Elite universities pay the price for allowing encampments of antisemites
May 6, 2024
The campus protests – or outbreaks of vile antisemitism – are leading to a devaluation of those elite Ivy League colleges.
People who do the wrong thing are valued less – nothing very extraordinary about that. But what’s really happening to the Ivy Leagues is that their sources of money are between reducing and disappearing as a result of this vile antisemitism on campus.
If a college loses its money flows, then yes, that college does eventually go bust.
The latest sign is that those considering which college to go to are deciding against those with the vast encampments of antisemites:
As protests engulf college campuses, prospective freshmen forced to weigh their own appetite for student activism, police presence and sense of safety
Here, the specific example is Columbia:
Accepted to a number of prestigious institutions, he had narrowed his final choice down to two: Columbia University and Dartmouth College.
There were multiple considerations at play: academic opportunities; social life; Manhattan’s Upper West Side vs. bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire. And over the past few weeks a new one had emerged: the quickly spreading pro-Palestinian campus protests and subsequent arrests for which Columbia was ground zero.
As a parent points out:
“You never want your kid to go to a school that is on the national news because of police involvement, right? It just doesn’t sit really well,” she said.
College – a college’s finances – only works if students actually go there. Of course, the Ivies have a certain amount of prestige to trade off, capital they can waste. But that’s not unlimited.
As we’ve been recording, Wall Street has been demanding the names of protesters so they make sure they don’t hire them. Donors are not just deciding not to donate more, they’re not delivering earlier sums. One has even insisted he’s not going to send more money to “whiny snowflakes”. But yes, there’s more. As Forbes recently reported industrial America is deciding to look outside the Ivies for its future fast track managers. Harvard – even Harvard – applications are declining.
If the donors won’t donate, business won’t hire the graduates, the students won’t go to these colleges with mass antisemitism, then it’s not whether they will survive but only how long they will.