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A reckoning is under way for the Ivies and other elite universities, as top students look elsewhere and alumni donations drop because these schools have abandoned their missions and their principles to worship “woke.”
Who’ll gain? Schools that resisted the rot, like Perdue, Boston College, maybe the University of Chicago — and even the likes of Clemson and Ole Miss.
The immediate trigger for the change is of course the post-Oct. 7 wave of very public antisemitism posing as “pro-Palestine” activism, but that madness follows a generation-long abandonment of campus commitments to free speech and other fundamentals of the enlightenment project.
StopAntisemitism evaluates 25 different colleges each year for how effectively they address antisemitism, issuing letter grades based on their performance.
Its 2024 report found that 72% of Jewish students feel unwelcome in certain spaces on campus simply for being Jewish, and 52% had personally been victims of antisemitism at their schools. (And that echoed the findings of another reform group, Alums for Campus Fairness.)
As for the grades, the usual suspects — elite schools such as MIT, Brown and Cornell, and “good” ones like UC Davis, the University of Washington and University of Oregon — got F’s.
(As did Columbia, when it last got ranked, in 2022.)
Other prestigious schools got C’s or D’s, including Vassar and Stanford.
Clemson and the University of Mississippi won A’s — suggesting that red states are now the ones where “hate has no home.”
On the free-speech front, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranks over 200 schools based on their friendliness toward free expression.
Cornell is ranked No. 215 out of 251, Brown is at 229, and Columbia at 250.
Meanwhile, Clemson is 21, the University of Mississippi 20.
Sensing a pattern here?
Woke schools are suffering the consequences, with applicants and donors.
Harvard, for instance, saw its early decision applications for the class of 2028 drop 17%.
Meanwhile, wealthy alums like Bill Ackman, Marc Rowan, Robert Kraft and Ken Griffin have announced they’re halting donations, some of which exceeded $100 million. And lots of smaller fish will follow suit.
The left won’t yield power or end the rot quickly; schools like Harvard and Columbia are now only pretending they’ve learned their lesson, hoping to wait out today’s fury even if it means spending down their ginormous endowments.
Then again, talk of taxing those endowments is getting louder in response to the stalling tactics.
And unless or until these institutions concretely excise their toxicity and again focus on their core missions, all of them are headed for rapid decline.