In the context of the embroiled hatred violently spewing out between Israelis and Palestinians in October 2023, some rich, very vocal alumni at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania threated to stop donating money in order to pressure the respective university administrations (and boards of trustees) to clamp down on pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel speech on the campuses. Over at Yale, 25,000 signatures were quickly obtained from students in favor of firing a faculty employee for having written against Israel’s violence against residents of Gaza. Yale’s administration backed up the faculty member’s right of free speech, especially as it was on social media rather than in a classroom or even on campus. Tenure itself, it should be noted, exists in part to protect professors from being fired for airing unpopular opinions. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time, so it is only natural that thinkers may have unusual and even controversial opinions. I contend that as respites for contemplation and learning, universities should not be pressured into taking sides on controversial political issues that do not directly affect higher education, and, furthermore, that even rich alumni have an obligation to safeguard their respective alma maters rather than seek to turn them into hotbeds of ideological unrest. Of course, money talks, even if it is not in itself free speech, which, even if unpopular, universities should protect. Hence, the question arises: To what degree are Ivy League universities like Harvard and Penn vulnerable to the threats of even a few rich alumni? Does it make a difference whether the demands of such ideologues gain traction among the rank-and-file alumni? Whereas a university’s administration can usually ignore student protests, those of wealthy donors may be another story.
I contend that even scholastically-oriented Ivy League universities don’t know what to make of alumni, both in terms of their moral obligations as members of their respective universities and how alumni should be treated, whether they are on or off campus. A former college dean at Columbia University told me in 2023 that academic (and, much more so, non-academic) administrators don’t know what to do with—nor, equally importantly, how to treat—alumni who are “in residence” (i.e., back on campus for a semester or two to audit classes or use the library for a research project or book). Incredibly, some non-academic employees at Yale have been stupid enough to insult alumni—telling us that we are not really members of the Yale community. The director of an alumni-engagement office even told me that! That would not be my fundraising strategy, but I have a BS and MBA in business and I only worked at Yale’s fundraising office part-time while I was a student, so what do I know.
It is easier for university administrators (and even non-supervisory employees) to figure out how to treat rich alumni in the business world, but even here, not even university presidents have a firm handle on what obligations even such alumni have to protect their alma maters. Of course, kissing up to (i.e., placating) such alumni only goes so far before it becomes obscenely indecent and even self-humiliating as well as contrary to a university’s interests. As a European visiting student at Yale in the late 1990s remarked to me concerning American society, there is a limit to everything.
Placating a rich alumnus who is publicly screaming at one’s own university’s administration from a distance to prohibit certain objectionable (to the alum) political statements by withholding further donations can become ethically and practically problematic. Giving a spoiled child ice cream because the child is throwing a tantrum might quiet the child today but it is not fair to any other children who are behaving themselves, and the chance of another outrage tomorrow has just increased by rewarding the one today.
When I was a student at Indiana University, I witnessed the famous basketball coach, Bobby Knight, make fun of a group of advertising executives at a lunch at the business school. The university’s president would not touch the bully, who was doubtless very popular with the alumni. Fecklessness eventually catches up with a university president. At the very least, the man looked weak. Eventually, Knight had finally gone too far and the president had to act. It should not have had to come to that. Whether in regard to a "sacred cow" university employee or a rich alum, a university president gradually weakens oneself in habitually reacting in fear.
The question of whether university presidents should allow themselves to be influenced by loud ideological alumni with a striking financial punch is actually not a simple matter. Should the nature of the cause make any difference, or is the manipulation merely a selfish ploy that should discouraged as at least a deterrent. Furthermore, should academic administrators jettison academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus just because some rich guys far away don’t like what is being said? Are not those alumni using free speech to urge other alumni to stop giving? In the case of a war, where truth is the first casualty, the presumption of being able to insist that the other guy has it wrong and therefore should be stopped from speaking (or writing) can be flagged. In other words, it takes two to tango. Especially where two peoples have been at it as long as the Israelis and Palestinians have, a lop-sided presumption of ideological infallibility is itself problematic. To claim that one of the two belligerent parties is “off limits” as far as criticism is concerned is highly dogmatic. In fact, such a claim, especially if backed up with financial threats, is itself weaponized. Should institutions that are oriented foremost to knowledge and learning as an ideal become embroiled in an international contagion, especially if the facilitators (i.e., the wealthy alumni) are not in residence on campus?
Members of a university’s community include even such alumni, and, unlike the general public, those alums have an obligation to honor a university president’s wishes to protect (what should be) the rarified atmosphere on campus. The heat of battle, slid in by alums at a distance, would come at the cost of reflection, which is more keeping with campuses devoted to thought. Alumni who do not feel so obligated and yet use their wealth, which may have something to do with what was learned, are ethically compromised, especially if the ideological cause is not really as one-sided as it might appear at first glance or for ideological reasons (including those stemming from a reductionistic and hyperextended (and thus artificial) group identification). Generally speaking, a presumption of epistemological infallibility combined with ideological fervent can elude a mind’s natural internal checks and balances. Such thoughts as these, rather than ideological passions, are at home on a college campus.
Ethical and academic prerogatives are nice, but as the commercializing, de facto “for-profit” universities such as Arizona State University illustrate, lofty ideals are not always believed (erroneously) to be realistic or are otherwise respected by university presidents and boards of trustees. Indeed, a university president—especially if one is a business person rather than a scholar—may even be leading the charge to create profit-centers and “cash-cow” partnerships with companies for applied research. The power of money is hard to ignore and of itself it pays no heed to other prerogatives other than itself.
A university president’s response to financial pressure from donors may depend on how viral the contagion is likely to spread (i.e., to other alumni) and how financially reliant the university is on donations from its alumni to meet operating expenses without drawing on an endowment. The presidents of Harvard and Penn were certainly facing some pressure from a few big donors when Israel was destroying Gaza, but how much is hard to say from a distance.
On the one hand, donations had been “the single largest contributor to revenue at Harvard” in 2022, “accounting or 45 percent of the university’s $5.8 billion in income.”[1] Gifts accounted for 9 percent of the university’s operating budget and 36 percent of the university’s $51 billion endowment.[2] Yet Lee Gardner, a writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education remarked in 2023 that even though donor “relationships are very, very important for colleges of all types” and there “is a premium placed on developing and cultivating donor relationships, . . . Ivy League universities have the relative luxury of being enormously wealthy.”[3] That luxury translates into being able to tell even big donors that anti-Israel political statements fall under the rubric of free speech, which is something that universities should honor, respect, and defend. This obviously would not sit well with angry, ideologically driven alumni (or students, as at Yale at the time). Sara Harberson, a former associate dean of admissions at Penn, acknowledged that universities such as Harvard and Penn “have a lot more financial insulation from the impact of some donors getting upset.”[4] That insulation may have a temporal dimension. Gardner points out that the “impact is less likely to be immediate as potentially longer term on gifts or donations that may not have been in the works or would come to fruition for years.”[5] However, what if those donors set in motion a wave of withholdings from the smaller fish?
As individuals, the smaller fish don’t matter to university administrators, and thus have no means by which to pressure them. At my student job at Yale’s development office decades before 2023, I had to figure out how to convince the average alum to give $50 or $200 to a university whose endowment stood back then at $18 billion.[6] Invariably, the alumni would ask me, Why does Yale need my money? My answer was to earmark the small gifts to specific interests going back to the particular alum’s college activities, such as being in a play in one of the residential colleges. In talking with the non-rich alumni, I sensed that they could distinguish the list of alumni who were subject to calls from us students in the phone room from the rich alumni whom I researched for the Major Gifts officers after I had been promoted from making calls.
Both as a student and then back on campus as an alumnus, I had the sense that Yale’s academic and non-academic staff were indifferent to whether I was there or not, and yet quite interested in certain other people there. When I returned decades after graduation as an alum in residence to write a book, administrators would not have tolerated the rude behavior from more than a few (faculty and non-academic) employees had I have made some very sizeable donations (or written an amazing book) before returning to campus. As an ordinary alumnus, I didn’t matter, and too many employees felt they could take advantage of my vulnerability as an alum at a university at which alumni are not considered to be members of the Yale community.
The tacit, unspoken and often instant judgment that organizational functionaries make on whether to respect someone as an insider or an outsider is powerful and can rarely be changed, especially if the organizational culture supports viewing one class of insiders as outsiders. At Yale, I observed too many university administrators, faculty, and even non-academic employees who seemed inordinately oriented to either extending or withholding their respect in a way that is passive aggressive. Rich alumni from such an organizational culture who are intent on pressuring a university president for political ideological purposes can be understood subtly as saying, in effect, I do matter and I’m worthy of your respect. This unconscious need is pressing in cultures in which respect tends to be weaponized. In fact, efforts merely to get someone's attention can be read in this way (as means of getting respect). Whether “money talks” in this respect is an interesting empirical question.
Regarding the rich donors at Harvard and Penn who thought that those schools could and should prohibit pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel political opinions by students and faculty, Harberson argues that a few large “donors cutting ties could also convince smaller donors to end their contributions, hurt alumni relations, impact college admissions and put pressure on the president or members of the board of trustees.”[7] The negative repercussions would get the attention of university administrators. Of themselves, small donors are peanuts for universities like Harvard and Penn, but together the small gifts matter. All they need is a leader, but given the arduous dispersion of a large university’s alumni, and the sheer differences in their ideologies, the likelihood is small that a major donor could enlist a large enough cadre of smaller donors as leverage.
I do think that rich alumni who have made some very significant gifts can have considerable sway with even Ivy League university administrations, but that the impact of small donors as an extension of a few rich alumni is likely nugatory. For one thing, the "rank and file" alumni of a large university are dispersed and hardly of one mind ideologically. Furthermore, it would take a lot of alumni at the $50 or even $200 level to be on a university's radar.
If a big donor does indeed have sway, I contend that both the presidents of prestigious universities and their respective rich alumni could benefit by thinking about the ethical dimension the status or classification of alumni. If Yale is any indication, a university administration can have a truly pathetic understanding of the standing of alumni, not to mention the moral dimension of the relationship. At its most obscene, telling alumni in residence that they are not members of the university community ("community" here being weaponized and thus not worthy of being a member of) and treating them as such are seriously flawed from the standpoint of fundraising. Superbia mala est. Petty obsessions or fixations such as whether an alum's Yale library ID is really a Yale ID, or whether an alum's email address from the Alumni Association is really a Yale email address are beneath a truly prestigious university. Academic administrators should exercise at least some control over non-academic employees.
On the alumni side of the moral equation, rich donors should realize that, as stated in the original Spiderman film, With great power comes great responsibility. Imposing an ideological agenda on one's alma mater is egoist and decadent, and using one's money to do so is obscene and anti-intellectual. The responsibility especially of alumni active on a societal level extends to the obligation to protect their respective campuses from commercial and political interlarding encroachments that could compromise the sui generis academic atmosphere of a university. Even an administration’s excessive efforts to render a campus into a police state should be opposed, as the use of intimidation even as a deterrent is antithetical to the academic atmosphere that should enjoy hegemony or primacy on a university campus.
As I was writing this essay in Yale's main library, a local protest against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians slowly walked by. My contemplation afforded by the quiet in the library was quite a contrast from the shouts from the street below.
I went outside to snap some photos to accompany this essay. Before I knew it, the large mass of marchers was turning onto the campus pedestrian lane where I was standing. By the way, it was not at all cold outside, as the white winter coat on the right might suggest. The campus was largely empty on that Sunday because the university was just about to come off a brief fall recess.
I stepped aside and watched as the marchers passed by. They cut through the main campus without any obstructions or conflicts before turning right and onto New Haven's central park, or "green" in New England speak. The marchers passed through the quiet campus as if it were a semi-permeable membrane inert to the political angst. I contend that Yale handled the exogenous, interlarding political movement well in allowing it to pass through, though ideally the march should have gone around the private university, for, besides the matter of private property, an academic campus is not a proper situs for that which belongs in the political or civic domain. State universities admittedly have a harder time with this distinction than does a private, academically-oriented university because a public school is linked government and is not on private property.
Safeguarding a campus on which academia is valued thus does not mean having a moral obligation to agree with the policies or culture of a given administration. The vantage point of alumni being longitudinal even over decades, criticism of a university administration can be extremely valuable to a university. For instance, in seeing Yale turned into a fortress, a virtual police state, a quarter of a century after my graduation, I could definitely perceive the salience of intimidation imbued on the hitherto academic campus, and thus the culpability or totalitarian extremism of a university administration.
Alumni are indeed members of their respective university communities (even at the outlier, Yale), whether an alum is on or off campus, and this brings with it certain rights and privileges, but also obligations. Rather than excluding alumni, universities (especially their students) could actually benefit from alumni who are visiting or in residence. For instance, alumni could be encouraged to audit courses and to attend colloquia and one-off lectures by visitors, and even to eat periodically at residential colleges. In fact, those colleges could even have alumni fellows, who would volunteer their time to associate with the colleges and thus with their students. Now we're talking a real community, rather than a "community" weaponized to exclude even an entire classification of insiders. Alumni could also get the discounts that even non-academic employees enjoy not only at the university dining halls rather than having to pay the prohibitive price for the general public, and alumni could also be distinguished from the general public when paying for symphony tickets. I contend that rights and privileges are justified in their own right, and they can even benefit the current students. Advise from an alum can be extremely valuable because an alum has longitudinal knowledge of the university and vocational experience (and contacts!). From this perspective of enlightened self-interest, the truly pathetic level of university administrators telling alumni that they are not members of the university community can be recognized as not only sordid, but also counterproductive.
Turning to alumni obligations, these go beyond not compromising the sui generis (i.e., uniqueness) of academia to pro-actively protecting it! Hence, alumni have an obligation to speak out against their fellow alums who would use their wealth to pressure the university into prohibiting certain political speech and thus embroiling the campus in an ideological or political controversy at the expense of a focus on abstract contemplation and learning. University presidents should not be afraid to appeal to the alumni as a group to keep campuses from becoming political by picking sides in an ideological moral, political, economic, or religious societal dispute. A legitimate perspective of a president would be, Look, we extended to you certain rights and privileges when we granted your degree, and you are members for life, so it is only fair that we expect you to accept certain obligations too. Not that I expect you to agree with all of my decisions, and in fact your critical perspective is quite valuable to the university, but I do expect you at the very least to protect the academic mission of the university and by no means to compromise it by pressuring me to embroil the university in an exogenous controversial matter not germane to OUR mission but, rather, fit for inclusion in another domain. Protect us from such interlarding instinctual urges from other domains so we can have a sanctuary for academic discourse and exploration.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
