NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} n the wake of the massacre of more than 1,400 in Israel, several universities have struggled to condemn Hamas’s depraved acts of terrorism. Harvard’s leadership has come under fire for their initial silence and their failure to condemn Hamas in a late statement. Cornell University has apologized for initially failing to admit that Hamas’s attacks were acts of terrorism. Stanford University said it doesn’t take positions on news events, despite previously commenting on the 2020 racial-justice protests and January 6 riot.
The hypocrisy is too much, and some donors have had enough.
Several donors have announced that they are closing their checkbooks to Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Marc Rowan, the chairman of the board of overseers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is urging other donors to follow suit. “Sitting on the sidelines has undermined trust in academia,” Rowan wrote in the Free Press. “We can accept that no longer.”
Many seemed surprised at higher education’s feeble reaction to a horrific event. Yet, for those who have been paying attention, the only surprising development is how quickly universities hid behind free speech and institutional neutrality to justify their weak responses to the shocking carnage of October 7. The lesson for donors is twofold: They need to pay more attention to what is happening on campus. And they need to use the power of the purse more proactively.
Year after year, we hear about campus censorship becoming worse. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have ranked extremely poorly for free speech in recent years. A recent survey by the Buckley Institute at Yale found that the majority of students now support speech codes. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies require faculty to endorse progressive political and social causes. The consequences for stating views that depart from progressive dogma are harsh. Professors have been punished for criticizing issues such as affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, and transgender ideology. It’s no wonder that university professors fear coming out against campus pro-Palestinian blocs, which view Israelis as colonizers and see any means of overthrowing the Jewish state as appropriate.
Donors are understandably dismayed to see radical statements that excuse and justify violence coming from students and faculty at their alma maters. This week, Cornell history professor Russell Rickford gained instant notoriety for calling Hamas’s attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Yet Rickford has a well-documented history of pro-Palestinian activism on campus. In 2017, he led a massive group of students and faculty to chant “Free Palestine” during a kneel-in protest to oppose racism. On Cornell’s campus that same year, the local Students for Justice in Palestine group disrupted a Jewish group’s celebration of Israel’s Independence Day by hosting a die-in, with students lying down on the ground in a pantomime of death.
Between 2011 and 2022, students on college campuses across the country proposed more than 140 resolutions to boycott and place economic sanctions on Israel. Where was the concern for campus radicalization then?
Universities’ indulgence of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement is just one of many issues that donors would have found distasteful if they had been paying attention. Many departments teach students what amounts to propaganda under the guise of scholarship. The National Association of Scholars’ investigation into Middle East studies departments found many instances of biased instruction. In a class on African decolonization, Yale students learned to take personal testimonies on Western “colonial violence” as rigorous historical evidence. The University of Texas at Austin used “lived experiences” to teach Palestinian history. This unserious, Marxist-inspired pseudo-scholarship extends to many other fields in the social sciences and humanities.
Universities’ reticence to condemn Hamas’s terrorism has been a wake-up call for donors. But as more donors reconsider their financial commitments to universities, they need to think beyond pulling funds over one particular issue and consider how they could use their influence to change the tides of campus culture.
Donors should condition the restoration of funds on reforms that make campus environments friendly to rigorous scholarship and diverse viewpoints. One place to start would be to demand an end to DEI requirements, which encourage universities to hire ideologically motivated professors and staff.
Those who make large donations to universities have a lot more power than they may realize in shifting the higher-ed culture. It might seem harsh to pull funds. But just as parents discipline their children out of care, donors who care about their alma maters need to be ready to withdraw their financial commitments toward the goal of restoring the institutions to their former excellence. Universities are conflating scholarship with activism. It’s time for donors to use their influence to correct them.