Driving America into the ditch
Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral.
Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.”
“But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.”
But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L. Bok resigned.
No longer a university spokesman, Bok penned a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed in response. Inquirer columnist Will Bunch directed readers to one passage in particular.
“It’s the academic equivalent of Ike warning us about the military-industrial complex — and here it’s the undue influence of billionaire donors. Here’s the money shot .” (I’m using Bunch’s highlights):
On all these issues, universities need to be very careful of the influence of money, especially one like Penn, which has a business school with a brand larger than that of the university itself. And I say that as both a Wharton graduate and someone who understands that contributions play a critical role in everything from lifesaving medical research to scholarships for kids like I once was.
But donors should not be able to decide campus policies or determine what is taught, and for sure there should not be a hidden quota system that ensures privileged children a coveted place at elite schools.
For nearly all of the 19 years I served on Penn’s board, I felt like there was a very broad, largely unspoken consensus on the roles of the various university constituencies: the board, donors, alumni, faculty, and administration.
Once I concluded that this longtime consensus had evaporated, I determined that I should step off the board and leave it to others to find a new path forward.
“The culture wars can be brutal,” Bok added, recounting the “violent threats,” street confrontations, “robot-generated emails,” and more unpleasantness that came his way.
But let’s consider Bok’s remarks in the context of the 2024 elections. The Republican presidential frontrunner — himself an alleged billionaire — faces multiple felony trials, including for attempting the overthrow of the government. Donald Trump yearns to be a dictator, to “prosecute enemies and release insurrectionists, and sic troops on protesters,” Bunch writes, while claiming it’s Joe Biden who is the dictator.
“There hasn’t been this much projection since the golden age of drive-in movies,” Bunch insists.
Trump’s MAGA base yearns for a strongman and for retribution for wrongs real and imagined. Trump backers in billionaire-financed think tanks drool over the prospect of turning the entire federal bureaucracy into a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, if not of the billionaire class itself, led by a “Red Caesar.” The business class longs to finish shredding the social safety net and return the working class to neo-serfdom. The lot of them have already abandoned democracy in word and deed.
Bok has only gotten a foretaste of what’s in store when Movement Authoritarians drive the country into a ditch. Elon Musk’s Cybertruck illustrates.
And Happy Hollandaise everyone!