Woke elite universities are now facing Trumps wrath with budget cuts, scrapped DEI policies
It’s not a lot of fun being an administrator at an elite, woke university now that we have a new sheriff in the White House.Instead of coddling campus antisemites as Sleepy Joe Biden did, Donald Trump is demanding their expulsion. Those with green cards who support Hamas are getting expelled.
Trump is cutting off federal aid to Ivy League hotbeds like Columbia and demanding they drop DEI. Yet by and large, leftism still rules at our major universities.But maybe not for long if The Donald uses the ultimate weapon in his arsenal, something that might, just might, make the leftist college crowd turn into born-again MAGAs. I am talking about going after the college endowment systems at a time when they’ve never been as vulnerable.
The market sell-off plus some ill-timed investments made these once formidable pools of cash massively exposed to wonky investments and the heavy hand of the federal government if Trump is willing to turn the screws for maximum financial pain. College endowments are a big business, worth nearly $1 trillion in market value, and they’re the lifeblood of most big, elite and lefty schools of so-called higher learning.I know these places charge an arm and a leg for tuition, but universities need endowments to pay for new buildings, research and all that woke stuff you see in your kids’ core curriculum, plus the salaries of the leftist professors molding young minds. Their gains have been juiced by tech stocks, IPOs, M&A and particularly private equity, pools of cash that receive favorable tax treatment for taking companies private and selling them, often at a huge markup. If you want to know why college administrators until recently could thumb their nose at critics over being an arm of the woke left, preaching to students that America is a racist hellhole, it’s because they had endowment money to burn. No longer, according to my Wall Street sources who follow the endowment racket.
The stock market’s recent tariff tant...