How Donors Can Shake Up Higher Ed
CAN philanthropists fix higher education? I’ve posed this question to more than 100 major donors over the past few months, from conservatives to moderates to a few on the center left. Most have given gifts to colleges and universities ranging from seven to nine figures, yet many have sworn off further donations, even after the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned.
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. This is something donors of all sizes can do, whether they’re giving a hundred million or a hundred bucks. Donors are furious for the right reasons. Even before higher ed’s largely antisemitic response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, many philanthropists were pulling back. A February Council for Advancement and Support of Education report found donations declined by more than a billion dollars between the 2022 and 2023 academic years, with the largest drop from individual alumni.
Donors across the ideological spectrum are worried about the decline of free speech and academic rigor, as well as the rise of diversity, equity and inclusion monoculture. Campus reactions to Oct. 7 deepened those concerns while creating a new class of disheartened donors. My advice to all donors is to channel that frustration into three specific strategies.
Look beyond your alma mater. 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.
Donors should look to institutions like the University of Florida, which last year hired former Sen. Ben Sasse as president. (That’s coming from a Florida State alum.) Other schools, like those in the University of North Carolina system, have begun ditching DEI. There are free-speech stalwarts like the University of Chicago, while University of Austin President Pano Kanelos and the donors who helped found UATX prove it’s possible to start from scratch. There are also many small religious and liberal-arts schools that provide excellent educations, like Hillsdale College. This list is far from exhaustive.
Choosing another school may be the best way to change an alma mater, since it fosters competition. If Harvard loses a billion dollars in donations from graduates, it doesn’t necessarily have to change. If those graduates loudly give those billion dollars to another school, Harvard will feel more heat.
Fund individuals and ideas, not buildings. It’s certainly appealing to put your name above a doorway or get top billing at commencement or other events. But these donations typically don’t change a university’s culture. Neither do unrestricted gifts for things like administrative expenses, which have few limitations on how schools can spend them. They often pay for things donors despise, like DEI bureaucracies.
The better approach is to support specific scholars or academic centers that directly align with a donor’s values. It’s much harder for universities to co-opt this money, and as Princeton’s Robert P. George, his James Madison Program and the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute prove (among many other examples), this approach can have far-reaching influence.
If a donor is giving a million bucks to a building or athletic program, he or she should at least require the university do something principled before getting the money, like sign the Chicago Statement on free speech.
Advocate for reform from the outside. 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. While some groups, like many free-speech organizations, are well-known, others fly under the radar. Philanthropists can also create or fund independent, school-specific organizations.
The goal shouldn’t simply be forcing out leaders in the short run. It should be fostering opposition on and off campus to demand real change over the long run.
That’s what donors want — the wholesale renewal of the colleges and universities they love and America needs. People across the ideological spectrum share this vision, and those in the middle and on the center left are among the most upset, having just come to realize how broken most universities are.
The past few months have shaken an unprecedented number of donors awake.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.