Donor pushback over the Israel-Hamas conflict is giving US higher education an unprecedented moment of reflection on how dependent it has become on the need to obey private funders.

In the weeks since the Palestinian group Hamas attacked Israel, fuelling a far deadlier Israeli retaliation, US campus presidents have faced sustained pressure from donors and politicians to publicly back Israel.

Some of those leaders, most notably at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, have revised public statements to better fit the pro-Israel positions demanded by some of their major donors. The leaders of more than 100 institutions saying they “stand together with Israel”.

Columbia University postponed a fundraising event, concerned about how Israeli-Palestinian tensions might impair it. Some corporate leaders demanded that Penn fire Elizabeth Magill as president, in part because the university hosted a Palestinian cultural festival weeks before the Hamas attack.

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Politicians aligned with pro-Israel donors have joined in. They include Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, whose administration to official campus recognition of student groups supporting Palestinians.

Donor pressure has long been part of life for those in academic governance, said Ann Marcus, a professor of higher education at New York University who has served in top leadership roles at NYU and other institutions.

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But this moment “is qualitatively different and quantitatively different – in the amount of money, the threats, the interference, the judging of institutions and presidents”, Professor Marcus said.

The result, she said, was that US higher education now needed to reflect – especially after decades of public disinvestment – on how well it was truly able to protect its mission from outside forces. “I do think this is really a big inflection point,” Professor Marcus said.

That general view was shared by James Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University who investigated the layers of Koch Foundation influence at his campus. The sudden, blatant and widespread nature of the pro-Israel pressure on US colleges was making the donor influence problem “clearer than we may have been able to see it before”, Professor Finkelstein said.

“It should serve as at least a cautionary tale, if not a real warning, about how outside money can be a threat to the core mission of what a university is supposed to be about,” he said.

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One of the campus presidents who signed the pro-Israel statement, Gordon Gee of West Virginia University, said he acted without regard to donor preferences. Dr Gee, raised amid the Mormon faith and Jewish culture, said he did not usually speak out on global affairs and described himself as “very committed to supporting our students and all members of our university community”.

While his university community includes students who have been protesting against the killing of Palestinian civilians, Dr Gee said he was “very proud” to emphasise Israel’s interests. “I simply believe that Hamas created the circumstances under which all of this is occurring, and I’m a great supporter of that kind of moral clarity,” he said.

Top university leaders might have been caught off guard, Professor Marcus said, in part because of the savagery of the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians. “I think it got people really kind of derailed and jangled,” she said. “I’m sure they were surprised somewhat by the blowback, and I am too.”

Yet as the days had moved on, Professor Marcus said, university leaders appeared to have drawn some principled lines, such as rejecting calls from some corporate leaders for institutions to help identify students who joined protests. “So far,” she said, “it seems that higher ed is holding to its own integrity.”

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paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com