“Who’s Really Funding Campus Protests?” Ways and Means Sends 9 More Letters to Universities
House Republicans are back on their high horses about campus protests. Even though the protests are nearly all gone. The protests died down at the end of the spring semester and commencements. But that didn’t stop House Republicans from sending out 9 more foot-stomping letters warning that Congress will not “sit idly by” or “countenance” universities’ foot-dragging on shutting down allegedly anti-Semitic protests. Threatening federal funding and tax exemptions. These letters are getting silly and repetitive so I won’t quote from them here. Click the links below to read one or all of them:
Read the letter to Barnard here. Read the letter to Columbia here. Read the letter to UC Berkeley here. Read the letter to UCLA here. Read the letter to Harvard here. Read the letter to MIT here. Read the letter to Northwestern here. Read the letter to Penn here. Read the letter to Rutgers here
Inside Higher Ed reports that universities are likely using the summer to prepare for a resurgence in the fall if the Israeli/Gaza conflict is still ongoing. Maybe the Republicans are trying to influence that preparation. Or just pandering for votes.
Meanwhile, The Chronicle of Philanthropy ran a story delving into the source of campus protest funding. The story asserts that the movement is fairly grassroots and funded by small donations. I think that’s heartening for two reasons. First, young people are recognizing and participating in Civil Society one way or the other. That has to be a good thing. Second, people are donating even without the benefit of tax deduction since most of us can’t claim it. Here is some of the article:
As the campus protests have swelled in size and intensity, so too have the questions, conspiracies, and conjectures about the funding behind them, with many feeding into longstanding right-wing talking points about billionaire George Soros and other left-wing donors. But data and testimony provided by movement leaders show that the student protests have not been largely funded or significantly shaped by any single donor or philanthropic organization. Although many pro-Palestinian groups participating in the protests — and pro-Israel groups more broadly — have received some funding from foundations or large donors, such as the Tides and Open Society Foundations, organizers maintain that a rapidly growing and decentralized network of young activists has propelled the protests forward.
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The Power of Small Donations
Among organizations supporting the protests is Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group whose student members have helped organize Passover Seders and Shabbat dinners in campus encampments across the country.
While the group has received significant support from several philanthropic organizations and high-profile donors — including just over $60,000 from the Tides Foundation, $210,000 from the Kaphan Foundation, $75,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and $225,000 from Open Society Foundations in 2022 — much of its funding comes from smaller individual donations.
“Our most common contribution is $15,” says Ari Solomon, director of development at Jewish Voice for Peace. “The overwhelming majority of our budget is fundraised every single year from tens of thousands of individual people.”
In a typical year, around 85 percent of the organization’s roughly $4 million budget comes from individual donors whose average-sized contribution is $60, with the remainder coming from philanthropic groups, says Solomon.
Funding Grassroots
For critics of the protests, “the real answer is scary, which is that there’s a true genuine grassroots movement of people who are upset about what’s happening in Gaza,” says Dan Shannon, chief partnerships officer at the Tides Foundation, which funds social justice organizations.
Earlier this month, an article in Politico went viral after suggesting that prominent Democratic donors were covertly funneling money toward student protesters through the Tides Foundation’s support for some pro-Palestinian groups, amounting to roughly $100,000 of its $800 million annual grant portfolio in 2022.
Tides has also received flack for its support of the pro-Palestinian groups Palestine Legal and the Adalah Justice Project through fiscal sponsorships, a system that can reduce the administrative legwork for small grassroots groups, but at the expense of funding transparency.
In reality, says Shannon, such critiques obscure the true funding mechanisms and popular support for the constellation of pro-Palestinian nonprofits and student groups behind the protest movement, many of which have received an influx of small donations and volunteers over the past seven months.
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darryll k. jones