UPenn donor pulls financial support over school's unwillingness to 'call out evil'
UPenn donor David Magerman explains why he pulled funds after the school refused to call out support for Hamas and antisemitism
Let me get this straight: the culture warriors say it’s not OK to wear a sombrero on Halloween, but it’s OK to spew antisemitic tropes and back Hamas? We’re not allowed to celebrate Christopher Columbus, but we can celebrate the thugs who burn teenage girls alive? You can be canceled for getting a pronoun wrong, but you’re applauded for defending the slaughter of innocent Jews?
This is the state of affairs at our nation’s universities; liberal elites appear to be shocked. Where have they been as our schools became factories of indoctrination instead of education? As college administrations and trustees talk endlessly about diversity but allow their faculties to shift uniformly left and prohibit differing viewpoints?
In the wake of the massacre of 1,400 Israeli citizens, college campuses have erupted in protests against the Jewish state. A group called Students for Justice in Palestine has organized rallies at the University of Washington at Seattle, Columbia University and on other campuses in support of Hamas, calling their Oct. 7 terror attack an "historic win" and their barbarity "legitimate" and "necessary."
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Americans across the country are horrified to see this outpouring of hate, especially when we have been treated to a decade or more of students advocating to fire teachers guilty of "microaggressions" or for not providing "trigger warnings."
There is certainly nothing to celebrate in the grotesque slaughter of Jewish citizens. But if the controversies swirling today alert the nation to the cynicism and hypocrisy of campus culture, and the dereliction of duty on the part of school administrations and boards of trustees, something will have been gained.
Outraged alumni and donors at some of America’s most prestigious schools have had enough, finally, and are speaking out. They are also responding in the only way that will matter to our universities; they are putting their checkbooks away.
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The University of Pennsylvania is reaping special criticism – and paying a price – for having hosted a pro-Palestinian and openly antisemitic forum in September, weeks before the Hamas slaughter of innocents. In the lead-up to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, vandals trashed the lobby of Hillel, a Jewish organization, and drew swastikas on school property.
Wealthy donor Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management and chair of the Wharton School board of advisors, wrote a scathing op-ed in which he criticized the administration for failing to condemn the "fomenters of hate and racism" who spoke at the Palestine festival. He noted that one speaker "advocated ethnic cleansing and gathering all of Israel’s Jews into "cantons"; another defended the necessity and propriety of substantial violence; and numerous speakers repeated various blood libels against Jews, whom they referred to as "European settlers" despite their 3,000-year presence in Israel. Rowan called on fellow supporters to withhold further gifts to the university.
After the Oct. 7 attack, other donors criticized Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, aka "Penn," for her tepid denunciations of Hamas and, as hedge fund manager Cliff Asness put it, drawing "vague equivalences between the intentional murder of children (and others) by terrorists and the accidental injury to children that sadly occurs when murdering terrorists hide behind children to escape justice."
Trustee and former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman, whose name is on the main Wharton School building, announced he is cutting off further donations. In addition, after a contentious board meeting, trustee Vahan Gureghian resigned, explaining, "Just as at so many other elite academic institutions, the Penn community has been failed by an embrace of antisemitism, a failure to stand for justice and complete negligence in the defense of our students’ well-being."
In response, President Magill backed Penn’s commitment to all students’ right to free expression, but her claim proves false. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a group dedicated to defending the "individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought" ranks the University of Pennsylvania as among the country’s worst 11 universities in the country for free speech.
A survey of 40 leading universities from a few years ago found the political affiliation of faculty members in five academic disciplines: economics, history, journalism/communication, law, and psychology, to be overwhelmingly Democratic. More shocking, among teachers of history and journalism/communications, there were literally zero Republicans… at 40 schools! It was noted that the political bias was most extreme among young teachers and that the slant had grown more extreme over time.
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Where have the university presidents and boards of trustees been in trying to moderate or correct this bias? They have been AWOL, afraid to push back against faddish "causes" among students lest the liberal media, spawned and educated by leftist faculties, undermine their authority.
The problem is not confined to antisemitism. The push for leftist uniformity on campus reached new heights recently when, more than 70 years after the University of California required that faculty sign an anti-communist loyalty oath, a new mandate from the California Community Colleges system demands teachers abide by an "ideological litmus test in the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion rules," according to FIRE. "These rules force professors to endorse the government’s highly politicized DEI viewpoints, such as the belief that race-conscious remedies are required to overcome systemic racism ('anti-racism') or that ideas such as ‘colorblindness’ and ‘merit’ actually "protect white privilege."
Professors are warned against ""weaponizing academic freedom" to "inflict curricular trauma" on students." FIRE has sued on behalf of teachers who say they would no longer be able to assign, for instance, the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, because they would violate the radical new guidelines.
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Maybe outrage about the way our schools have responded to the Hamas horrors will prove a turning point, with alums and trustees demanding more balanced faculties and viewpoints.
Top schools have enormous endowments (Harvard’s, for example, totals $52 billion) so donor pushback will take effect slowly. But money talks; indeed that may be the only language college grandees, for all their erudition, actually understand.
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