For generations, Jewish philanthropy has been extraordinarily generous to American higher education. Our names adorn libraries, schools, institutes, dormitories and endowed chairs. We gave because universities represented learning, opportunity and the promise of American life. Then came Oct. 7.
What followed on many campuses produced anger, bewilderment and, among some Jewish donors, a perfectly understandable response: If this is what these institutions have become, why should we continue supporting them?
A provocative essay in the new issue of SAPIR suggests that may be the wrong question. Tao Tan, the senior managing director at a private investment firm and an affiliate at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for the Future of the American University, and former George Washington University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg argue that Jewish donors have misunderstood how universities actually work. They have treated them too much like corporations, assuming that presidents exercise CEO-like authority and that substantial financial support provides some corresponding measure of influence.
Universities don’t work that way. Their intellectual cultures are shaped much more diffusely — by faculty, departments, hiring committees, tenure decisions, scholarly networks and the prestige systems of academic disciplines. Changing that culture requires something more sophisticated than withholding a check or complaining to a university president.
That insight deserves serious attention. But it also points toward a larger lesson. The problem wasn’t that Jewish donors gave too much. It was that too often we asked too little about what our giving was accomplishing.
Philanthropy should never purchase academic conclusions. Donors shouldn’t dictate what professors teach, determine whom universities hire or demand that scholarship become pro-Israel. Replacing one intellectual orthodoxy with another would accomplish very little.
But academic freedom does not require philanthropic passivity. Donors can support scholars willing to challenge prevailing assumptions. They can fund graduate fellowships, postdoctoral positions, research, conferences, journals and visiting professorships. They can support serious study of Israel, antisemitism, Jewish history and the Middle East without prescribing the conclusions scholars must reach. Most importantly, they can support intellectual competition itself.
Tan and Trachtenberg make a striking practical point: In the humanities and social sciences, where outside research funding is scarce, relatively modest grants can profoundly affect a young scholar’s career. Instead of another $20 million building, imagine what even a fraction of that sum could accomplish if strategically distributed among scholars and programs committed to genuine intellectual inquiry.
Fund people and ideas, not merely bricks and plaques.
There is one qualification. Changing academic culture may take decades. Protecting students cannot. Jewish philanthropy therefore needs to operate on two clocks. The long clock invests in scholars, ideas and institutions that can reshape academic culture over a generation. The short clock insists that universities today enforce their rules, protect students from harassment and ensure that classrooms remain places of education rather than political coercion.
Walking away from American higher education would be satisfying. It might also amount to surrender. The better response is smarter engagement: fewer blank checks, greater accountability, less prestige philanthropy and more strategic philanthropy.
For decades, Jewish donors asked universities: What can we help you build? After Oct. 7, there is a better question: What kind of university will our philanthropy help build?
