We live in a country full of very generous people—especially conservatives. They give to many causes, not least among them education. But it’s time for all donors to start thinking critically about whether the institutions they support are worth it and find other ones if they aren’t.
The last few months have been clarifying for Americans about the state of higher education. The supposed crème de la crème of universities in the Ivy League showed themselves to be curdled milk in a Poison Ivy League. While these institutions have become tyrannical about “misgendering” and “microaggressions” among faculty and students over the last few years, the proliferation of vile antisemitic words and behavior on their campuses has led mostly to shrugs and denials and weasel words about what calls for “intifada” and “jihad” mean. The embarrassing responses of presidents Liz Magill of Penn, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT to Rep. Elise Stefanik’s questioning in Congress earlier this month led to Magill’s resignation. Attempts to force Gay, a mediocre scholar whose published work has been shown to have violated Harvard’s own plagiarism policy, to resign or be fired have been unsuccessful. Like Kornbluth, she will continue to make big money and little moral sense.
But it would be a mistake to think this is just about a few east coast universities with multibillion dollar endowments. Intellectual serenity, it has been said, consists in not giving a damn what they’re doing at Harvard. But there is precious little intellectual serenity in this country. Almost all higher education in this country follows the lead of the Ivies when it comes to the crazy. Administrators everywhere think, imagine, or aspire to being a “peer institution” to the loony bins in Cambridge and Philadelphia. Take a look at any set of stories on sites that report on the crazy in higher ed such as The College Fix, Campus Reform, or the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Though the Ivies are well represented, so too are all sorts of institutions, including church-related schools and state universities in red states. The poison of relativistic claptrap and tyrannical DEI moralism with its anti-conservative, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-white propaganda has weakened every institution that has not had sufficient personnel with the will to fight back against it.
The academic leftists love to talk about “systemic” problems. What we saw in Congress weren’t just examples of elite moral and intellectual corruption. They were representatives of a system that has been sickened and is sickening.
And that’s where donors of all levels come in. Among your Christmas cards from family and friends, we are all being besieged with cards from our own dear alma maters and those of our children and grandchildren. Scenes of students walking across snowy campuses are laid on top of appeals to give back and help the next generation and all sorts of italicized and non-italicized plucks on the heartstrings. Undergraduates are calling you to thank you for making it possible for me to go to college! It can be very hard for people who remember stirring lectures on King Lear, endless late-night conversations, and romantic walks with a future spouse to resist these appeals.
And yet resist they often must. For too often these days Shakespeare has been banished, conversations are muted due to speech codes, and marriage and family are treated as evils due to their propensities to bring new children and carbon emissions into the world. (Well, unless they are “gay marriages.”)
So before you pick up your checkbook or scan the QR code to give the old college try one more time, it would be wise to do a little research. The first step is to look at the college or university’s website. If the first thing that greets you is a statement about the institution’s unending commitment to the unholy trinity of Diversity, Equity, or Inclusion, you can have no doubt that while your money is welcome, Shakespeare, free speech, and the centrality of the mother-father family in society aren’t. Your money will probably go to funding a BLM or pro-Palestine march, or perhaps paying the five-figure honorarium for a pornographic actress during Sex Week.
Of course, not all institutions are quite so forthright on their websites about their commitments or what’s going on at their campus. A quick glimpse at their job offerings will often tell a lot more. If they want scholars equipped in Critical Race Theory or are not-so-subtly suggesting they will only hire “people of color” or “sexual minorities” for positions, this place is Harvard without the money or prestige. But if the hiring notices don’t seem too weird, you ought to to take one more step.
Before donating any money to a college or university, ask for access to their internal website—what faculty, staff, and students can see. If they don’t want you to be able to see that, that’s likely because they don’t think you’ll be very happy to find out that males who identify as female might be rooming with your daughter or granddaughter. Or perhaps that students are being offered “Accountability Training” or “Privilege Workshops” due to their original sins of whiteness or maleness. Or perhaps that they are pressuring all students to be left-wing activists about some issue of domestic or international politics.
This writer has been in and around higher education for two decades. I can tell you that, chances are, your dear alma mater—“soul mother”—is likely more wicked stepmother to souls these days. And if that is the case, the responsible thing to do is to tell the undergraduate on the phone why you aren’t donating and figure out a place where your money can do good.
There are lots of small colleges and universities where intellectual serenity—in the ignorance-of-Harvard definition—is the rule. Hillsdale is the best-known, but there are others out there. Alternatively, there are a great many options for groups that are providing educational opportunities for students outside of the university proper. Anselm House, which provides Christian spiritual and intellectual formation at the University of Minnesota, and the Aggie Catholic program at Texas A & M are two great examples of religious programs doing great work. ISI and the Claremont Institute are two examples of conservative organizations offering fellowships and educational opportunities for college and graduate students.
It’s easy to keep donating to the same old places. Nostalgia for a time in which our minds were formed and our souls expanded is a powerful pull. But if we want the next generation to have any such nostalgic memories and feelings, we need to support the institutions that will create them.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.