Academic freedom is the loser when big donors hound US university presidents
Robert Reich | 12 December 2023 | The Guardian
Presidents of prestigious US universities appear at a House of Representatives committee meeting last week. Photograph: Ken Cedeno/Reuters
America’s prestigious universities play a big role in determining who gets into America’s wealthy elite.
A degree from Harvard, Penn or MIT, to take three examples, is a meal ticket to a lucrative job on Wall Street or a corporate law firm and to the richest and most influential people in the land.
But as America becomes increasingly stratified by wealth, those tickets are easily abused.
Universities that give preference in admissions to the children or grandchildren of major donors serve to widen inequality even further.