The First Street Journal has covered the backlash of deep-pockets donors against the outbreak of anti-Semitism on our college campuses. Now it seems as though the colleges are very upset when those deep-pocket donors exercise their freedom of speech. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Penn’s donor backlash raises questions about how much influence philanthropists should have

Ronald Lauder told Penn president Liz Magill he didn’t want faculty involved in the Palestine Writes festival teaching at the Penn institute that bears his family’s name.

by Susan Snyder | Sunday, November 12, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

In mid-September, Ronald S. Lauder, of the Estée Lauder cosmetic company, made a special trip to Philadelphia to see the president of the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, to which he and family members have given many millions over the decades.

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The school in two weeks was scheduled to house the Palestine Writes Literary Festival, billed as a celebration of Palestinian culture and arts, but criticized by some for inviting speakers who had a history of making antisemitic remarks.He wanted it canceled. As is now widely known, Liz Magill, Penn’s president, didn’t comply, citing academic freedom and free speech.

That set off one of the biggest — if not the biggest — backlashes from donors that an American university has ever seen.

Ronald S Lauder, photo via his biography page, Ronald S Lauder Foundation.

So, who is Ronald S Lauder? With a net worth of a measly $4.6 billion — down from $5.5 billion in 2021 — he has been the President of the World Jewish Congress since 2007. Dr Magill, who certainly knew who Mr Lauder, a graduate of Penn’s Wharton School of Business, was, chose not to comply with Mr Lauder’s request, “citing academic freedom and free speech,” according to the newspaper.

That Mr Lauder, and other deep-pocket donors, not all of them Jewish, might exercise their freedom of speech, in the form of no longer donating to the University, might not have occurred to Dr Magill, but it probably should have.

Chief among the critics was Lauder, who told Magill in an Oct. 16 letter that he was re-examining his financial support of the university. He wrote that he “had two people taking photos and two more who listened to the speakers” at the festival and found them to be “both antisemitic and viscerally anti-Israel.”

Lauder, a Wharton alumnus, gave Magill a directive involving the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies that he and his brother, Leonard A. Lauder, also a Wharton grad, founded at Penn in 1983 with a $10 million gift. They created the institute in honor of their father, Joseph H. Lauder, co-founder of Estée Lauder Inc.

“Let me be clear as I can,” he wrote, “I do not want any of the students at the Lauder Institute . . . to be taught by any of the instructors who were involved or supported” the festival. He also wrote to Steven J. Fluharty, dean of Arts and Sciences, asking to meet with students and faculty involved in the festival, though he said in the letter that he never heard back.

Naturally, Penn’s Faculty Senate were appalled, saying that academic freedom is not something which can be bought and sold, and that “individuals outside of the university” should not be “surveilling both faculty and students” over their academic freedom and freedom of speech.

That is arguably true, but it is also true that the “individuals outside the university” have a perfect right to choose to donate, or not donate, to the University of Pennsylvania, and they have every right to take their decisions based on what the school has done. Despite its state-school-sounding name, the University of Pennsylvania is not a public institution, but a private, Ivy League college with listed tuition and fees cost, not including housing, of $73,494 per academic year. The University’s endowment total is $21.0 billion, so the college is not in serious trouble yet, but a flight of donors could eventually put it in trouble. 53% of the endowment’s distributions go to ‘instruction,’ and another 15% to student financial aid.

Last year alone, Leonard Lauder, 90, — who has a net worth of $16.7 billion, according to the daily Bloomberg Billionaires Index — donated $125 million to Penn for a tuition-free program to recruit, train, and deploy nurse practitioners to work in the nation’s underserved communities.

Without Ronald Lauder’s brother’s gift, would that tuition-free program even exist?

Three generations of the Lauders have been educated at Penn, and they have been both wealthy and generous with their money. Perhaps the next generation will choose to attend a different college, and be generous elsewhere.

Penn has every right to choose to do whatever it wishes as far as academic freedom and free speech are concerned, but the donors have their own rights, one of those rights being to no longer donate.
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Related Articles:

• Jonathan Zimmerman in The Philadelphia Inquirer: Fight antisemitism by protecting free speech: That sounds like a contradiction, but if we erect new rules to restrict what we can say — about Jews, Israel, or anything else — we’ll lose the ability to function as teachers, scholars, and citizens.
• Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘From the river to the sea’ threatens to drown out any chance for peace: The phrase is code for eradicating the state of Israel, but some right-wing Israelis don’t shy away from similar calls regarding Palestinians.
• John Hinderaker in Powerline: Why didn’t MIT Expel Violent Students?
• Steven Hayward in Powerline: This is not your grandfather’s anti-Semitism