Colleges Should Defend Students’ Free Speech Against Billionaire Donors

Criticism of student groups blaming Israel for the killing of civilians by Hamas terrorists gives colleges and universities a choice between protecting their students or caving into the pressure of wealthy donors. They should choose their students.

Student reactions to the attack—like those expressed in a letter from the Harvard University Palestine Solidarity Committee, co-signed by several dozen other student organizations—blaming Israel as being “solely responsible for all unfolding violence” have caused enormous backlash against the students, as well as the schools.

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, a Harvard alum, demanded on social media that Harvard release the names of students who had signed onto the letter so that he—and other CEOs who support him—could make sure they didn’t “accidently hire” any of the students who voiced those opinions. Wealthy donors and organizations have both threatened and actually withdrawn financial support over schools taking too long to condemn the attacks.

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The Wexner Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to developing Jewish leaders in business and government, terminated its 30-year relationship with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. And the University of Pennsylvania faced calls from another Wall Street billionaire for the university president and board of trustees to be fired, and for other donors to cut off their donations over the billionaire’s dislike of the school’s response to the attacks.

Let me be clear about people’s rights to express their opinions.

Donors—whether wealthy billionaires or not—have a right to talk with their mouths, feet, and wallets. If they don’t like what the schools do they have a perfect right to say so and stop donating. If a wealthy Wall Street billionaire felt up to leaving their plush offices they could even get out and protest—imagine that.

Students, too, have a right to do the same.

They can protest—as they often do—and even choose to leave their schools if they want. But it’s how educational institutions handle these controversies and expressions that critically affects education and, ultimately, our freedoms.

Allowing and protecting student free expression is not only protecting the First Amendment, but educating students about how to process the events of the world by thinking about them, reacting viscerally and intellectually, while learning how to seek solutions. That’s the job of educators. They don’t need to listen to loudmouth billionaires like Bill Ackman dictating how to educate.

Ackman appears oblivious to the irony of his social media support for MAGA poster-boy Kyle Rittenhouse—whom Ackman praised as a “civic-minded patriot” for killing two unarmed people with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, and maiming a third—while he calls for the McCarthy-style blacklisting of students who signed the letter blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks.

He’s not alone in calling for the punishment of students for expressing their views. One New York University (NYU) law student lost their offer to a prestigious law firm over their expression.

NYU’s reaction is particularly troubling, as their public statement to The New York Times suggested the student could be under investigation for misconduct—a likely violation of that student’s privacy rights. Students at Harvard are also being doxed by a conservative group that has put their names and faces on the side of a bus that drove around campus and labeled them “Harvard's leading antisemites.”

But we keep seeing this playbook of attacking education being used by the powerful and elite.

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The banning of curriculum in Florida and other states that offend powerful politicians like Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the caving in of educational organizations like the College Board, which stripped down its African Studies Advanced Placement Studies to comport with Florida’s “Stop Woke” law are but two examples.

Billionaires who want to dictate educational policies confuse campuses with corporations, and educational institutions need to stiffen their backbone and push back.

Most colleges and universities already have existing policies and mission statements that ban hate speech and any form of discrimination based on religion, political viewpoints, gender, and the like. They should remind the critics and their own students of these policies that allow for the discipline of students for violating such rules—discipline that includes suspension and expulsion.

Sure, it can be a tough call in the heat of the moment to distinguish between impassioned speech and racism and antisemitism—hate speech that masquerades as free speech—but that’s what educational institutions get paid the big bucks to do.

To protect their students, schools should denounce efforts like the one by Bill Ackman to target students and expose them to potential life-threatening danger through doxing. At the same time, they should also enforce rules against discrimination and hateful conduct because that enforcement also protects their students.

Universities have always been a flashpoint for social and historical change. The wide-scale student protests during the Vietnam War, calls for divestment over apartheid, and climate change are just a few instances that have contributed greatly to social change.

That’s the way it should be in a free society.

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Those looking to use their power to dictate educational policies and the free exchange of ideas on campuses are blind to the fact that the power to impose their opinions because of wealth and power is a basic building block of authoritarianism—not education.

Stanford University may provide a good working model for schools facing the inevitable controversies of world events. It has put out a statement stating that “as a moral matter, we condemn all terrorism and mass atrocities. This includes the deliberate attack on civilians by Hamas” but which also manages expectations by saying to the campus and world that “you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

That seems about right to me. In education, commentaries about world events—whether they be horrific or wonderful—should take place primarily in the classroom.

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