In the piece, Mr. Bok, who is an investment banker, said that donors play an important role in funding research and scholarships. “But donors should not be able to decide campus policies or determine what is taught, and for sure there should not be a hidden quota system that ensures privileged children a coveted place at elite schools,” Mr. Bok wrote.
“For nearly all of the 19 years I served on Penn’s board, I felt like there was a very broad, largely unspoken consensus on the roles of the various university constituencies: the board, donors, alumni, faculty, and administration,” Mr. Bok wrote. “Once I concluded that this longtime consensus had evaporated, I determined that I should step off the board and leave it to others to find a new path forward.”
That task will now lay in part with Dr. Jameson, a figure with more than a decade of experience in Penn leadership. In addition to being dean of the medical school, he has also been executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which operates hospitals and specialty centers around the region. The school and health system, which make up Penn Medicine, employ thousands of people and account for the largest share of the University of Pennsylvania’s operating budget. Before coming to Penn, Dr. Jameson, a molecular endocrinologist, was dean of the medical school at Northwestern University.
At Penn, Dr. Jameson helped steer Penn Medicine through the difficult years of Covid’s emergence. Last year, he expanded a summer program for aspiring medical students from underrepresented backgrounds to include undergraduates from a number of historically black colleges and universities. “We are dedicated to attracting and training a diverse group of talented future physicians,” Dr. Jameson said in an announcement of the program’s expansion.
According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at Penn, Dr. Jameson and the chief executive of the university’s health system sent a letter to the medical school community last week saying that calls for genocide “violate our behavioral standards and remind us that we must forcefully condemn, prevent, and respond to hate in all forms.”
