Higher ed by and for the 1 percent

Abstract

As public subsidies to higher education continue to shrink, and costs continue to escalate, academic institutions struggle to raise the kinds of resources they believe they need to remain competitive in a tightening market. One increasingly critical source of funding has become sizeable philanthropic donations, sometimes from the institution's own wealthy alumni and sometimes not. In recent years, private philanthropy has come to play a growing role in sustaining many academic institutions. According to a recent article from Higher Ed Dive, in fiscal year 2023, “US colleges received $58B in philanthropic support.”¹ What is somewhat more surprising is that the same article points out that this figure actually represents a 2.5% reduction in charitable donations from the year before.

What are the implications of universities having become so reliant on the largesse of the nation's billionaires? A recent article from the site Bestcolleges.com details the uses to which many of these gifts have been put.² It is fair to note that some of these monies have been bestowed on causes that many of us might rally around; for example, the Lilly Endowment Inc. gave $100 million to the United College Negro Fund; Michael Bloomberg contributed $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University to support undergraduate financial aid. The contribution of $100 billion by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support historically grossly underfunded HBCUs was widely lauded as were donations totaling $400 billion from MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, to predominantly minority-serving institutions.

But asking whether such contributions were for causes that we can support or not completely elides the key issues that constitute what we might call, “the philanthropic turn.” First, the fact that we even have such a gross proliferation of billionaires who can afford to give so much money to their favored personal causes speaks to the devastating levels of inequality that now are imperiling our democracy more broadly. Second, we have several examples of how these megadonors then come to feel that their benevolence empowers them to meddle in the affairs of the universities they support; such intrusions range from intervening in faculty hires and tenure decisions to weighing in on the intellectual content of departmental offerings and curricula.

Almost 10 years ago, when I co-edited a book entitled Learning Under Neoliberalism, most of the contributors focused on the threats to academic freedom and equality of access that originated from within universities. Such coercions included an increase in audit measures coming from upper-level administrators intended to quantify and police our work; the rapid growth in the number of nontenure-eligible faculty in the academy; and the antiunion measures that have intensified as faculty members, at least in some quarters, became more open to collective organizing in the face of a drastically shrinking professoriate. Demands for monitoring “faculty productivity” have become even more difficult for faculty members to satisfy given the context of shrinking resources mandated by draconian austerity measures. Some of these legislative actions, particularly in public institutions and in red states, are certainly linked to ideological initiatives undertaken in response to what elected officials see as the unfettered and predetermined liberalism of academia. It is also significant that this growth in philanthropic activity has taken place against the backdrop of rapidly declining public subsidies for higher education that have driven institutions to seek greater financial support from wealthy donors, foundations, and corporations.

In our introduction to the volume, Learning Under Neoliberalism, Boone Shear and I (2015, 7) acknowledged the shape-shifting and differentially hegemonic nature of global neoliberalism. Yet, as a way of linking all of the case studies we included in that volume to one another, we found it useful to draw on the key processes that characterize neoliberal governance: “processes like marketization, privatization, responsibilizing individuals, auditing and accountability, and entrepreneurialism” (6). These ideas accord with our classic understanding of neoliberalism. Yet, a few years before this, Jeff Maskovsky (2012, 819) had published an article in which he pointed out that, “Although it is tempting to gloss [recent university budget cuts] as part of a broader neoliberal assault on public education … the austerity measures that states have adopted are a direct consequence of the Tea Party's right-wing (not neoliberal) populism.”

This is a critical insight. Not all austerity measures or systems of audit arise within the same political-economic context. Increasingly, such measures are emerging from environments that are far more authoritarian than they are neoliberal. In fact, if we were to produce an updated version of Learning Under Neoliberalism today, we might well feel that Learning Under Authoritarianism would be a more apt title.

What may have flown a bit under our radar 10 years ago was the growing influence of Big Philanthropy in academic settings and the ways in which this trend was also contributing to a proliferation of antidemocratic impulses more broadly. This is true in both public and private academic institutions, though the extreme shortfalls in funding that public institutions are now facing make them more vulnerable to the prospect of courting wealthy donors to fill budget gaps. Then again, it is also the case that elite private institutions are more likely to have affluent alumni who are eager to put their imprimatur on their alma maters.

Since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, there has been a movement among philanthropists to withhold funding from universities deemed by them to have been too tolerant of pro-Palestinian activism. This tendency ratcheted up considerably after the faux congressional hearings purporting to investigate the increase in antisemitism on college campuses. It is way beyond the scope of this commentary to assess the extent to which antisemitism is an issue on various campuses; nor am I making any claims here for how we should regard the humanitarian costs of the war in Gaza. My point here is simply to note how wealthy alumni are wielding their power to police campus activities and academic offerings so that they can adjudicate behavior they believe does not constitute “legitimate” free speech.

This trend certainly did not arise solely as a result of the current tragic situation in Gaza or even as a consequence of the long shadow of the conflict in the Middle East. In 1995, for example, Yale University confronted the following situation. According to an article in The New York Times,³ “Four years after giving $20 million to Yale University to expand its Western civilization curriculum, Lee M. Bass, a billionaire alumnus, has requested that the money be returned because Yale never implemented the courses.” Bass wanted not only the power to approve the syllabi that would be taught in those courses; he also requested the authority to preapprove the faculty members who would teach in this program. The New York Times also pointed out that, in the end, “The donation may actually cost Yale money. The university, which already has a $12 million deficit in its $900 million operating budget, must now find the money to pay the five tenured professors whose salaries were being drawn from the Bass gift” (Steinberg, 1995).

Six months ago, after the first congressional hearings on antisemitism that brought down the presidents of two elite universities, Harvard and Penn, Robert Reich wrote an editorial that appeared in The Guardian,⁴ in which he chastised these two college presidents for equivocating on whether calling for the genocide of Jews (or any other group) was ever acceptable in any context. But the focus of Reich's commentary was more directly a criticism of the subsequent actions taken by rich benefactors, who threatened to withdraw their lavish gifts if the presidents did not resign and who put pressure on other donors to do the same. It was clearly these actions that forced the resignation of the two college presidents far more than it was their performances in the hearings. While Reich noted that big donors and wealthy trustees have long taken an active hand in shaping campus activities in accordance with their interests, he concluded, “But not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression” (Reich, 2023).

The Philanthropic Turn has been a significant and perhaps somewhat underrecognized feature of contemporary policymaking in several domains. Through their lavish contributions, the 1 percent are imposing their own visions of society in contexts as diverse as remaking the urban infrastructure, to reshaping education, including colleges and universities. Certainly, there is nothing new about the rich undertaking measures aimed at various forms of social engineering; we need only think of the Carnegies and Rockefellers and other magnates of the Gilded Age to see that such activities have a long history in the United States and elsewhere. The difference now is that in the past 100 years or so, our notions of what constitutes democratic participation have broadened considerably. However short those ideals may fall, philanthropic interventions in the public sphere are a product of much larger trends, such as taxation policies that increasingly favor the wealthy. Such policies serve to constrain democratic participation by promoting increases in inequality.

What is to be done? First, we need to mobilize a movement to gain greater recognition for the extent to which public subsidies for higher education have plummeted. In an article in Inside Higher Ed, Woodhouse (2015)⁵ noted that despite public outrage about universities engaging in spending sprees dedicated to building such amenities as “climbing walls and lazy rivers,” the far more important cause creating greater degrees of student debt is drastic cuts in public funding to universities. According to a 2022 report by the National Education Association (NEA)⁶, 32 states provided less support for their public institutions of higher education in 2022 than they did in 2008 (NEA Research, in Partnership with ASA Research, 2022). We need to organize a coalition of faculty, staff, and students to lobby our state legislatures to increase state subsidies to support public higher education.

Second, we need to try to monitor how the actions of Big Philanthropy are shaping programs and priorities in our institutions. Realistically, we probably can't stop or restrict such bestowments, but we can at least try to scrutinize the impact of such gifts and can possibly mobilize some resistance when such funding measures seem to contravene the basic values of higher education as we see it.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we need to see ourselves first and foremost as workers in a destabilized and turbulent economy. As Shear and I (2015, 23) observed in the conclusions to our introduction to Learning Under Neoliberalism, we need to think about the strategies we might engage in to form new political alliances outside of the university context: “Such tactics will surely involve us making common cause with other constituencies outside of academia, constituencies…who have been far more bruised and battered by the depredations of neoliberalism and its curious doppelganger, the law-and-order state—than we have been.”

The actions by big donors at Harvard and Penn and elsewhere over this past tumultuous year are blatant illustrations of the ways in which the moneyed class now sees higher education as fair game for wielding their enormous resources and exercising their will. We would do well to recognize and resist the ways in which these actions are creating universities that are designed exclusively by, and for, the elite 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.