Revolt of The Rich Alums

Cancel culture, wokeism and left-wing radicalism on campus are nothing new. The lefties have been shouting down conservative speakers, demanding “safe spaces,” and acting like snowflakes for years.

One frequently heard complaint is: Where’s the accountability? Where are the deans and university presidents who will stand up to the Marxist mobs? Where are the lawyers who will sue to defend women’s sports from competition with male athletes and give women privacy in the locker room? Where are the free speech advocates who will stand up for a conservative’s right to speak even if they disagree with their views?

Sadly, all those potential points of pushback on the progressives don’t exist. The deans and presidents are cowards. The lawyers are afraid to be attacked by the mob. The advocates for women’s sports are hounded off platforms and have to cower in campus offices until the police arrive (if they even come). And the free speech advocates are hypocrites who believe that free speech is for one side only and the other side is engaged in “violence” or “disinformation” if they speak up.

Yet, there may be hope.

In many revolutions, the end of the revolution is caused by the revolutionaries themselves. They go too far. They attack too many people. They destroy too many institutions. They tear down too many statutes. In the end, everyday citizens rise up and put the progressives in their place, which is back on the margins for decades where they belong.

Something like that may be happening now in connection with the Israeli-Hamas War. The Pro-Hamas movement on major campuses has taken the war as an excuse to trumpet their anti-Semitism (dressed up unconvincingly as anti-Zionism).

They blatantly call for the elimination of Israel. They ignore the atrocities committed by Hamas (too gruesome to be repeated here) and they ignore the history of the Holocaust, which began with small attacks on Jews of the kind we are seeing today, but then grew to the industrial scale murder of six million Jew and others.

The progressives have gone too far. University administrators are still cowards, but the alumni are not. One-by-one well-known billionaires from Ron Lauder to Ron Perelman to Lesley Wexner and others have announced that they will not give additional gifts to schools such as Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Stamford and other top institutions because those schools will not condemn the anti-Semitism on their campuses.

These donors make gifts in the range of $50 to $100 million (or more), which are not trivial even for schools with multi-billion-dollar endowments.

That may not be the end of it. Congress is considering revoking tax-exempt status for university endowments. That could cost universities a billion dollars per year or more if they have to pay 40% income tax on the income those endowments produce. Finally, there’s some accountability even if it had to come from alumni and not the schools themselves.

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