Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via AP
CEO of Apollo Global Management Marc Rowan takes part in a panel at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit, November 7, 2023, in Hong Kong.
Most viewers probably thought it was an inspired bit of absurdity when, during the opening sketch of a recent Saturday Night Live satirizing the now-infamous college presidents hearing on antisemitism, Kenan Thompson swooped in to offer his perspective on the matter from his post as “president of the University of Phoenix.” (“Lady, we’ll offer a class on anything … the only two mandatory classes at the University of Phoenix are ‘How to log into the University of Phoenix online’ and ‘How to set up autopay.’”)
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. Apollo acquired the scandal-plagued diploma mill’s parent company, confusingly also named Apollo, in 2017. And while Rowan has been mounting what the American Association of University Professors has termed a “hostile takeover” of his alma mater in Philadelphia, he’s been simultaneously orchestrating an equally alarming plot to dump University of Phoenix onto the University of Idaho, in a scheme that could have an even more devastating impact on American higher education.
Under Apollo’s stewardship, the University of Phoenix shut down 80 associate degree programs and closed, sold, or made plans to shutter all but one of its more than 200 physical campuses and mini-campuses worldwide. It whittled its full-time faculty to just 127 full-time instructors for 96,000 students. It agreed to pay Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission $191 million to settle a deceptive practices lawsuit, and was the subject of more than 3,000 consumer complaints to the FTC between 2017 and the beginning of 2021, along with over 73,000 borrower defense to repayment claims to the Department of Education. It appointed its third president in a single year after the DOE launched an investigation into the role of its newly appointed president in the collapse of his last online university. And it reported a six-year graduation rate of 26.2 percent.
But for Rowan, the University of Phoenix overhaul was a glorious success. The Apollo fund that acquired the online school extracted about $1 billion in dividends during the first four years of its investment, despite the unprecedented tens of billions of dollars in student loans the Biden administration has canceled on behalf of students of virtually every shady for-profit online college other than University of Phoenix. Apollo then brokered the aforementioned lucrative agreement to double its initial investment by selling the school to the University of Idaho, though state attorney general Raúl Labrador has sued to block that purchase, arguing the deal was hashed out in secret meetings that violated state law. (The university has demanded $2,400 from a local education website to comply with open records requests it filed to learn more about the transaction.)
The media depiction of the “Ivy League antisemitism crisis” as an in-crowd battle between Harvard and its obnoxious billionaire alumnus Bill Ackman is fun, because it pits the nation’s most insufferable institution against a self-aggrandizing Wall Street jerk with a million Twitter followers, and because both sides have emerged looking worse for wear. The fraud has showcased the self-enrichment Ackman and other well-heeled Ivy League alumni derive from their tax-deductible donations, the scandal has shone a spotlight on the possible shoddiness of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s scholarship, and The New York Times has looked deservedly ridiculous for devoting ten reporters to covering the university’s palace intrigue during the deadliest war in recent memory.
But Marc Rowan’s lower-key machinations are far more important, for three reasons. First, Rowan is far more powerful than Ackman; Apollo boasts a half-trillion dollars in assets under management to Ackman’s $18.5 billion, giving its CEO almost incomprehensible power over the nation’s economy and its political system. Second, the institutions over which Rowan has steamrolled are far more representative of what higher education in America actually looks like. The University of Phoenix, for one, is the single greatest producer of student debt by a hefty margin—its former students having accumulated a staggering $35 billion worth of it as of 2014. It’s an exemplar of the debt-financed American higher-education system, freed of the cobblestone autumn-leaf college brochure bullshit and distilled to its nakedly predatory essence.
The University of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, represents something like the Harvard of people who view the University of Phoenix as an ingenious business model. While it lacks many of the prestigious trappings of its neighbor to the north, it is quantitatively every bit as elite as Harvard—at least inasmuch as its undergraduate college produces more billionaires—and just slightly less exclusive, admitting 7 percent of applicants to Harvard’s 3 percent. Yet its campus culture is, like that of most American universities, deeply pragmatic and mostly apolitical, something like the inverse of a place like Oberlin. Few students would challenge the notion that Penn is a high-end credentialing brand its customers deploy to attract high-end employment brands. (Having gone to college there, I say this from personal experience.)
Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies during a House Education and Workforce Committee Hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, December 5, 2023.
Third and most importantly, Rowan’s campaign to overthrow its administration has thus far been entirely successful, in part because of the total lack of organized pushback by its alumni population—4,000 of whom apparently signed Rowan’s open letter castigating university president Liz Magill for “platforming antisemitism”—but also because it was clearly and obviously a deliberate plot, waged not opportunistically on social media like Ackman’s but behind the scenes from his helm atop the Wharton Board of Advisors.
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 as such, has an agenda much broader than anything that could have been inspired by the massacre Hamas inflicted on Israeli civilians that day. 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 18 SUGGESTIONS POSED AS (VERY LOADED) “QUESTIONS,” Rowan called for: shrinking the university’s 48-member Board of Trustees and establishing a “risk committee” to assess whether the “current political orientation” of the university “has exposed UPenn to significant risk in the event of political realignment in Congress”; shutting down academic departments; doubling down on online education and something called “AI education”; incorporating “viewpoint diversity” into its diversity, equity, and inclusion framework for hiring “faculty, our administrators and the remainder of the University community”; articulating its plan for complying with the Supreme Court ruling banning explicit race-based affirmative action; disciplining professors who in any way display “political and other leanings” to students; and enhanced focus on branding. (Predictably, a Rowan spokesperson claimed to The Philadelphia Inquirer that his questions “in no way” reflected “what Marc wants,” but the questions were so wildly outside the range of typical trustee purview that it’s impossible to take that contention seriously.)
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.”
A federal judge enjoined the state from enforcing that law, following a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. But 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.
Marc Rowan does not appear to have ever been a supporter of Ron DeSantis. After giving $1 million to Donald Trump’s Victory Fund during the 2020 campaign cycle, he gave heavily to a bipartisan group of congressional candidates and PACs in 2022, and this year has donated almost exclusively to Republicans, most heavily to the erstwhile presidential candidate Tim Scott, for whom he co-hosted at least one Hamptons fundraiser, and most recently to antisemitism hearing convener North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, for whom he is slated to co-host a fundraiser with his fellow Wharton alumnus and coup plotter Ron Lauder next month.
But Rowan’s email to the trustees was hailed as “Awesome” by one Christopher Rufo, a primary architect of the national Stop Woke agenda and DeSantis’s specific right-wing takeover of a small, state-run liberal arts school called New College in Sarasota, which has purged hundreds of professors, administrators, and students, dramatically overhauled the curriculum and, for reasons that remain a mystery, recruited and awarded athletic scholarships to no fewer than 70 freshman baseball players despite the fact that the tiny campus lacks a baseball field or, in the words of the AAUP report, “any other intercollegiate athletic facility.”
As the AAUP report explains, the DeSantis education reform agenda is a global phenomenon. Turkish universities have purged more than 6,000 professors deemed hostile to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Indian universities have embarked upon a comprehensive campaign of scrubbing references to Muslim-Hindu unity and anti-Muslim violence from school textbooks, and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban’s war on “woke culture,” according to the report, “could easily be mistaken for DeSantis’s ‘war on woke.’”
I would submit that Rowan’s “hostile takeover,” as AAUP terms it, hasn’t been nearly hostile enough, as not a single college friend of mine has voiced any outrage over Rowan’s machinations. But since Rowan’s email was leaked, 900 members of the Penn faculty have signed an open letter saying they “unambiguously reject the view that the Board of Trustees, the Schools’ Boards of Advisors, alumni, or donors should determine Penn’s academic priorities or governance policies.” Rowan’s “prescription” for reform at Penn, one instructor told me, “is right out of the Florida report.”
FOR YEARS NOW, CRITIQUES OF ELITE UNIVERSITY NORMS have highlighted their destructive impact on Enlightenment principles we regard as inextricable from education itself, like the Socratic and scientific methods, the emphasis on empirical over emotional reasoning, and most obviously, the basic reverence for freedom of speech. Perhaps no one has channeled this more effectively than Greg Lukianoff, whose center-right free-speech advocacy and legal aid organization FIRE raised $35 million last year, in part by encouraging affluent donors disgruntled with the leftward drift on campus to contribute money to them in lieu of donating to their alma maters—or for that matter the ACLU, many of whose former officials have championed FIRE as the new home of the civil liberties group’s old bread-and-butter First Amendment protection operation. Having derived most of its seed funding from the right-wing Koch donor network, FIRE’s reputation is conservative-friendly, but its credibility as a neutral and nonpartisan defender of First Amendment rights was burnished as the cancel culture wars, the book bannings, and the Moms for Liberty counterrevolution repulsed both old-school liberals and libertarians alike.
But somehow over the past few months, billionaires like Rowan have managed to co-opt FIRE’s message and vibe in service of the biggest and broadest campaign of campus cancellation the nation has perhaps ever experienced. Indeed, in his original open letter to Penn donors urging them to boycott the school over its refusal to cancel Palestine Writes, Rowan specifically referenced the school’s dismal ranking on FIRE’s annual free-speech rankings as one of the reasons alumni should join him in suspending their donations to the school. A source close to the Penn administration says the same alumni who complained to the administration about its dismal showing on the free-speech rankings were first to demand the school cancel the Palestine Writes festival, a contradiction they at first found startling.
FIRE, to its credit, has slowly started pushing back on its erstwhile allies, dispatching a staff attorney to campus to express the group’s opposition both to calls for the Penn administration to cancel Palestine Writes, and to Magill’s later decision to cancel a screening of the movie Israelism on the vague grounds that it might present a “security” risk. (This week, FIRE even published a special post delicately reminding free-speech advocates that “from the river to the sea” constitutes protected speech and not genocidal terroristic threats, in part because only half of the students surveyed in a recent poll could correctly identify which river and sea were being referenced in the chant.)
Matt Rourke/AP Photo
It is of course unsurprising that wealthy donors do not, as it turns out, give a fuck about Enlightenment principles or open discourse. The bigger question is, what are they so upset about? What does Rowan want out of this? Now that he has successfully made an example of Liz Magill, what is his bigger agenda?
A source familiar with Penn’s alumni relations operation says they saw no evidence before the Palestinian literary festival of simmering alumni resentment over wokeness; not when then-Penn president Amy Gutmann invited Angela Davis to campus to discuss prison abolition in 2020, and not when Wharton unveiled its new DEI major in 2022. Given the nonexistent impact college demonstrations have on American foreign policy, what exactly is the donor class after with its coup at Penn?
There isn’t necessarily a straightforward answer to this question. After Ron DeSantis performed shock treatment on New College, expenses soared, the average SAT scores of incoming students plummeted by nearly 100 points, and the 70 freshmen on baseball scholarships were left on a campus with no place to play. Asked in September to explain the seemingly gratuitous institutional destruction, Rufo told Vox the school was still in the “demo” phase of his revolution, which he likened to a kitchen renovation; he has since turned his attention to the academic output of Harvard president Claudine Gay, whose plagiar-ish misdeeds he was first to unearth in his Substack.
But the Penn fundraising source has a theory about one of the “subconscious” drivers behind the putsch. After the Supreme Court overturned race-based affirmative action last June, the source notes, they began to sense a distinct unease among wealthy donors about “legacy admissions,” by which the offspring of alumni receive preference in the admissions process, possibly prompted by a Pennsylvania state senator’s proposal to ban them, or the Department of Education’s launch of a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s legacy admissions procedures, which had come under particular scrutiny during the Supreme Court arguments.
While nothing has as yet come of either initiative, the source said there was a “sense of inevitability” that legacy admissions, which comprise about a quarter of the students admitted early to Penn in any given year and 15 percent of the student body at large, would be “the next thing to fall.” That seemed to spook the school’s well-heeled donors, who then felt naturally inclined to assert their authority over the school’s administration when Rowan gave them the opportunity.
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.
Whatever the case, George Mason University professor emeritus James Finkelstein told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the spectacle of Magill’s resignation and its aftermath would likely prove “a Waterloo moment for university presidents across the country, making them even more beholden to donors.” He would know: Not long ago, GMU, which was for decades a veritable wholly owned subsidiary of the Charles and David Koch foundations, was probably the most prominent billionaire donor–influenced university in the country. Now of course, it has plenty of company in the Ivy League.
