Michael Lachanski, Jonah Davids A Simple Tax-Code Change Would Protect Academic Freedom Donors want their gifts to universities to fund exceptional scholars, not bloated bureaucracies and ideological initiatives.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/tax-code-change-university-donations-scholars-academic-freedom
Every year, donors give billions of dollars to American colleges and universities. Some give for social or sentimental reasons, but most do so because they want to aid exceptional students, faculty, and research. Yet, far too often, these donations disappear into administrative costs and ideological projects that do little to advance real scholarship. At the same time, scholars who challenge the consensus within their fields, or simply hold opinions unpopular with their colleagues, frequently find themselves without support from their department or institution.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A simple change to the tax code—making direct payments to faculty and graduate students tax-deductible, just like donations to universities—could strengthen scholarship, revitalize independent inquiry, and ensure that donors can directly support the people who matter most to our intellectual future.
The practice of institutional control over scholarly funding emerged at a time when direct payments were hard to process, and universities could be trusted to steward academic funding. Neither of these conditions holds today. Consider Amy Wax, a tenured University of Pennsylvania professor who was suspended last September for controversial remarks about race and immigration. Those who admired her teaching and scholarship, with its uncommon conservative perspective, would typically donate to Penn’s Law School, where she teaches. But this same law school has now withdrawn Wax’s research funds, undermined her tenure protections, and constrained her academic freedom. Donations to Penn’s Law School and the University of Pennsylvania were diverted, at least partially, towards the undermining of Wax’s academic freedom via a dubious, ideologically motivated disciplinary process. In this manner, universities can use institutional donations to subvert the viewpoint diversity that donors hope to foster.
Wax’s case isn’t unique. In recent years, high-profile donors like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman have been shocked to discover that the Ivy League schools they have supported not only permit but actively foster radical anti-Israel activism and “social justice” initiatives that promote anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic advocacy.
Donors still want to fund the high-quality research and teaching, much of which takes place at top American universities even today. But they do not want their money funding university bureaucracies that promote illiberal ideologies. Donors have tried to get around hostile administrators or departments by endowing a professorship, creating a research chair, or funding a research center. Even in these cases, though, schools exercise substantial influence over the research agenda and hiring process and often siphon off dollars.
A tax-code change allowing direct subsidies of graduate-student stipends and faculty salaries would reduce administrative overhead and departmental control, and let donors support individual scholars within a school or department—without funding the entire institution. This would be one of the surest and most efficient ways to back heterodox scholars or fund high-quality scholars who happen to work for lower-ranked universities that get little funding.
By freeing more scholars to break new ground and challenge orthodoxies with less fear of departmental reprisal, this small change to the tax code would help usher in a renewed culture of intellectual freedom within academia.
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