During an annual fundraiser event this week at Columbia University, donations plunged nearly 29 percent from its last event in 2022.

Columbia’s “Giving Day” event in 2024 raised $21.4 million, a significant decrease from the $30 million it garnered in 2022, according to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper. The event was not held in 2023 due to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent protests on campus.

The university also saw a nearly 28 percent decline in the number of gifts, which dropped from 19,229 in 2022 to 13,870 in 2024, the lowest level since 2015 and the first time the total monetary amount of the donations declined from the previous year since the event began in 2012. In response to the decline, the Columbia Spectator stated that the university is currently facing a “donor crisis — born out of concerns regarding campus protests.”

This story merely reinforces the decline in support for Columbia. In July it was reported that several major big donors had pulled money from the university, citing its willingness to tolerate violence and discrimination against Jews as well as its unwillingness to prosecute pro-Hamas students who trespassed and rioted on campus in the spring. Its board of trustees at that time took action to prevent the university president from taking any firm action to stop the occupancy of the campus by these students.

It remains entirely unclear whether this decline in donations will have any impact. While there does seem to be some effort at the university to clean up its act, the effort has so far appeared half-hearted and mostly centered on producing good pr while changing nothing. It took action this week to make sure the competing demonstrations by pro-Hamas and pro-Israel students marking the one-year anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Gaza would remain peaceful, but it also appears it continues to condone having a large block of students attending the university who not only see nothing wrong with the rape, torture, and murder of innocent Jews by Hamas, continue to advocate more such massacres.

During the last school year, Columbia became a focal point for both campus turmoil and the testing of free speech limits. In the last month, anti-Israel protesters vandalized the Alma Mater statue, an important campus landmark, and staged an unauthorized sit-in inside the lobby of the School of International and Public Affairs.

In other words, the university continues to tolerate such behavior, allowing the students involved to remain uncharged and enrolled, despite their actions clearly disqualifying them from earning a college degree. No wonder donations continue to drop.

In the past two months Columbia University has discovered that there are real consequences for tolerating and sometimes even supporting the bigotry and anti-Semitism of its Marxist and pro-Hamas students and faculty.

First, in early June a very wealthy Columbia graduate donated $260 million to Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. Though the donor remains anonymous, these details were released by the university:

Not only did the donor make a point to tell onlookers he fought in a conflict entrenched in antisemitism, but he also reiterated how he graduated from Columbia.

It appears the donor wanted to make it very clear that Columbia had once been in the running for this donation, but its wishy-washy response to the riots committed on campus by pro-Hamas students caused him to reject it.

Nor has this been all. Another major donor to Columbia, Mortimer Zuckerman, announced earlier this week that he has cut off payments on a major $200 million donation he had initiated to Columbia in 2012, totaling millions.

For months, Zuckerman engaged in conversations with Columbia, raising concerns about the school’s governance and handling of campus anti-Semitism following Oct. 7, the Zuckerman Family Office spokeswoman told the Free Beacon. Columbia, in response, requested time to “rebuild trust and demonstrate better governance.”

But that rebuilding failed to take shape, prompting Zuckerman, a media and real estate mogul, to pause millions in funding. Columbia had become the forefront of campus anti-Semitism, with protesters eventually storming Hamilton Hall and barricading its entrance. In-person classes and the main graduation ceremony were canceled.

And last week, Columbia announced that it would not fire the four deans at the center of a texting scandal after they were caught exchanging derogatory text messages during an alumni panel on anti-Semitism. Instead the school opted to reassign three of the deans, while the fourth and most senior administrator, Columbia College dean Josef Sorett, would remain in his post.

According to officials for Zuckerman, “a significant minority payment” of this $200 million donation had already been made, but the rest will not be.

The last paragraph of the quote above is significant. The four deans in question all had positions supposedly focused on improving life and providing support for students on campus. Instead, they all were caught expressing outright contempt for the fears and concerns of their Jewish students, proving they had no interest in doing their job where Jews were concerned.

These are probably the worst colleges in the country

Yet, the university has not fired three of them, simply shifting them to different positions (likely the same job but with a different title) and has allowed the fourth to remain in his position, unscathed. No wonder Zuckerman has ended his donation.

Expect more such actions by big academic donors, especially at the very bankrupt Ivy League colleges where such Marxist, pro-Hamas, queer theory, and DEI programs run rampant. These are not good universities, and unless they reform themselves soon (something we would be fools to expect) they should be shut down. It is good therefore that major donors are now finally recognizing this reality.

Recently four Columbia University deans were caught exchanging anti-Semitic texts during a panel on Jewish life on campus, attacking some Jewish students simply because those students objected to being harassed, attacked, and even blocked from entering campus buildings by pro-Hamas protesters.

The university immediately suspended three of those deans, with the fourth, Josef Sorett (who held a top position at Columbia), allowed to remain in place after he apologized publicly for his statements.

We have now learned that the university is not going to fire those three suspended deans, but will simply reassign them to other positions.

The university placed Susan Chang-Kim, former vice dean and chief administrative officer, Matthew Patashnick, former associate dean for student and family support, and Cristen Kromm, former dean of undergraduate student life, on leave in June after they exchanged dismissive text messages about the “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present, and Future” panel. The three are on indefinite leave and will not return to their previous jobs, according to a Monday message to the campus community. [emphasis mine]

In other words, no one is being punished at all. Columbia’s actions are merely designed to lower the heat against the university. Once things have cooled down, it will do what it can to return things back to normal, whereby those who see nothing wrong with anti-Semitic harassment against Jews and anti-Israeli violence and riots will be allowed to run things. These individuals will still work for the college, and in fact might even be put back in exactly the same jobs, with simply their titles changed.

The highlighted words in the quote above however illustates another aspect of this bankrupt university that is also typical of most of today’s academia: All modern universities today appear to have very bloated administration overheads, filled with people doing empty make-work. For example, Columbia has more full time employees than undergraduates, while MIT — which is another typical example — increased its staffing last year by 1,200, even though its student enrollment hardly changed.

At Columbia, the dean positions for all three of these individuals had nothing to do with teaching students. In fact, one wonders what they actually did. In addition the job description for Sorett, who holds the top position as dean of the College, is as vague and empty, “…to ensure that students have the best possible experience inside and outside the classroom.”

With such bureaucratic jobs divorced from teaching, it is no wonder these individuals had time to spend advocating pro-Hamas demonstrations and harassment against Jewish students. And we should expect that track record to continue, in the coming years, since it is obvious Columbia is doing nothing to clean house and refocus itself back to actually teaching students how to think critically.