Class is back in session. Philanthropy is attuned to whether the campus protests that overtook many colleges and universities last academic year would be reignited and how school leadership will respond to antisemitic protests and the treatment of Jewish students on campus. 

Donors and alumni have widely rebuked student involvement in riots and violent protests. University presidents, who could not act with moral clarity to protect Jewish students or who have been selective in the application of free speech and academic freedom, have been forced out by pressure from stakeholders. Using the power of the purse, donors canceled pledged gifts and promised to withhold future funding to send a clear message to university leadership. 

However, higher education donors and grantmakers should also pay attention to the actions of deans, faculty and lecturers. Are these academics upholding the standards and values that motivate alumni and donors to give to institutions, or are they perpetuating toxic learning environments donors want to change? True diversity calls for a diversity of viewpoints, but not for discriminatory behavior or intolerant rhetoric.  

Concerning events may have flown under the national radar but they provide cautionary examples of what is happening on campuses around the country. Recently, several Columbia University deans left the university after a scandal ensued from their antisemitic text exchanges during a panel discussion on Jewish life on campus this spring.  

One wrote, “Amazing what $$$$ can do,” while another dean wrote the panel discussion at the event “comes from such a place of privilege.” A third dean used vomiting emojis to refer to an op-ed by the campus rabbi on antisemitism. The text messages were captured by attendees at the event and released by the U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce in a hearing. 

Conversely, a Stanford lecturer was dismissed last October for calling Jewish students in the class “colonizers” and asking Jewish students to physically go to the back of the class to illustrate the point that this is “what Israel does to Palestinians,” according to eyewitnesses. University officials stated clearly that “academic freedom does not permit the identity-based targeting of students.”  

These incidents and likely many others that have gone unreported should make donors cautious to ensure their philanthropic dollars are not supporting faculty who disrupt the learning environment for students of all backgrounds. 

My Roundtable colleague, Joanne Florino’s “Top Ten Tips for Higher Education Funders,” provides some helpful pointers for university donors in this regard. For example, one of Florino’s tips is to form relationships with friendly faculty. They will execute your project and are most likely to serve as guardians of your donor intent because you share the same goals. Faculty with aligned values can also be a trusted source of information for grantmakers on campus happenings or advising on promising philanthropic opportunities there and elsewhere. 

However, be prepared for personnel changes to remove your ally from the equation. Consider funding an academic center that hires professors who share your values and commitment to your mission. And, as always, be careful with unrestricted grantmaking. Grants or gifts with no strings attached can lead to donor intent being undermined and donors supporting people and activities they vehemently disagree with.  

This fall, expect more campus protests, especially as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Israel massacre and hostage crisis on October 7. Colleges and universities must grapple with heated viewpoints on different sides. Faculty should know there is no place for antisemitic or violent rhetoric when it comes to education and academic freedom. Philanthropy can play a role in making sure that message is heard loud and clear. 

Philanthropy Roundtable’s True Diversity initiative is an equality-based, holistic framework for embracing diversity. It values every person as a unique individual and empowers charitable organizations with the freedom and flexibility to advance their missions and help those in need.   

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As the fall semester begins at colleges and universities across the country, students, faculty, alumni and donors are watching closely, anticipating that new and returning administrators alike may bring with them new policies on free speech, protests and the role that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) will play on campus in areas other than admissions.  

An August 30 op-ed in The New York Times tackled that last issue and suggested current DEI programs are not working and are “subverting their schools’ educational missions.” The guest essay was co-authored by Paul Brest, professor emeritus and former dean at Stanford Law School and president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2000-2012, and Emily J. Levine, associate professor of education and history at Stanford. On the day it was published it attracted over 1,000 comments – enough to shut down the comments section.  

The authors say they are not calling for the complete abandonment of diversity programs as “some of these programs most likely serve the important goal of ensuring that all students are valued and engaged participants in their academic communities.” What they find concerning are the programs and DEI trainings which “undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mindset and by pitting students against one another.”  

Recognizing “how exclusionary and counterproductive some of these programs can be,” they call attention to the antisemitism and anti-Israel bias of protests at Stanford University following the Hamas attacks on Israel. That bias, they note, is baked into current DEI ideology as manifested in “a DEI training program at Stanford a few years ago [where] Jewish staff members were assigned to a ‘whiteness accountability’ group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism.” 

In place of current DEI models, Brest and Levine call for programs employing a pluralistic approach, recognizing a universal need for belonging and fostering “empathy with others rather than a competition among sufferings.”  Such programs would involve “facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression.” 

“Success,” they say, “would be an academic community of equally respected learners who possess critical thinking skills and are actively engaged in navigating challenging questions throughout the curriculum — an approach that teaches students how to think rather than what to think.”   

Brest and Levine acknowledge their recommendations will face strong headwinds from those who advocate for the complete abandonment of DEI and those who are adamant it be retained in its current form. Yet they persist in advocating change, concluding, “The current system is not good for Jews at Stanford and other universities. It’s not good for Muslims, either. And it’s certainly not good for society as a whole.”   

The post How DEI is Failing Students: A View from Stanford University  appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

Philanthropy Roundtable recently met with John Sailer, senior fellow and director of university policy at the National Association of Scholars, to discuss his groundbreaking investigative research and reporting on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda in higher education. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Your research started when you looked into mandated diversity statements used in faculty hiring at major public universities. Tell us about your research and its impact. 

Sailer: My job is pretty simple. It’s to show what higher education activists, scholars and administrators are up to in their world, and a primary tool has been public records requests. It’s fun, it’s an art and it requires creative problem solving plus lots of research, along with a deep understanding of universities and how they operate. My approach has yielded really interesting, and in some ways troubling, stories about what universities are doing.  

Texas Tech University is a great example. Around 2020, their Department of Biology passed a DEI resolution requiring faculty job applicants to submit a diversity statement to demonstrate how they will contribute to inclusion and equity. The university also required the department to create a separate presentation on the diversity contributions of each candidate under consideration for a job. This meant documentation existed. I made a public records request for those presentations, and what I found I eventually published in The Wall Street Journal. 

One scientist got a low score for not understanding “the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct,” which was said to represent “a rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.” One was given a “red flag” for ostensibly committing micro aggressions, while another was dinged for repeatedly using the pronoun “he” when referring to professors.  

On the other hand, one was rewarded for giving a “land acknowledgment” at the beginning of their job talk, acknowledging that the United States exists on stolen land. This was the first time the public had ever really seen actual evaluations of diversity statements. The result was very swift and a true game changer. 

Q: What was the immediate impact and outcome of your investigative research? 

Sailer: The day the article was published, the university announced that it would no longer allow diversity statements. Shortly thereafter, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the public universities in his state saying that hiring on the basis of anything other than merit was unlawful. Within a month, multiple university systems in Texas ended the practice of diversity statements. By June of 2023, the state legislature took action and banned the practice statewide. So, it was a pretty massive change. 

Q: What other stories have you uncovered? 

Sailer: Around the time that I published the Texas Tech story, I got a tip from a professor at Ohio State University. He said that every department and every search committee in the College of Arts and Sciences was required to submit an in-depth diversity recruitment report. Approval of these reports was required in order to proceed with finalist job interviews. I made a request for the records and what I got was actually more remarkable than even the Texas Tech documents. 

One job candidate was praised for their contribution to diversity in part, according to the report, because they were married to an immigrant in Texas in the age of Trump. Another person’s diversity contributions were praised for being “a first-generation fat, queer scholar of color.” The DEI statements were given a weight of about one-third of the overall points in evaluating the candidates, right alongside their research and teaching ability. 

Q: You’ve traced some of the stories to the federal government as well, through the National Institutes of Health. Can you explain that? 

Sailer: There’s a quarter billion-dollar NIH grant program called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation. The program gave $10 million to $20 million grants to universities for faculty hiring that’s focused on DEI. The key requirements are that the universities who received the grant require and heavily weigh diversity statements when they select the funded faculty.  

So, I ended up going to a lot of universities and requesting the rubric that they use to evaluate diversity. Some of them didn’t give me the rubric or said they didn’t have one. But there were two that did: The University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico. Both rubrics were the same and they give low scores to anyone who says in their diversity statement that they prefer to treat everyone the same. It also gives a low score for things like expressing skepticism about racially segregated affinity groups and focusing exclusively on diversity of thought. 

In later reporting, I found evidence that this program had been a cover for overt racial preferences that would almost certainly be unlawful. When the NIH FIRST program was created, the director of the program essentially said this is not a racial preferences program—that it would be unlawful. Using diversity statements was essentially a way around that. But what’s interesting is that the documents that I uncovered, starting about a year ago, showed that as faculty at these institutions discussed candidates, they very clearly eliminated certain people from contention on the basis of skin color.  

One hiring document from the University of New Mexico said that “candidate No. 42” was eliminated from consideration because they did not fit with the mission of the NIH. I thought that was funny. I requested all emails in reference to the candidate, and what did I find? This candidate was a South Asian man. One director of this program asked whether this person counts as an underrepresented minority. They were told no. The other two candidates on the list of finalists were both women. And so they took him off the list, noting that the math department where they were hiring was “really low on women.” It’s a clear-cut case of both racial and gender discrimination. 

Q: What are some of the biggest takeaways from your investigative research? 

Sailer: I’ve gleaned two broad lessons from my time reporting on higher education. One is that legitimate scoops move the needle more than anything else. If you cut through the noise and actually show people what’s happened with hard-fought research, it changes the conversation and gives you a seat at the table to talk about what reforms are needed. The other is that universities are such closed systems that many of their policies are simply indefensible. When I show what’s going on, when I show how these policies play out in practice, it is very difficult for scholars and administrators to actually defend them, or at least to defend them in a way that appears to be in good faith. 

Q: You’ve emphasized a different kind of diversity—viewpoint diversity—among faculty. Why? 

Sailer: Faculty hiring for the last decade, and especially for the last five years, has involved a high degree of ideological discrimination and has encouraged heterodox thinkers, or outsiders, to simply skip out of the job market altogether. This is the key problem in higher education right now. 

The post John Sailer: Unearthing Corruption and Illiberalism in Higher Education  appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

With the recent resignation of the third Ivy League president in the 10-month period following October 7, 2023, university trustees are likely to face continued questions about hiring policies and practices.

All three of those presidents had unusually short tenures. Claudine Gay left the president’s office at Harvard after only six months. Minouche Shafik resigned from Columbia after holding the job for 13 months. Liz Magill resigned from the presidency of University of Pennsylvania after less than two years on the job.

All three women faced accusations from parties within and outside their universities that they horribly mishandled the campus protests following the conflict that erupted after the Hamas attacks on Israel. All three also failed to convince members of Congress they had taken adequate measures to protect their Jewish students from antisemitic attacks. And all three faced public criticism from some of their institutions’ largest donors.

Harvard trustees responded to Gay’s resignation by first appointing provost Alan Garber as interim president and then naming him president of the university on August 2. The Harvard Corporation announced he will be in office until mid-2027. At Penn, medical school dean Larry Jameson has been serving as interim president since December 2023 and has agreed to remain in that role through academic year 2025-2026 or until a successor has been identified. Penn has not yet announced that a presidential search process is underway. Columbia has already named as interim president its executive vice president for health and biological sciences, Dr. Karen Armstrong. No mention has been made of her likely tenure in that position.

The action of the trustees at all three universities indicates a wariness about choosing leaders from outside their inner circles at a time when more turbulence is anticipated. The same is true at Cornell, where provost Michael Kotlikoff was named interim president following the retirement of Martha Pollack, who had assumed the presidency 2017.

In announcing his appointment the university reported, “At the request of the board of trustees, Kotlikoff will serve a two-year term as interim president. The board will form a search committee to select Cornell’s 15th president six to nine months before Kotlikoff’s term ends.”

Higher education donors may well consider how college and university trustees will frame the duties and assess the abilities of the next generation of presidential hires. They may also begin to address needed reforms in private and public universities alike. For the immediate future, however, all eyes will be on the return of students to campus and the ongoing tensions around free speech and campus conduct. 

Philanthropy Roundtable’s Programs and Services team provides a one-stop shop that helps donors navigate the complexity of higher-ed giving. Learn more about our higher education donor services. 

The post Higher-Ed Transitions: Will New Leadership Offer Opportunities for Needed Reform? appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

On May 23, university presidents from UCLA, Rutgers and Northwestern appeared before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer questions about campus antisemitism, their response to pro-Palestinian encampments and negotiations with protesters. This was the third time the committee has brought university leaders to Capitol Hill to testify on these topics since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing campus protests related to the Israel-Gaza war. 

Many generous higher ed donors are fed up with the failure of leadership to respond quickly and decisively to the explosion of antisemitism on campuses and protect Jewish students. Unfortunately, not only are these problems not new, they only scratch the surface of the crisis we’re facing in higher education. For decades, America’s universities have drifted from the ideals of academic excellence, intellectual pluralism, open debate and merit – and from conferring degrees that promise better economic opportunity.  

If there is any good news to be found here, it’s that donors and philanthropists have the power to change this situation, provided they go about their giving strategically. As Joanne Florino, Philanthropy Roundtable’s Adam Meyerson Distinguished Fellow in Philanthropic Excellence, noted in a recent guide, higher education can be a minefield for the unwary donor. Few grantees have shown a more whimsical disregard for donor intent than colleges and universities. Here, just as with other forms of giving, success may depend on a donor choosing the right vehicle for an investment. 

For some, that vehicle may be an academic center that aligns with their values. Such centers, whether subject to the authority of a host institution or free and independent, provide a space where students and faculty can debate ideas and consider points of view that may not be tolerated, let alone welcomed, anywhere else on campus.  

Philanthropy Roundtable encourages donors to continue supporting higher education to help advance the reform it desperately needs. In this piece, we discuss one such strategy: by supporting an existing academic center or founding a new one, donors can engage in effective and high-impact grantmaking to improve the intellectual environment at universities.  

The Trendsetters 

The degree of independence that centers enjoy from their host institution varies widely. An example of a center completely independent – financially and administratively – from its parent university is The Witherspoon Institute. Informally associated with Princeton University’s James Madison Program, Witherspoon’s physical proximity to campus allows it to draw on Princeton’s faculty and offer occasional events in collaboration with the university’s departments. To fund its education and research activities, however, Witherspoon relies entirely on its own resources.  

Witherspoon is one of the earliest examples of a university center dedicated to advancing American values. Founded in 2003 by Princeton University Professor Robert P. George, it takes its name from John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and former president of Princeton. 

The Witherspoon model, which focuses on cultural issues, has been so successful many university centers look to it for inspiration. The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, a grantmaking organization supporting programs and institutes at elite universities including Princeton, has helped fund similar centers at Johns Hopkins, Yale and Duke universities to name a few. 

But while Witherspoon exists separate from Princeton, an academic program may find success by being closely embedded within a university. In the case of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University, that’s the whole point. It isn’t just a center – it’s a school with two centers within it, along with degree programs and its own curriculum and faculty.  

Founded in 2017 with appropriated funding from the Arizona Legislature, SCETL launched a national reform movement at public universities that has spread to eight states with new departments and programs being built at colleges and universities in Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Mississippi and Texas. 

University centers can also be housed within a university while maintaining their own budgets and fundraising as an independent nonprofit. That’s the case with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (GMU), one of the earliest and best-known academic research centers that focuses on how markets solve problems.  

Founded in 1980, Mercatus has served as a model for university centers specializing in economic issues and how research centers can bridge the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Led by a faculty director appointed by the provost of the university, GMU Professor of Economics Tyler Cowen, the Mercatus Center is the largest supporter of GMU graduate students and offers fellowships at all levels of study for students from colleges and universities around the world. 

These three very different institutions have served as models for university centers that have emerged in recent years at private and public universities. What all of them have in common is a commitment to advancing American values. 

The Next Generation: Five New Centers Advancing American Values 

The following is a sample of university centers and academic programs to emerge thanks to a renewed interest in funding American values on college campuses in recent years. 

The Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization “promotes study of the intellectual, artistic and political traditions that characterize Western civilization.” Housed within the University of Colorado Boulder, the center is committed to the highest academic standards and intellectual rigor. Through its many programs, the center provides a forum for free and open discourse and aims to serve as a model to other institutions by promoting balanced conversation, academic freedom and intellectual diversity on campus in a time of increasing political polarization and homogeneity. The center’s “The Free Mind” podcast welcomes professors and public intellectuals who present a diversity of viewpoints to engage in candid conversations where reasonable expression of ideas is valued. 

The Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida equips students with the knowledge, habits of thought, analytical skills and character to be excellent leaders and citizens in a free society. This is accomplished through a multidisciplinary undergraduate curriculum centered around Western tradition and the American founding, public programming to highlight the value of debate and disagreement and aiding the Florida Department of Education in implementing civics curriculum in K-12 schools. 

The School of Civic Life and Leadership housed within the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC), is an interdisciplinary home for the study of public discourse, civic life and civic leadership. A degree-granting program within UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, the school provides students with a range of courses and the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to foster meaningful conversations on contentious topics. The Civic Life and Leadership minor, for example, is structured to benefit all students by teaching how to engage productively and thoughtfully with one another, especially when they disagree. It supports “a culture of robust public argument through curricular and extra-curricular engagement, equipping students with the rhetorical and deliberative capacities to serve North Carolina and beyond as citizens, leaders and stewards of democracy.” 

The University of Texas at Austin’s newly launched School of Civic Leadership and its associated Civitas Institute will be home to a community of students and scholars on a mission to discover what it takes to preserve liberty and foster thoughtful citizenship. The School of Civic Leadership will offer students a major in civics, a minor in civics and a minor in philosophy, politics and economics. The associated Civitas Institute will be a community of scholars committed to independent thought, civil discourse, free speech, reasoned deliberation and intellectual curiosity.  

The Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society is a forthcoming center at The Ohio State University (OSU). The Chase Center will be an independent academic center physically housed in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. In 2023, the Ohio legislature chose OSU and four other universities to house academic centers focused on American values. Trevor Brown, dean of the Glenn College, stated, “Ohio State is committed to free speech, civil discourse, critical thinking and intellectual diversity on our campuses. The Chase Center will be a focal point for advancing these values and our land-grant educational mission.” A seven-member academic council is conducting the search for an executive director. 

Tips for Higher Ed Donors 

When it comes to investing in higher education, Florino offers the following advice in the form of “Top Ten Tips for Higher Education Funders” considering supporting an academic center:  

• Ally yourself with a faculty member (preferably tenured) who shares your commitment to the proposed center’s mission and who has the academic and administrative skills to help it succeed. Build your program around him or her. 

• If you are launching a center to champion ideas that may be viewed as controversial elsewhere on campus – free markets or free speech, for example – make sure the institution’s top administrators, right up to the president, respect academic freedom. 

• Always allocate your funding on a year-to-year basis, contingent on the center’s performance and its fidelity in carrying out your intent. Academic and administrative personnel will fluctuate, and new arrivals may not share your same commitment to the center or your goals. 

By following this advice and supporting academic centers such as the ones featured here, higher ed donors can reshape the campus environment and restore American values in the university setting. 

Read the rest of the tips in Philanthropy Roundtable’s “Top Ten Tips for Higher Education Funders.” 

Philanthropy Roundtable’s Programs and Services team provides a one-stop shop that helps donors navigate the complexity of higher-ed giving. Learn more about our higher education donor services. 

The post To Reform Higher Education, Consider Funding Academic Centers  appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

But in John Rose’s “How to Think in an Age of Political Polarization” class, discussion is the whole point. “It was very distinct” compared to his experience elsewhere on campus, Criner says. Students were able to disagree strongly without hurling insults or storming out of the room.

“The entire class as a whole was a lot more civil than you’d expect with the type of issues we were talking about, you’d kind of expect it would be more hostile,” he says. “It changed my perspective. I’d assumed people would be more combative with the way they respond to hearing a contrarian view.”

There is a certain selection bias here, with students choosing the class because they want to learn to engage well. But much of this success in civil discourse is thanks to Rose, associate director of Duke University’s Civil Discourse Project.

Rose says his political polarization class is “sort of civil discourse 101.”

“On campus, it’s thought of as the forbidden topics class,” he says. “Students love it. It spends a little bit of time talking about polarization, but most of the semester is reserved for case studies, or I sometimes call them stress tests, on the most controversial topics of our time.”

This is the “signature class” of the Civil Discourse Project, and Rose estimates that 500 students have been through it.

“I’ve seen students have really remarkable conversations on issues of identity and certain no-go zones elsewhere,” Rose says. “I have students who take my class because they have a damaged friendship due to politics, and they come out of the class able to mend that friendship.”

The Tide Is Turning

Destroyed friendships, self-censorship and intolerance of differing viewpoints are just a few symptoms of an ideological rot spreading on college campuses. It’s no secret that free speech in higher education is in trouble. Prestigious universities such as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown rank among the worst for free speech. Nearly 75% of students feel pressure to avoid certain topics among their professors and peers.

Meanwhile, college administrators have done little to assuage the fears of Jewish students as anti-Israel protests have spread across the country. Courses on the Constitution or Western tradition have been replaced with divisive, politicized topics such as gender studies, critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Onlookers may wonder whether the academy is broken beyond repair. But there are plenty of people and organizations working to champion civil discourse and American values on campus, and they’re not giving up.

In some ways, it seems the tide is turning. Over the past few months, following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses, the atmosphere has shifted. After the widely criticized congressional hearing in which the presidents of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania failed to unequivocally condemn antisemitism at their institutions, one donor pulled a $100 million gift from Penn. Two days later, the university’s president resigned, as did Harvard’s president less than a month later.

There’s no doubt the power of the purse works. But if donors are withdrawing blanket grants to universities they no longer trust to spend their money well, where else can it go?

“The Foundations of Western and American Civilization”

Expanding free speech at a private school has its own pros and cons. Since they are not publicly funded, such schools are not required to have robust First Amendment protections in the same way public schools are. A university such as Duke, Rose says, also struggles with political diversity and a strong pre-professional student body, keenly aware of how saying the wrong thing could affect their future career. At a public university such as the University of Florida, the focus is different. Just ask William Inboden, director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the university.

In the fall of 2022, the state legislature established the center “to support teaching and research concerning the ideas, traditions and texts that form the foundations of Western and American civilization.”

“We are trying with the Hamilton Center to fulfill our legislative mandate,” Inboden says. “I take very seriously the public part of our mission, our accountability to the public and our need to be responsive to them.”

The center’s “broad mission” as Inboden says, gives it many areas of focus, one of which is “to promote the values of citizenship and to promote civil discourse on campus.”

“What we are doing is trying to be innovative, but in a lot of ways we’re a throwback,” Inboden says. “We’re trying to recover the more traditional classical liberal model of higher education. We’re not going to be doing reverse indoctrination. We’re not engaged in political partisanship. We’re trying to depoliticize higher ed, which has become hyper politicized, and welcome a broader range of views. And that is very consistent with the Western tradition.”

Inboden seems cautiously optimistic about the future of higher education, at least where students learning about Western civilization and America’s founding principles are concerned.  

“We are trying to build something positive here,” he says. “We are trying to show that it is still possible to develop and teach a curriculum based on Western civilization and the great books, that combines knowledge, skills and values, my mantra of the trinity, if you will, of what we want our courses and degrees to embody.”

The center is on track to become its own college within the University of Florida, and it already has the authority to hire tenure-track faculty and offer majors and degrees.

“Those are really the key levers of influence and ability to get things done within any university,” Inboden says. “I think a number of past, smaller-scale efforts at higher ed reform weren’t able to have as much influence because they were a little more tangential in how they were located in the university.”

Considering the state of higher education, there’s certainly a need for efforts such as the Hamilton Center. And among students and faculty, there’s a demand for it too. In just 18 months, Inboden says, the center has had over 1,100 applications for its faculty positions. Inboden considers the strong student interest one metric of success, but he also asks, “Can we inspire imitators and competitors?”

“Ultimately, we hope that we can make a positive difference nationally,” he says. “We’re trying to reset the demand signals there and show the rest of higher ed that there is a demand for these kinds of academic efforts.”

Growing From Center to School

Similar to the Hamilton Center, the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, is a fairly new initiative, spurred by the state legislature, that aims to promote civil discourse and civic virtue on campus. What began as a research think tank will soon be part of a new college with the ability to create courses, confer degrees and hire faculty, with the goal of “exploring the ideas and institutions that sustain a free society and enable individuals to flourish,” according to the institute’s website.

Creating a new college to house the institute is significant, says Justin Dyer, executive director of the Civitas Institute and dean of the new School of Civic Leadership. 

“The standard strategy that people had for higher ed for a long time was to create centers within universities,” he says. “And those are great, and they do a lot of good work. They’re limited in that they do not hire faculty directly and they don’t develop new courses for students. What the school does is it allows us to combine the best the center has to offer with an actual academic unit that can do core academic functions.”

New schools within universities aren’t created every day, he says, making this a “generational opportunity,” he says.

“Through the school, we’ll be able to have an integrated and thoughtful curriculum that prepares students for leadership positions by connecting them to the legacy of American constitutionalism and the Western tradition and equipping them with the skills they need,” Dyer says.

In Texas and elsewhere, addressing civil discourse and reintroducing American values on campus is a wide-ranging problem. Part of the disinterest in free expression on campus comes from faculty, but some of it comes from students. And the faculty members, of course, were once students themselves.

Dyer emphasizes the importance of encouraging students not to turn away from a future in academia. One challenge is to answer the question: “How do we create the talent pipeline for the next generation?”

Through hosting guest speakers and other programs, the institute aims to model open inquiry for its members. The Civitas Institute is in a good location for this.

“Austin is a hub of intellectual energy for people who have different ideas than what we’re seeing in mainstream higher ed,” Dyer says. “It’s a kind of haven for center-right contrarians.

“But free speech isn’t the goal,” Dyer continues. “Free speech is a necessary condition for education, but once we have the necessary conditions in place, we still have to go about the task of education, which is different than just free speech.”

The Donors’ Role in Funding Reform

Tina Snider offers a philanthropist’s perspective on building support for intellectual diversity and the study of Western civilization. A financial supporter and board member of the Benson Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Snider is a big fan of the Western civilization-focused academic center. “If you build it, they will come,” she says, “and that’s what we found.”

Snider has been involved with the Benson Center since its inception in 2013. She received her bachelor’s degree at UC Boulder in the ’80s but found that by the time her daughter was a student, the university had changed. It was hamstrung by bureaucracy and had no rigorous teaching of the Western tradition. So when Bruce Benson, later the president of the university, asked her to join the board of the new center, she said yes.

Snider donates to her alma mater, but it’s important that she didn’t just write the university a blank check. Her money goes specifically to the Benson Center. Before the center was founded, the university sought her financial support, and she wasn’t interested.

“They reached out to me through the development office,” she says. “Well, my answer was, ‘No, I’m not giving you a penny because I don’t like what’s happening there.’”

Now the Benson Center has the second-largest endowment of any center in the UC system. It invites visiting scholars, hosts guest speakers and summer workshops and more. The center “promotes study of the intellectual, artistic and political traditions that characterize Western civilization,” per its website.

According to Snider, the majority of the pushback against it for the teaching of American values comes not from students, but from faculty. “It’s so funny to see people afraid of ideas,” Snider says.

“You Can’t Give Up on Higher Ed”

Leaders of organizations supporting civil discourse and American values within and outside universities agree now is not the time to abandon higher education.

“You can’t give up on higher ed because it’s such a culture-shaping institution,” Rose says. “For better or for worse, what happens on campus, especially at elite schools, has a huge impact on wider society.” He recalls the 2018 headline from writer Andrew Sullivan “We All Live on Campus Now.”

But for many donors, giving to higher education institutions should look different than in the past. Rose recommends donors find just a few faculty committed to intellectual diversity and support them in bringing civil discourse initiatives to campus. Targeted giving is key, as is knowing what institutions deserve donations.

“Sometimes the best way to help your alma mater is to give to a different school,” he says.

Snider cautions against endowments and warns that donors must “go on performance.” She tried to support Lesley University, where she got her master’s degree, in creating a civics course. The course was taught for two years. But the next time she saw the curriculum, after “the scaled tipped so far the other way,” it had been edited to put a heavy emphasis on “the lens of [Ibram X.] Kendi,” author of How to Be an Antiracist. Snider immediately pulled her funding and moved on.

Through the success of initiatives such as the Civil Discourse Project, the Hamilton Center, the Civitas Institute and Benson Center students and professors have shown there is a large demand for greater support of free expression and the study of the Western tradition.

“When donors and others look at the otherwise grim landscape of higher ed and see the hyper-politicization of so many majors and radical activism on so many campuses, we want to show that amidst all that, there is another model being returned to here,” Inboden says of the Hamilton Center.

Dyer says we have to “fight for the soul” of our country’s academic institutions.

“Don’t give up on these institutions because they’re too important for America and for the next generation,” Dyer says. “They’re enormous public resources. On the question, ‘Should we build new things or should we reform old things?’ my answer is always, ‘Yes. We should do both.’” 

The post How Donors Can Restore American Values in Higher Education appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

The top line news is charitable giving to higher education during that period totaled $58 billion, which is $1.5 billion less than the amount received the previous year. The $59.5 billion contributed in FY 2021-22 was the highest amount ever contributed. The drop in 2022-23 represents a decline of 2.5% (5% if adjusted for inflation).   

A cursory look at the sources of gifts to colleges and universities indicates “organizational” giving increased slightly, while individual giving from alumni and non-alumni alike drove the decline, dropping over 10% (12% if adjusted for inflation). Those statistics do not tell the whole story, however. CASE includes corporations, foundations and donor-advised funds (DAFs) in the broad category of organizations. As Sue Cunningham, CASE president and CEO, noted, “Many individuals who historically would have been counted in the individual category are now giving through donor-advised funds. It’s certainly a vehicle that we’ve seen growing.”  

Cunningham added individual donors also give to higher education through personal and family foundations and closely held companies, so even more of their giving may be masked under the “organizational” heading. The actual breakdown in that category – which accounted for a 2.7% increase in FY 22-23 (0.1% if adjusted for inflation) – is a 3.2% increase in corporate giving, a 1.8% decline in foundation giving and a 4.4% increase in giving from other organizations including DAFs. Last year’s report was the first to require reporting on giving from DAFs. Both individual higher education institutions and CASE are currently assessing how DAF gifts should be described. 

Jenny Cooke Smith, senior director of CASE Insights Solutions, and Brian Flahaven, vice president/Strategic Partnerships, graciously agreed to speak with me recently about the latest giving numbers. Asked whether CASE had seen a drop in giving after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded the standard deduction in 2017, Flahaven said no such drop occurred.  

In fact, CASE reports indicated a significant increase in donations from $43.6 billion in FY 2016-17 to $46.7 billion in FY 2017-18. This is less surprising than a reader might imagine. Wealthy donors would likely continue to qualify for a charitable deduction, while smaller donors – particularly alumni – would continue to express a historic loyalty to the institutions they attended.  

Flahaven also said excluding the period 2020-2022, giving to colleges and universities has generally correlated with fluctuations of the stock market, an observation that agrees with Cunningham’s comments in the latest report. “While colleges and universities operate on fiscal years which typically begin on July 1 and June 30,” she noted, “donors plan giving based on the calendar year.” The primary market indices were indeed down on December 31, 2022, with the S&P 500 alone showing a nearly 20% loss in a year when total charitable giving also declined. 

If the correlation with market performance at the end of the calendar year continues in FY 23-24, higher ed fundraising should produce a banner year. Reversing performance remarkably from 2022, the S&P 500 increased 24% by December 31, 2023, with the Dow Jones average up nearly 14% and the Nasdaq up 43%.  

CASE representatives and higher education officials remain positive about future philanthropy in public conversations. But it is certainly reasonable to anticipate some fallout from the “donor revolt” after October’s Hamas attack on Israel and the many antisemitic campus demonstrations that have continued into this spring.  

Alumni gifts – both large and small – will no doubt continue for all sorts of projects, as evidenced by a recent $25 million donation toward a $60 million, six-story cylindrical tower to serve as the University of California-San Diego’s alumni and welcome center. But will the nature of gifts begin to change in the wake of increased donor dissatisfaction, and if so, how? 

Will we continue to see an increase in the number and size of gifts over $100 million as we saw in FY22-23, or will wealthier donors shrink or discontinue their support? Will higher ed receive fewer gifts for general operating support and more restricted donations to ensure adherence to donor intent? Will donors choose to make fewer gifts to endowments and replace them with short-term gifts that are easier to monitor and evaluate?  

Will next year’s CASE report show a decline in gifts to elite universities as donors seek other options in post-secondary education? How will the anticipated increase in women’s and Gen X philanthropy impact higher ed gifts? 

In light of these and other questions about trust in and support for our nation’s colleges and universities, we will be following CASE, Giving USA and other organizations tracking philanthropy in this area throughout 2024.  

The post Analyzing the Latest Data on the Decline in Giving to Higher Education  appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

In an op-ed recently published in the New York Post entitled “How Donors Can Shake up Higher Ed,” Philanthropy Roundtable President and CEO Christie Herrera provides a detailed giving approach for higher-education funders who want to advance American values and reestablish excellence, merit and opportunity for all at universities around the country.

Below are excerpts from the article entitled “How Donors Can Shake up Higher Ed”:  

“Can philanthropists fix higher education?” 

… 

“While it’s wise to abandon some giving strategies, I’ve urged donors to take a more effective — and more aggressive — approach to advance their values and secure the reforms higher education desperately needs.” 

… 

“The days of nostalgia giving must end unless your school is one of the few that’s still excellent. 

This may be the toughest message for philanthropists to hear, especially those who went to an Ivy League or other prestigious institution. 

They should instead fund schools with more principled leaders or proven commitments to ideals like free speech and intellectual diversity.” 

… 

“Choosing another school may be the best way to change an alma mater, since it fosters competition.” 

… 

“When a donor pulls a big gift from a college, the result is a brief news cycle. 

If a donor directs that money to an advocacy group that criticizes the university’s failings, the result is ongoing pressure.” 

… 

“Now it’s time to shake up the system — not merely by withdrawing donations but by donating in ways that make higher education worthy of the name.” 

Please continue reading at the New York Post.

The post Christie Herrera in New York Post: How Donors Can Shake Up Higher Ed  appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

On December 5, 2023, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing entitled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Legislators grilled the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about their response to a dramatic rise in antisemitism on campuses following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis. In her opening statement, Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said that while universities have “stoked the flames” about anti-racism in recent years, it is now “clear that Jews are at the bottom of the totem pole and without protection under this critical theory framework.”  

While lawmakers look for ways to protect Jewish students on campus and hold university leaders accountable, university alumni and board members have been demanding action for months. As Philanthropy Roundtable wrote recently, some philanthropic donors are withholding their donations to colleges and universities to show administrators that antisemitism will not be tolerated at the institutions they support.  

Below are examples of several prominent universities that are facing scrutiny from donors.  

Columbia University 

Columbia University is one of seven colleges and universities now facing federal inquiries over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia. While few details about the investigation are available, they follow a string of incidents, including one professor describing the brutal Hamas terror attack as a “stunning victory,” and according to police, an Israeli student who was beaten with a stick.  

An open letter signed by 160 Columbia and Bernard College faculty also backed the school’s Palestine Solidarity Groups after that group was accused of antisemitism and the identities of some of its members were disclosed publicly. As scrutiny from alumni rose, Columbia University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) through the end of the fall term for violating campus policy by organizing a walkout and protests that included threatening rhetoric and intimidation toward Jewish students on campus. Columbia also announced a Task Force on Antisemitism, but many argue it is not enough.  

One notable donor who has been vocal in his opposition to growing antisemitism on campus is Columbia alumnus and billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman. Earlier this fall, he said he would no longer donate unless Columbia took swift and severe action to combat antisemitism. Over his lifetime, Cooperman estimated he has given Columbia $50 million in total donations. 

Harvard University 

Editor’s note: On January 2, 2024, Claudine Gay announced her resignation as Harvard University president.

The October 7 events were met with praise by 33 student groups at Harvard who signed a letter written by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, which said Israel is “entirely responsible” for the attacks and the war unfolding in the region. Over 500 Harvard students also organized a walk out and “stop the genocide in Gaza” demonstration, which resulted in incidents of violence and arrests.  

It was not until Tuesday, three days after the student group’s letter was first posted, that Harvard President Claudine Gay addressed the matter directly with a short statement condemning the attacks by Hamas. Many, including senior chairman of Goldman Sachs and Harvard donor Lloyd Blankfein, argued the statement was too late and not strong enough, as it failed to condemn the students who signed the letter or promised any action. In response to intense criticism, Gay released a plan on November 9 to combat antisemitism on campus by forming an Antisemitism Advisory Group. Subsequently, an open letter signed by 101 Harvard faculty members condemned Gay for speaking out against the pro-Palestine slogan “from the river to the sea.”  

In 2022, philanthropy accounted for 45% of the university’s $5.8 billion in income. But the landscape for donors is different this year, as some are threatening to pull their funding, including a group of 1,600 Jewish alumni.   

In October, Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of L-Brands, along with his wife Abigail Wexner of the Wexner Foundation, wrote a letter to the Harvard Board of Overseers ending their financial relationship over Harvard’s initial response to the attack. They wrote, “We are stunned and sickened at the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians by terrorists last Saturday, the Sabbath and a festival day.”  

On November 4, Harvard alumnus, donor and billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman wrote an open letter saying Harvard’s tolerance of antisemitism has “emboldened this antisemitic subset of the community to escalate their antisemitic actions.” In the letter, he urged Gay to do more to protect Jewish students and hold Hamas sympathizers accountable. “As Harvard’s leader, your words and actions are followed closely,” he wrote. “As a result, the steps you take to address antisemitism at Harvard will be recognized around the world, and can contribute greatly as an example to other institutions seeking to eliminate antisemitism in all of its forms.” Ackman was a vocal supporter of releasing the names of students who signed the letter praising Hamas in an effort to warn potential employers.   

Legendary investor, co-founder of the hedge fund Baupost Group and Harvard alumnus and donor Seth Klarman co-wrote an open letter condemning Harvard’s initial silence as “expressions of hate and vitriol against Jews” on campus raged. “Despite these serious concerns, university leadership shockingly has been paralyzed,” the letter, with over 900 signatures, stated. Other authors of the letter included alumni Sen. Mitt Romney, venture capitalist Bill Helman, former Bain Capital managing director Mark Nunnelly and philanthropist Joanna Jacobson. 

University of Pennsylvania  

In September 2023, the University of Pennsylvania hosted a multi-day Palestine Writes Literature Festival featuring speakers who had “a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism.” Many donors and alumni have been quick to say UPenn eventually condemned antisemitism on its campus in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack, but not the festival or its speakers. Since then, some donors have called for the resignations of university president Liz Magill and chairman of the school’s board of trustees, Scott Bok. Magill eventually resigned, following her much criticized testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Apollo CEO Marc Rowan, one of the university’s biggest benefactors, is one of those donors. He has pulled financial support of the university and has called on others to “Close their Checkbooks” until Magill and Bok resign. As more donors join Rowan, the New York Post estimates UPenn could lose $1 billion in funding. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Rowan said, “The underlying culture that permitted this to happen is so strong,” In 2018, Rowan gave the school its single largest gift ever with a $50 million dollar donation.   

Another notable UPenn donor calling for Magill’s resignation is venture capital firm HighSage Ventures founder Jonathon Jacobson. Jacobson wrote a letter to Magill saying he would donate only $1 a year to the school instead of his typical “multi-seven figure” donation unless she resigned.  

Co-founder and managing partner of Differential Ventures and alumnus David Magerman also wrote a letter to Magill, stating, “My only conclusion, from your fierce support for the Hamas-affiliated speakers at the Palestine Writes festival, followed by your equivocating statements about the heinous acts of barbarism perpetrated by the same Hamas you allowed these speakers to promote, from your failure to call out evil, is that you are ambivalent to the unprecedented evil their acts represent.” He has pulled his funding, saying he is “deeply ashamed” by his alma mater, and he hopes “all self-respecting Jews” disassociate themselves from the university. 

Alumnus and billionaire Ronald Lauder also pulled his funding from the university, saying in a statement, “I have spent the past 40 years of my life fighting antisemitism around the world and I never, in my wildest imagination, thought I would have to fight it at my university, my alma mater and my family’s alma mater.” Similarly, former Utah governor, U.S. ambassador to China and Russia and UPenn alumnus Jon Huntsman wrote a letter to Magill stating his foundation is halting donations and calling the university “unrecognizable.”  

In response to Magill’s testimony before Congress, Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, UPenn alumni and donor pulled a gift in the form of limited partnership units in Stone Ridge estimated around $100 million. A letter from Stevens’ lawyers says he will not reconsider his stance until a new president is in place. His attorneys also write: “[The university’s] permissive approach to hate speech calling for violence against Jews and laissez faire attitude toward harassment and discrimination against Jewish students would violate any policies or rules that prohibit harassment and discrimination based on religion, including those of Stone Ridge.” 

Cliff Asness, UPenn alumnus and founder of AQR Capital Management, said in his letter to Magill, “I do not like making something like this about money — but it appears to be one of the only paths that has any hope of mattering, and it has become clear that is the only voice some of us have.”  

The hearing in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has done little to allay the concerns of donors about the state of America’s higher-education institutions. “The presidents’ answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership,” Ackman wrote on X (previously Twitter). “They must all resign in disgrace.” Higher education leaders must learn from their mistakes, and quickly. Donors will not be backing down from this issue any time soon. 

The post Alumni Respond to University Leaders for Failing to Condemn Antisemitism appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

It’s been one month since Hamas terrorists brutally murdered over 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians – including babies, children, women and the elderly – and the international community was jarred back to the reality of the evil in this world.  

Subsequently, an antisemitic backlash to the Israel-Hamas war has ensued. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights antisemitism, in the weeks following the Hamas attack, there have been nearly four times as many instances of harassment, vandalism and assault directed at Jewish people and communities in comparison with the same period in 2022.  

On college campuses in particular, there has been an alarming rise in threats against Jewish students. This week, a Cornell University student was arrested following online threats he would “bring an assault rifle to campus” and “shoot up” a dining hall where Jewish students eat. At Stanford University, an instructor was removed from the classroom after trying “to justify the actions of Hamas” and singling out Jewish students. In response to “an extremely disturbing pattern of antisemitic messages,” the Biden administration announced this week it would partner with campus law enforcement to provide federal resources to schools.  

Universities Slow to Respond Following Hamas Attacks 

Sadly, in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric terrorism, many people tacitly supported their actions. Yet as anti-Israel rhetoric and actions have intensified among some groups, leaving Jewish students feeling scared and unsafe at American universities, too many higher educational institutions have hypocritically equivocated at the moment they should have stood firm in their opposition to antisemitic hate and violence. Encouragingly, charitable donors are uniquely positioned to hold higher education accountable to its commitments to the safety, dignity and rights of all people.    

Days after the attacks and amid pressure from donors to respond, universities released statements expressing concern. The responses ran the gamut from clear moral condemnation to near sympathy for the attackers. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian student groups hijacked the conversation with their shocking statements and protests thereby coopting the universities’ responses.  

Harvard’s reaction illuminates this point. It took days for the most elite university to release a statement, prompting former Harvard President Larry Summers to say: “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student group’s statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral toward acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel.” The university released multiple follow-up statements, but failed to strongly condemn a student statement that held Israel responsible for Hamas’ violence, prompting other alumni and donors to chide the university. 

In comparison, University of Florida President and former U.S. senator Ben Sasse sent a letter to students and alumni explaining why it was unacceptable that his peers at other institutions were taking a neutral approach: “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. [They] have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby or the murdered grandmother,” he wrote.   

The neutral approach that some colleges have taken – those that even chose to speak out —stands in stark contrast to letters and commitments made after the murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests of 2020. Many of those statements condemned the officer, the criminal justice system and systemic racism inherent in all institutions against Blacks. This leads us to wonder why those who embraced social justice and the equal rights and protections of all people haven’t stepped up now to defend their Jewish counterparts or condemn the slaughter of 1,400 people. What message does this send to Jewish students, faculty, donors and alumni? 

As Sasse said on another occasion, “You got so many universities around the country [who] speak about every topic under the sun, Halloween costumes and microaggressions. But somehow in a moment of the most grave, grotesque attacks on Jewish people since the Holocaust, they all of a sudden say there’s too much complexity to say anything.” 

Donors Can Help Combat Antisemitism on Campuses 

Now, as violence and intimidation against Jewish students are rising, donors and alumni need not sit on the sidelines in dismay. They can use their voices and dollars to move administrations to stand against antisemitism in word and deed.  

Philanthropic giving to higher education last year totaled $59.5 billion, including $23 billion from individual donations, according to a 2022 survey of U.S. universities by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. People giving $1 million or more made up less than 1% of donors but 57% of total donations.  

While higher education giving is a rewarding and meaningful use of philanthropic dollars, it can be challenging for both donor intent and grant compliance. Nonetheless, accountability is a critical element of higher education funding. Academic institutions must be held accountable for the misuse of donor funds and that includes indirectly supporting activities that can be destructive to civility, undermine academic freedom or promote violence. 

Recently, major higher education donors have ended their financial support and relationships with institutions over their response to the attack. For example, venture capitalist David Magerman, hedge fund billionaire Cliff Asness, private-equity billionaire Marc Rowan, former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman and other high-profile donors cut ties with the University of Pennsylvania in protest of the university’s support for a festival featuring antisemitic speakers and its subsequent conflicting messages on the Hamas attack. Magerman, who is calling on other donors to do the same, noted, “I was just pushed over the edge by the equivocation of the response.” 

At Harvard, retailer Leslie Wexner announced he was pulling funding from Harvard over its refusal to support Israel. Meanwhile, a group of prominent alumni including Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and investors Seth Klarman and Bill Helman published an open letter criticizing the school’s leadership for creating an increasingly hostile environment for Harvard’s Jewish students and providing steps the university can take to remedy its actions. 

Perhaps the removal of charitable dollars will nudge universities to action. Academic institutions may say their hands are tied or attempt to hide behind claims they are protecting academic freedom and free speech. However, that rings hollow when we consider the alarming censorship on campus today. Let’s remind them of their sundry diversity, equity and inclusion efforts – from speech codes to removal of faculty — that have been weaponized against opposing viewpoints on campus. There is something deeply wrong when people argue “words are violence” but make excuses for and even celebrate one of the most inhumane acts of violence on a civilian population – including at least 30 Americans – in recent memory.  

While faculty and students have the right to their viewpoints, the university has a responsibility to ensure everyone’s physical safety and – given their outspoken stance on social justice – to speak out when atrocities like the unprompted murders of innocent Jews occur in the world. And when they forget, donors should remind them.   

The post How Donors Can Fight Rising Antisemitism on College Campuses appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

Philanthropy Roundtable is pleased to share this essay by Joe E. Ross, president of Reach University. Ross and his team have worked to provide an innovative model that creates pathways to opportunity for individuals working within educational communities while simultaneously solving one of the largest problems plaguing our nation’s schools today – teacher talent pipelines. Reach University is providing a low-cost solution to the barrier of credentialing for individuals who are best positioned to meet the educational needs of their local communities through a groundbreaking apprenticeship model.  

Among high school seniors, a privileged few get to pick between elite, world-renowned colleges like Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Stanford, Wellesley or Yale.  

What if they could spend their next few years at investment bank Goldman Sachs instead?  

Some now can. Dozens of famous employers — including Goldman Sachs and other corporate luminaries like Deloitte, GE, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Nestlé, UBS and Rolls Royce — have begun to offer a four-year paid “apprenticeship” that leads to a debt-free bachelor’s degree.   

What’s the catch?  

Well, to apply for the Goldman Sachs gig and others like it, you need to be based in the United Kingdom. Here in the United States, the apprenticeship-to-degree model is only beginning to emerge, particularly for working adults who otherwise lack access to college. If the idea takes off, it could be a long-term solution to the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis and restore lagging faith in American higher education.  

How does this model work?  

Imagine a job – a paid job – that turns into a degree. Applicants apply to the employer. The diploma is technically conferred by a collaborating university. But the action happens outside the Ivory Tower. Half of the learning comes from on-the-job work. The rest comes from job-relevant classes typically held outside of working hours. Tuition is largely paid for as part of the learner’s compensation. There are no student loans. 

Early adopters of a similar approach in the United States include state education agencies and K-12 school districts seeking to address the teacher shortage. The nonprofit Reach University created a debt-free, apprenticeship-based bachelor’s degree specifically for school employees in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado and Louisiana. Launched in fall 2020, the fully job-embedded program has grown from 50 candidates to over 1,500 in less than three years.  

The federal Pell grant typically covers all but $2,000 of the cost of the job-embedded degree program. Philanthropy or Labor Department apprenticeship funding covers most of the remaining tuition, so each candidate’s out-of-pocket contribution is capped at $900 per year. That’s enough to ensure some skin in the game, while keeping the program affordable without student debt.  

Dr. Heath Grimes is the superintendent of the rural Russellville City School District in northwest Alabama. The majority of students in Russellville are Hispanic but the district has had a hard time recruiting bilingual staff. Grimes began last year to recruit prospective hires who had graduated from the local community college. He positioned the district as a kind of “transfer institution” where they could use their job to turn their associate degree into a bachelor’s degree.   

Elizabeth Alonzo, who held an associate degree in business, was among the first to accept this unusual offer. She now serves as an English language aide. Her job is a kind of apprenticeship where what she does at work renders both a paycheck from the district and academic credit from Reach University. Less than a year from now, Alonzo will graduate with the bachelor’s degree she needs to become a teacher. 

She will be the first fully bilingual elementary school teacher in Russellville.  

For now, the apprenticeship-to-degree program at Reach exclusively serves school employees – classroom aides, coaches and bus drivers, for example – who aspire to become teachers, and who first need to earn a bachelor’s degree.  

But could this idea expand in the United States to fields outside of teacher preparation?  

The answer is yes. Just look at what’s happening in the United Kingdom. More than 100 universities now offer so-called “degree apprenticeships” in fields ranging from management consulting to medicine, and more than 40,000 new students enroll each year. Robert Halfon, the U.K. minister for higher education and skills, likes to say that “degree” and “apprenticeship” are his two favorite words.  

The ordering of those words — degree before apprenticeship — reflects the complexity of the apprenticeship system in the United Kingdom, where the “degree apprenticeship” is the pinnacle of a multi-level system that also includes the “intermediate apprenticeship” and “advanced apprenticeship.” This nomenclature does not translate on our side of the Atlantic. It makes more sense to refer to the American version as the “apprenticeship degree.”  

After all, amid skyrocketing student debt, it’s not the apprenticeship that needs to be modified. It’s the degree.  

That’s why Reach University is bringing together policymakers, philanthropists, employers and entrepreneurial leaders in higher education and workforce development to launch a new nationwide center to advance the apprenticeship degree – not as a postsecondary alternative, but as a postsecondary option – and to make it mainstream in the United States.  

We believe the emergence of the apprenticeship degree has three notable implications for the future of American higher education:  

1. For starters, we’re skeptical of narratives that paint the apprenticeship as a mere “alternative” to college. This is a false binary. An apprenticeship that intentionally leads to a degree provides both near-term job skills and long-term upward mobility.  

2. Second, we imagine the future of college as the future of work: The workplace becomes a campus. Colleagues become classmates. Classes may be online, but learners are not remote. This would be a big change for higher education. To conflate the apprenticeship degree with an online degree or an executive degree would be like mistaking Superman for a bird or plane. 

3. Finally, when it comes to the nation’s seemingly intractable student loan crisis, we believe the debt-free apprenticeship degree could save the day. But this will only happen if job-embedded higher education goes mainstream, drawing the imagination of learners across all income levels. 

Enrique Peñalosa, a former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, has been quoted describing this third dynamic in the context of urban policy: “The sign of an advanced society is not where the poor have cars, it’s where even the rich use public transportation.” 

Similarly, we’ll know the apprenticeship degree is changing the landscape of opportunity in America when rich and poor alike aspire to a job that will lead to a good degree.  

Not the other way around.   

To learn more about Reach University, visit www.reach.edu. If you are interested in helping accelerate Reach’s work addressing the teacher shortage or supporting Reach’s Fall 2023 launch of the new National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD), please contact NCAD Executive Director Eric Dunker, edunker@reach.edu.   

For more information about other organizations providing Pathways to Opportunity, reach out to Philanthropy Roundtable Program Director Erica Haines.  

The post Will the “Apprenticeship Degree” Come to America?  appeared first on Philanthropy Roundtable.

The Roundtable recently sat down with Pano Kanelos, founding president of the University of Austin (UATX), and Chad Thevenot, the university’s vice president of advancement. The conversation centered around the university’s mission to create a higher education system that values and promotes freedom of speech and civil discourse at a time when universities are increasingly accused of censorship on campuses.  

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.  

Q: Tell us about the University of Austin and the mission behind it. 

Kanelos: The University of Austin is a newly founded private, nonprofit university, and our intention is to become a top-tier research university in the country. We will begin undergraduate programs in the fall of 2024 and build out from there. Our mission is simple: to renew higher education by addressing several of the interwoven crises the sector is currently facing.  

The first is a crisis of principle. We see constant infighting and hateful rhetoric on campuses across America simply for having differing opinions. At UATX, we affirm the purpose of higher education is about the advancement, transmission and preservation of knowledge. Our preconditions for fulfilling this mission are open inquiry, freedom of consciousness and civil discourse. We believe universities need to commit to freely circulating ideas to create a community of open conversation. Our free society depends upon the discussion and debate of important topics so that we can be well-informed, and thus, universities should be a model of that.  

The second crisis is the financial model of higher education. We are all aware the price of higher education has risen precipitously, outpacing not only inflation, but also the ability of families to pay for that education. We’re seeing the problems of massive student loan debt as well. At the same time, a significant number of universities are financially unstable, unable to carry out their own missions because they’re on the brink of financial failure. At UATX, we are rethinking the entire financial structure of higher education; how universities do what they do, in the most cost-effective manner possible, while still delivering a first-class education.  

Lastly, we’re facing a curricular crisis. Older universities haven’t changed their curricula in well over a century, since we saw the rise of research models in higher education. The founding of schools like the University of Chicago, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University, led to current templates for higher education, including the idea that you must have major apartment complexes and scholarly research facilities. We think it’s time to challenge those dynamics, and to reflect upon the fast-changing world we’re living in today to ensure we’re preparing the next generation for success.  

Q: For donors who want to get more involved with higher education, what distinguishes UATX from others?  

Kanelos: One of the great strengths of the United States has always been our entrepreneurialism, our ability to innovate and to create new institutions. Higher education is in dire need of innovation. It is unbelievably difficult to start a new university, from getting authorization from the state, to being accredited, to bringing in the money necessary to launch it. Despite these challenges, the University of Austin is showing we can create competitive new institutions, and it’s my hope that other new institutions will follow in our wake. The advent of new institutions created with different missions, all approaching higher education from different directions, will strengthen the system. For donors, their gifts will mean more than those to legacy institutions who are incapable of creating models that will challenge and enrich the system. We have a great opportunity here at UATX with the creation of a new, innovative university dedicated to graduating top-tier educated students. 

Q: What type of impact do you foresee your university making in the future?  

Kanelos: I’ve spent my entire career in higher education, and I’ve witnessed time and time again much room for improvement. Our achievements will be the model example of institution building. It will be a huge sign of success for us when, decades from now, we look around and we have dozens of competitors. Our country and our society need individuals who build new organizations, found exemplary businesses and innovate in technology and the arts. As an institution that is dedicated to helping higher education evolve, we are dedicated to graduating thousands of people who have the ambition to change the world. I strongly believe that ripple of change will have a huge impact on our society for the better.  

Q: How can donors give to the University of Austin? 

Thevenot: It’s completely up to the donor. As a university, there are a multitude of ways folks can give. Many of our donors have a specific interest in where they want their money going: from student scholarships to faculty life, to general operating funding, as well as planned gifts, so there’s a wide range of giving options available. 

Q: There are policymakers in Washington, D.C., who are trying to limit the tools donors can utilize to give freely. Does this concern you?  

Kanelos: We recently had an experience regarding the freedom to give with one of our donors, in fact. We have a significant donor who lives in the Netherlands and who has graciously supported us from day one. Recently, the Netherlands changed its laws around philanthropy to limit the amount of money any foundation or individual can give to an organization to roughly $250,000 USD per year. That limitation makes it much more difficult for Dutch charitable organizations to operate on any viable scale. It’s a direct overreach of government that has essentially caused the entire system of private philanthropy to collapse in the Netherlands. Fortunately, I don’t foresee anything that extreme in the United States, though it does demonstrate the system can be vulnerable to federal government intervention and overreach. We must be mindful of the consequences that would occur should further regulations be placed on the charitable sector.  

Q: Do you believe new restrictions on giving vehicles like donor-advised funds (DAFs) would impact charitable donations to the University of Austin? Would some people be less likely to give if they were not able to do so anonymously? 

Thevenot: Absolutely. Many of our donors utilize DAFs, and national data shows more and more people are choosing them as their preferred vehicle of giving. The National Philanthropic Trust came out with a 2022 report that shows the number of DAF accounts rose from less than half a million in 2017 to almost 1.3 million in 2021. I strongly believe donor privacy reasons were a major factor. So, there’s absolutely no question that additional restrictions would hinder charitable giving across the board. It’s simple: limit the privacy donors have, and you’ll see fewer donors over time. 

Q: Why is donor privacy important to your mission and do you foresee any remaining threats following the Supreme Court’s decision in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v Bonta? 

Kanelos: The Supreme Court ruling was very encouraging, not only for the sake of donors, but for the communities that nonprofit organizations are uplifting with their support. This was a huge win for charitable organizations and American philanthropy. After all, there is certainly no constitutional reason to limit the privacy of charitable donors. With that, I don’t necessarily foresee any significant legislative threats coming anytime soon, though if there are any, this ruling clearly sets precedent for that.  

Q: We have talked about the importance of philanthropic freedom for donors, but as a new organization, what sort of regulatory hurdles did you or do you face that have made it difficult to establish UATX? 

Kanelos: The primary regulatory hurdle of universities is accreditation. This system is designed to take a very long time, typically six to eight years, for a new university to be fully accredited, though you’re required to be up and running before you can get accreditation status. It’s a huge challenge to get donors to fund the university and to get students to enroll before you’re accredited, just to prove you’re worthy of it. Nevertheless, the strategy we have in place has been incredible and I’m grateful to everyone involved. If the process was easier to manage, I’m positive we would see more competition in higher education. Thankfully, donors understand it’s an issue we must face, and while they don’t like it any more than we do, we have some phenomenally devout donors who are here for the long haul because they know how important this is to our society.  

Q: Why do you believe protecting the freedom to give is important? 

Kanelos: If we, as Americans, believe we have the right to live as we choose, we should believe in the freedom to give to charities as we choose. Any compromise is an attack on our right to believe what we want to believe and be who we want to be. There also needs to be a hard line between one’s private and professional lives. Where one gives his money shouldn’t have any bearing on his professional life. There needs to be a firewall to protect everyone’s freedom to give to the charities they support. 

Thevenot: If society pressures us to agree with only conventional practices, then we’ll lose the ability to innovate and to have divergent opinions. A one-size-fits-all strategy has never worked and never will. If we have a one-dimensional toolset, we’ll lose everything that makes us Americans. Philanthropy is where you have different people with different ideas going into society to fix the issues we’re facing, and that’s what makes it so great! 

View more stories about the importance of philanthropic freedom at FreeToGive.org. 

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