RUTHFULLY YOURS

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“This year I gave only $1 to Brown.” Last week, three people said this to me.  Well, to be exact, one said, “only $10 to Princeton” and another “only $100 to Harvard.” But you get the idea.

All three have given millions to these institutions in the past. All three are infuriated by what is happening on campuses across the country. All three sought my approval for their pointedly small gifts.

They do not have my approval. The amount of money they should give is zero. Not $1, like Harvard alumna Tally Zingher, who plans to join “hundreds of other former students in a symbolic protest,” but $0. I made this argument last December, and reiterate it now at the end of a year in which public confidence in higher education understandably has hit a new low.

Colleges and universities, like other nonprofit organizations, care not only about how much they receive in donations but also about how many people donate. These institutions express great pride (or, sometimes, consternation) in the percentage of alumni who contribute money and, at the fanciest institutions, have an army of employees and volunteers working year-round to get as many people as possible onboard.

Take Princeton, which historically has had by far the country’s most loyal alumni. Today, many are unhappy with the university and are withholding donations. One reason explored in a long article in June’s Princeton Alumni Weekly is “politics,” on both the Left and the Right. Some alumni are so concerned about the state of free expression on campus—read the report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) on Princeton for an illustration of the problem—that they launched a 501(c)(3) to defend the speech rights of students and faculty.

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The pro-Hamas uprising that broke out across American universities after October 7 roused once-somnolent alumni and donors. That awakening has now produced a new university charter, called a “Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania,” drafted by Penn professors. Penn’s most recent president, Liz Magill, had to resign on December 9, following widely mocked testimony at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism. The charter’s authors, along with Penn’s rebel donors, hope to make agreement with the new constitution a requirement for Penn’s new president. If enough Penn constituents, especially faculty, endorse it, the board of trustees will be compelled to adopt such a prerequisite, their thinking goes. An ongoing donation boycott provides the financial pressure. Ultimately, alumni across the country may be inspired to seek a similar foundational shake-up in their own alma maters, the drafters hope.

The new constitution adopts the thinking behind the Kalven Report, drafted in 1967 at the University of Chicago. Penn must henceforth abstain from adopting an institutional position on political issues. Embracing an official line alienates dissenting members of the university who might want to challenge “common orthodoxies,” explains the charter. Individual members of the university, by contrast, shall be free to propose, test, and reject the “widest spectrum of perspectives.”

The university’s selection committees have one mission only: identifying excellence. Hiring non-excellent diversity candidates makes it harder to attract outstanding faculty and students. (This assertion will seem commonsensical to anyone who believes in merit. The diversity complex would respond that, to the contrary, faculty and students shun non-“diverse” institutions. Sadly, in some cases, especially in the case of woke students, the diversity complex is correct. That does not make Penn 2.0 wrong, however, to seek to break the stranglehold of diversity thinking.) The new constitution posits that an unambiguous, publicly understood commitment to excellence will give Penn a competitive edge in hiring and student admissions in the decades ahead. This, too, seems commonsensical. Testing such a hypothesis is long overdue.

Penn 2.0 overcomes in one stroke a weakness bedeviling a central strategy of campus reform. Those seeking to create new universities face the challenge that no new institution can offer the prize that a legacy university confers: status and bragging rights. It is prestige that drives the ever-more frenzied torrent of college applications, rather than any promise of knowledge. The beauty of the Penn 2.0 plan is that it re-founds Penn on a new footing, while maintaining Penn’s prestige-granting power.

Were Penn 2.0 to become part of the presidential hiring search, it would be clarifying to see how many university apparatchiks demurred from its principles. 

Penn’s temporary replacement for ousted president Magill shows how heavy a lift Penn 2.0 is going to be. Penn’s trustees chose J. Larry Jameson, now dean of Penn’s medical school, to serve as the university’s interim president. As soon as Jameson took over the medical school in 2011, he placed diversity hiring and indoctrination at the core of his administration. He created the school’s first vice dean for Inclusion and Diversity and first associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion. Naturally, an Office of Inclusion and Diversity followed, which rolled out endless diversity initiatives and mandates, including Health Equity Weeks, the Transgender Patient Advocate program, and the LGBT Student-Trainee-Faculty Mentorship program. In 2021, Jameson initiated what the Penn press office called a “new institution-wide program aimed at eliminating structural racism.” (Hint: There is no structural racism at the Penn medical school. The medical school, like the rest of the university, is desperate to admit and hire as many blacks and Hispanics as possible, often disregarding academic skills gaps to do so.) As with all such duplicative programs, the conceit of the 2021 “institution-wide” antiracism initiative was that the school was for the first time prioritizing “diversity” at “all levels of staffing.”