Wall Street vs.the Ivy League

More corporate leaders are fed up with campus culture. Can business and academia find common ground?

- JEFF JOHN ROBERTS

In November of last year, a flood of alumni donations came pouring into Harvard-hardly an unusual event for a school that oversees a $50 billion endowment. But something stood out: Many of the donations amounted to exactly $1.

The piddling contributions were a protest of a campus culture that, in the eyes of critics, had restricted political speech while giving free rein to anti-Semitism. The action had been inspired by Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity giant Apollo, who a month earlier had called on fellow alums of the University of Pennsylvania-where he has been a prodigious donor-to join him in stiffing that school with $1 donations. And they came as another big Wall Street name, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, launched a noisy campaign to oust the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT after those officials testified before Congress about campus antiSemitism in a way many viewed as hypocritical and insensitive. (By early January, the heads of Harvard and Penn had resigned.) This Ivy League vs. Wall Street battle erupted in the context of bitter division over the Israel-Hamas conflict and its tragic cost in thousands of lives. It has also provided fodder for a much wider attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), with opponents including Ackman, a Harvard College and Business School alum, portraying the Ivies' freespeech stumbles as the consequence of out-of-control "wokeness." But even in that context, the breadth of the dollar-donation protest was striking, and so has been the continued dissatisfaction among alumni and donors. Ackman and his allies probably stand to the right of much of the business community on diversity issues, but his activism has struck a chord beyond culture-warrior circles because it tapped into a wider discontent.