The Capital Strike

We need media coverage about the Ivy League. Just not this coverage

It is true that the elite media of the United States—the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Yorker—spend too much time covering the campus politics of the Ivy League. At times over the past week, the fallout from the disastrous presidents’ hearing before the House education committee has dominated the front pages of the Times, in particular. It has even, occasionally, displaced news about the actual war currently taking place in Gaza—a triumph of discourse over importance. Even the most myopic observer of culture wars would agree that the forced resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president just isn’t as important as real-world fighting.

My social media feeds have lit up with people rightly decrying the overemphasis of coverage on the travails of some Ivy League presidents. These posts usually include calls on the Times and others to rebalance their reportage to spend more time on the schools and universities where most college-bound Americans actually learn.

Let me state at the outset that I usually agree with this complaint. In fact, I’m usually the one making this complaint. But this time, we actually need more coverage about what’s happening to Penn, Harvard, and other institutions, because it matters a lot more than the typical fracas over speech or Oberlin’s dining hall offerings.¹

We actually need to pay attention to what’s happening at the Ivies right now in relation to the current conflict. We don’t have to have sympathy for university presidents, not least because they should have done better. And I’m not going to defend the tepid defense of speech or safety that the university presidents offered. Instead, I will argue that categorizing this as yet another “campus controversy” downplays what’s at stake too much.

We should, instead, recognize the assault on Penn as a form of a capital strike against institutions that tolerate dissent because they tolerate dissent—and insist that the coordinated actions of enormously powerful people with vast amount of resources be at the center of the story, rather than a plot device.

The Penn story began well before October 7 and has only intensified since then. Penn, for context, is home to the Penn Biden World Center and gave the former vice president a perch between gigs in the White House; it is also, like all Ivies, at the center of a web of power and influence manifested in its board of trustees. Many of these trustees are dismayed by the leftward drift of the institution, and many of them are sensitive to what they see (and what can, indeed, sometimes be) antisemitic displays or pro-Palestinian activism on campus.

These sorts of men tend to think that campus activism should be policed—and, when it comes to people feeling afraid for life and safety, I take their point, even as I take it much more generally than they would (for instance, I would wager at least some of them think of Islamophobic violence or anti-trans violence as not really that serious). Many of them go beyond that, to support what—if we were talking about campus activists—we would call “deplatforming”. They object to any sort of discussion about issues relating to Palestine and Israel that would be relatively commonplace even in Israel.

They have a great many tools to make their viewpoints not only seen but also enforced. They can, for instance, donate funds to manifest centers for teaching courses and crafting ideas that they agree with; they can also withhold or take back their donations, as Penn donors have done. The latter, I argue, is a form of a capital strike, the leveraging of resources to reshape institutions and, crucially, the behavior of faculty and other workers at those institutions. Through those actions, they hope to tamp down dissent and protect against threats.

Some have asked how it is that Penn, with its $21 billion endowment, can be afraid of donors, even those who can yank a $100 million gift. The answer is self-evident. Institutions are sensitive to those who provide them resources, and at no major institution is tuition enough to pay even for the cost of instruction, much less for research and other functions. Endowments, of course, are encumbered, and so it is hard to move money around to make up for such losses—and thus losing on such gifts, and the promises of future gifts, really has an impact. Gifts at this level not only sustain universities but can reshape their offerings and priorities.

(You may be thinking to yourself that you would not act that way if you were a university president. Well, the ultima ratio of the donors who write large enough checks to be on major university boards is that they choose senior administrators, and they would never choose you.)

In some ways, what the donors are doing is a form of protest and a bid for control just like those who have joined sit-ins, teach-ins, and other protest actions, decorous and not, around the country. In other ways, it is not. Students and instructors do not wield the kind of power, even collectively, that the trustees of an institution do. Legally, corporately, the trustees are the institution. And individually trustees of places like Penn tend to be the sort of people who can command the attention of politicians, either through ongoing relationships or hopes for ongoing relationships.

It seems silly to assert baldly that wealthy and powerful people can shape institutions to their will. Of course they can. That is why people attain wealth and exercise power. Yet the complaints that the media is paying much too much attention to this Ivy drama have begun to entertain a sort of denialism about what’s going on here. Framed as a protest action by wealthy and powerful people designed to break private institutions—and their charges—to their will, this looks like a rather important battle between groups of political actors over shaping public opinion regarding the most notorious issue of the day. This isn’t another trend story based on the gossip at Winthrop House. It is a story about power.

It would help, then, if this were the frame that the Times and other outlets would adopt. (This is closer to the line that The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have taken, although they tend to downplay the political aspects, reporting on it more as an industry and a society story.) I do not make this argument to save Claudine Gay or to avenge Kim Magill; rather, I am interested in making clear why, even if you think that New College’s destruction or the Cal State strikes should get more coverage, you can agree that this story does actually matter. This action will not stop with the Ivies, or private schools; indeed, state governments have vast potential control over their public universities on issues like these, and the arguments here will not be deployed in red states alone.

I want to be clear that I write in large part here as a social scientist. I am constantly interested in the operations of power in society, especially in my society. I am also, to be clear, interested in making sure that all of my colleagues and students feel safe on campus (and there is more happening on campuses than just innocent chants—on all corners). But I am also interested in this topic as a faculty member and someone who thinks that, on the whole, violent intrusions into higher education by people with little experience of running campuses will end poorly.

1. That controversy, by the way, was as badly misrepresented in the discourse as the scalding McDonald’s coffee cup.