Wesley Yang
"'I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni.'
To my knowledge, the Wall Street shareholder-activist model of hostile takeover has never before been deployed against US NGO's and universities.
Just as junior employee activism became a new star in the political firmament in the 2010's, driving the Great Awokening, fund managers are suddenly intervening in the governance of major US institutions. It is a fascinating development.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that racial preferences in college admissions were unconstitutional, only to be greeted by open avowals by universities, including Harvard, to find ways to persist in the granting of such preferences that could evade detection or enforcement.
The new donor activists propose themselves as a privatized enforcement arm of a SCOTUS decision that elite consensus would have happily thwarted.
We will see whether these new activists have the wherewithal and persistence to carry out this mission.
Many high net-worth Jewish individuals who are major donors to universities saw the world erupt into ecstasy at seeing Jews massacred -- including students and faculty at the very institutions that have been mainlining money from them for decades. Whether they can deploy their methods successfully in a sustained way is an open question -- frankly, I'm skeptical. But that they got one university president fired is already far more than anyone could have guessed was possible.
And an important thing happened that made any of this possible: they totally lost the fear and awe that made them such assiduous donors to these institutions in the first place. They realized that DEI has begun hollowing out these revered institutions (which still of course employ many of the world's smartest people) and that something fundamentally pathological has infected them and that they have a right to act to work their will in hitherto unprecedented and unthinkable ways. It is a story with major consequences for important institutions that was conducted more or less entirely on Twitter, with zero need to make recourse to the mainstream press. It's all a first move toward a general decoupling from the institutions sustaining the fragile pseudo-consensus. No faculty member is going to support having fund managers determine their president. But some faculty members know that the processes that made Gay's ascension inexorable were never going to be reformed from within, and that if anything was going to change, it would require some exogenous shock."
The reason Gay should not have been hired in the first place -- she promised to infuse all scholarship and instruction at Harvard with DEI -- is the reason she was hired
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 11, 2023