The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's Steve McGuire has been performing the useful service of collecting and sharing the letters from donors pulling out of Ivy League universities in response to the surging antisemitism on some of the the campuses and the leadership failures in response. One of the best ones that has come across is from Jonathon S. Jacobson of Highsage Ventures here in Boston, who wrote to Penn President Elizabeth McGill in part:
The University that I attended and shaped me is virtually unrecognizable today, and the values it stands for are not American ones. There has been a litany of issues over the past several years where the Administration has shown no leadership, moral courage or an ability to distinguish between what is clearly right and clearly wrong. ... It is said that a fish rots from the head; if those are the free speech principles future journalists are gleaning from their university studies, no wonder the mainstream media's coverage of virtually every issue is infected by extremist political bias....
If you were to walk through the U.S. Holocaust Museum or Yad Vashem, which I would encourage you to do if you have not, you would see that the first half of each is dedicated to telling the story of how Hitler was ultimately able to exterminate six million Jews and have ordinary Germans turn a blind eye to it, namely an almost decade-long period of carefully scripted propaganda which systematically delegitimized Jews as an inferior and subhuman species. Anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and elsewhere have been on an alarming rise for quite some time, largely being met with a shrug by pro-human rights activists and the broader community, and history is repeating itself as we speak, as witnessed by the lack of universal condemnation and unspeakable celebrations cheering on last week's beyond horrific terrorist attack in Israel, which marked the largest loss of life by Jews since the Holocaust.
As Marc said so elegantly on CNBC last week, it's not your fault that you cannot distinguish between right and wrong or feel like there is some moral equivalence between unadulterated pure evil and a legitimate political dispute. You are a product of a very screwed up higher ed values system, where academic rigor has slowly been replaced by extremist political ideology, and, sadly, as a country our leaders have lost the ability to take the moral high ground. Unfortunately, an entire generation of our kids is also a product of this system, and this ideology, which is now deeply ensconced at Penn and other countless universities, has now also infected the media, our legal apparatus and the Congress.....
Astonishingly, Penn is reacting to these sorts of messages by retaliating against the whistleblowers. An email went out today from Penn Alumni President Michael Barrett '89 denouncing what he called "the most personal type of attacks" on President Magill and describing her leadership as "inspiring." He claimed the university had been subjected to "a great deal of misinformation." Penn's board chair, Scott Bok, attacked Marc Rowan for creating "confusion and division." Bok lashed out at Rowan, saying he "actively works to divide our community." And amazingly, Bok said, "Rowan's attempt to draw a connection between the [Palestine Writes Literature Festival] with the heinous terrorist attack on Israel is shameful."
The only shameful thing is a university that attacks whistleblowers calling attention to antisemitism, and whose leadership still can't see the connection between anti-Israel hate and Hamas terrorism. What a sad thing for Penn.