The anti-Israel protests on America’s elite university campuses have reached a fever pitch: On name-brand campuses across the country, students have occupied offices, set up encampments, and held daily demonstrations to protest the war in Gaza. Today, nearly 50 campus activists were arrested at Yale. Last week, more than 100 anti-Israel protesters were arrested at Columbia — and university administrators subsequently announced that they would be moving to online classes due to the chaos. Those moves only inflamed tensions further, unleashing “a wave of activism across a growing number of college campuses,” the New York Times reported on Monday. “In the days after the tents at Columbia came down, students at Yale, the University of Michigan and M.I.T. erected their own encampments in support of those arrested. By early Monday, New York University had become the latest protest site.”
If onlookers are disturbed, they shouldn’t necessarily be surprised. None of the radicalism emanating from the nation’s most influential universities is new, nor is it confined to the issue of Israel-Palestine. That it has invited the level of outrage and scrutiny it has now — including from conservative megadonors who happily funneled cash to these elite radicalization machines for years — is preferable to the alternative; late is always better than never. But this most recent spate of upheavals did not materialize out of the blue. It is only the most recent culmination of an ideological corruption that has been decades in the making, often with the implicit assent of Republican politicians — and the active support of Republican university donors. As I wrote for the American Conservative back in late October:
Hamas’s savage attacks are outrageous, as are the efforts to excuse or justify them. But so is the mass murder of unborn children in the womb. So is our open border. So is the radicalization of our universities, the carnage and violence on our city streets, and the systematic destruction of our history and heritage. That our conservative leaders have suddenly found their appetite for outrage is laudable, but it’s impossible to avoid wondering where it has been for the past decade…[Republican voters] could have been forgiven for inquiring where the donor class was when the campus radicalism it suddenly abhors was ransacking the country in the summer of 2020, or when the education system was teaching our youth to hate the country they are to inherit, or when the same factions that are now celebrating the slaughter of Israelis were fantasizing about doing the same to their fellow Americans.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks and the fallout on American campuses, a number of powerful GOP donors appear to have suddenly come to their senses. Marc Rowan, a private equity billionaire and Trump donor, has given some $50 million to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business; after Oct. 7, he publicly called for university donors to “close your checkbooks.” Ken Griffin, another GOP megadonor, has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Harvard; today, he has embarked on the warpath against his alma mater and the campus activists leading the anti-Israel movement there.
Republican politicians, too, are making angry noises about financial reprisals — a bargaining chip that has been on their table, unused and collecting dust, for decades. Most Americans are probably unaware of the extent to which their tax dollars pad the sinecures of campus radicals. (Then again, most Americans are probably unaware of the extent to which their tax dollars are spent on any number of terrible things). According to a November 2023 report from Open the Books, a government watchdog group, 10 of the most elite universities in America — the eight Ivy Leagues, Stanford, and Northwestern — received a breathtaking $45 billion in federal government goodies over the past five years. “Since 2018, $33 billion of federal contracts and grants flowed to these ten colleges – averaging $6.6 billion annually” and outpacing “their collection of undergraduate student tuition,” the report notes. “Furthermore, these schools reaped another $12 billion in special tax treatment benefits on the growth of their massive endowment gains (2018-2022).” Here’s a visualization, from America 2100:
To be clear: These are not drops in the bucket for these universities. For many of the nation’s top schools, they make up a substantial portion of the budget. As Joe Lancaster wrote in Reason:
In some cases, universities receive more money per year from the government than from their students: In the 2021–22 school year, Princeton University took in nearly $145 million in net tuition and fees (tuition paid minus scholarships disbursed), but it received over $362 million in government grants and contracts—more than twice the amount it received in tuition. In the 2022–2023 school year, Yale took in more than $458 million in net tuition and room and board costs, but it brought in a whopping $1.038 billion in government grant and contract income.
This funding stream has continued to flow through both Democrat and Republican majorities in Congress; it has continued to flow through both Democrat and Republican presidential administrations. It has continued to flow amid the radical fervor of Black Lives Matter and the DEI revolution within our elite institutions (an ideology and movement born in our elite universities). It has continued to flow as academic theories about police and prison abolitionism have become public policy, wreaking violence and destruction in every American city they touch. It has continued to flow as the anti-American iconoclasm that was once confined to the sociology classroom consumes the country, tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, and wiping the names of our heroes off our schools, buildings, and streets.
It has continued to flow in spite of all of this anti-civilizational chaos — chaos that is sustained by your hard-earned money, dear reader. Through no fault of your own, you are funding the subversion and destruction of the country you love, the country you will pass on to your children. The politicians you vote for and donate to have watched it happen, and they have happily signed over more of your tax dollars whenever they’re given the chance. Today, they’re insisting that will change. This time, they say, these radicals have really gone too far. We’ll believe it when we see it.
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