The University of Phoenixification of Elite Education | What does the oligarch behind the ‘Ivy League antisemitism crisis’ actually want?

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But a leading orchestrator of the entire media frenzy around antisemitism in the Ivy League, Apollo Global Management co-founder Marc Rowan, is literally the CEO of the parent company of the University of Phoenix... Rowan has been mounting what the American Association of University Professors has termed a “hostile takeover” of his alma mater in Philadelphia...

Rowan began agitating to remove Magill shortly after she refused to cancel a Palestinian literary festival back in September. That timing alone tells you that the current shitstorm was in the works well before October 7... And while Rowan has publicly attempted to link the massacre to alleged sentiments expressed during the literary festival in Philadelphia, a jaw-dropping email he sent the University’s Board of Trustees last week in the wake of Magill’s resignation with the subject heading “Moving Forward” articulates a much vaster, more existential agenda than anything most antisemitism hysterics have voiced.

In its call for austerity, lobbying savvy, better branding, and more action on AI and online education, Rowan’s email might have been inspired by his prescription for “turning around” the University of Phoenix. But the sections about disciplining professors for voicing political opinions and establishing committees to determine the “risk” of faculty members and departments in the event of a “political realignment” seem distinctly cribbed from Ron DeSantis, whose notorious Stop WOKE Act, among many other things, would bar any university instructor teaching a non-elective course from doing so in a way that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individuals to believe a series of specific concepts.”

...the climate of terror DeSantis has promulgated throughout Florida remains, according to a disturbing 53-page report recently published by the American Association of University Professors, which quotes one self-professed conservative professor advising colleagues:

Bottom line: Big Brother is watching. He is taking names. I’m on their “woke” list! I’m the faculty advisor for the Federalist Society, for the Law School Republicans, and for the Christian Legal Society. If they find me threatening, the rest of you are dead in the water.

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https://archive.ph/4qotU

A Brookings Institution study published this month suggests that the Supreme Court may have made Penn more beholden than ever to donors, at least if it aspires to achieve anything resembling its old degree of racial diversity in compliance with the law. The study estimates that a class-based affirmative action policy would enable elite schools to achieve the same degree of racial diversity they currently obtain, at a cost of roughly triple the amount of financial aid they currently distribute, which would cost Penn more than a billion dollars a year, while likely wiping out the coveted places of many of the 55 percent of its students who currently finance its $90,000-a-year cost with no aid whatsoever.

Perhaps that is the thing motivating all these billionaires to show Big College who is boss. The cost of post-woke diversity and equity turns out to be the educational fortunes of their sons and daughters, and no self-respecting oligarch is willing to withstand that.

Ultimately, this subservience to the rich is going to cost the US. American universities are going to lose ground to China.