Top donors pulling their funding over antisemitism on campus have spooked elite schools.
Good.
Keep it up.
Ivy League universities are lowering their threshold for donations that can get a prospective student’s application bumped to the top of the pile, reports The Post’s Rikki Schlott; one expert says the new price tag could be as low as $2 million — not chump change, but a tenth the prior rate of $20 million.
Behind the “fire sale”: moves like Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner cutting ties with Harvard, and billionaire Ronald Lauder ending donations to the University of Pennsylvania, as did hedge funders Cliff Asness and David Magerman.
Billionaires Ken Griffin, Bill Ackman and Len Blavatnik have pressured universities to take a stronger stance on antisemitism. Apollo CEO Marc Rowan encouraged other UPenn alumni to end donations.
Selling admission at a lower rate might keep up schools’ income as they wait out the storm.
But the storm shouldn’t end until these schools mend their ways.
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Tuesday, Jewish students from MIT, Harvard, NYU and UPenn spoke to the press at a Committee on Education & the Workforce hearing, telling horror stories about their experiences with bigotry on campus: Death threats against an MIT student whose study-group fellows told her that Hamas’ victims at the Nova music festival “deserved to die”; an NYU student assaulted for wearing an Israeli-American flag; UPenn kids huddled in their rooms as other students and professors chant for genocide.
Across the board, the students reported that administrators ignore the abuse of Jewish students.
To be clear: What ails elite campuses isn’t just antisemitism; that’s just one aspect of the race-obsessed hard left’s dominance of modern academia.
No: The eruption of antisemitism should be a wake-up call; donors (large and small) mustn’t fall back asleep once this current crisis is over, not even if a university president or two gets ousted.
Schools that have embraced extremism need rebuilding from the top down: new board majorities committed to protecting minority rights, free speech, diversity of opinion and open discourse.
This also requires ditching the DEI initiatives of recent years, which are all about imposing a single ideology at the expense of true diversity, equity and inclusion.
Academia’s become a cesspool; the only hope for cleaning it up is for donors to put it on a starvation diet.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/12/06/opinion/ivy-league-alums-must-keep-up-the-fight-against-on-campus-antisemitism/