also resigned. Julie Beren Platt was named interim chair.

Jameson is the longest-serving dean among Penn’s 12 schools and has more than a decade of experience in Penn leadership.

At Penn, he helped steer Penn Medicine through the earlier parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently, expanded a summer program for aspiring medical students from underrepresented backgrounds to include HBCU graduates. 

According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper, Jameson and the chief executive of the university’s health system sent out a letter to the medical school community that said genocide “violate our behavioral standards and remind us that we must forcefully condemn, prevent, and respond to hate in all forms.”

Read more about Penn’s new interim president and the events leading up to it at The New York Times.

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