Shortly after pressing three university presidents at a December hearing on whether calling for the genocide of Jews amounts to campus harassment, Rep. Elise Stefanik went on a fundraising blitz, imploring supporters to “take the pressure off this ‘woke’ liberal presidents even higher. further.”
The rush to capitalize on the highly publicized hearing proved successful: Stefanik (RN.Y.) saw record fundraising.
It has also opened a new front for Washington’s influence industry. In campaigns, on K Street and in Congress, the city’s apparatus has cashed in on the fight against perceived liberal bias on campus, as colleges have turned to consultants or lawyers to navigate the increasingly unforgiving landscape. This month, the public relations firm Marathon Strategies, which launched a higher education crisis communications practice after the hearing, will host a so-called boot camp for colleges and universities in hopes of keeping themselves out of a similar spotlight.
“There is blood in the water for the industry as a whole,” said Christopher Armstrong, a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight who co-chairs the congressional investigations practice. Issues surrounding higher education have taken on new “political salience,” he said, emphasizing that the risk to universities extends beyond anti-Semitism and has persisted for some time.
The president and co-chairs of Columbia University’s Board of Trustees will testify this month before the House Education and Workforce Committee, which held the hearing in December, about their own university’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus. But lawmakers who are not on that committee are also keeping higher education under scrutiny.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the tax code, have launched their own investigation into anti-Semitism on college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) has raised the specter that colleges that fail to protect Jewish students could lose their tax-exempt status.
“A lot of universities that in the past haven’t paid much attention to what’s happening in DC politics are now doing so because they see the risks,” said Armstrong, whose company is co-hosting the crisis communications boot camp for higher education. education.
As a staffer to Senator Orrin Hatch, when the late senator chaired the Finance Committee, Armstrong helped investigate university endowments. It was part of a wave of mostly Republican-led oversight of those wealthy schools. The pressure from those studies partly led universities to offer more generous financial aid packages in the mid-2000s. And when Republicans overhauled the tax code in 2017, they added a new, unprecedented excise tax on the investment profits of wealthy college endowments.
Dozens of universities are now subject to the tax, which they have since been fighting to repeal, arguing that it takes away money they could otherwise spend on activities related to their mission, such as research and education.
With their billions of dollars in endowments at stake, along with future federal aid, universities have turned to K Street for help.
The University of Pennsylvania has tapped the lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates, and in March, Stanford hired the Klein/Johnson Group to lobby on tax and education issues. Cornell University in February retained the firm Capitol Tax Partners to lobby on “issues related to the taxation of tax-exempt colleges and their endowments.” In January, another company, BGR Government Affairs, registered to lobby the University of Notre Dame on issues such as “tax policy.”
The federal government provides billions of dollars to post-secondary institutions, and should former President Donald Trump win the 2024 election, his administration could work to shift significant funding from the largest universities in a way that would be politically popular can turn out to be at his base. He has vowed to “reclaim” educational institutions from the left and to fine or tax the donations of institutions that discriminate “under the guise of equality.”
Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, suggested that the issue’s resonance with voters was a symbol of Republicans’ growing frustration with elite higher education.
“That was really the culmination of a long period of Republican distrust about the mindset of higher education,” he said of the December hearing with the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT. “Republicans believe that woke liberals have taken over most institutions of higher learning and instituted a very rigid belief system that one must follow or be excommunicated from the woke tribe.”
Phil Singer, founder of Marathon Strategies and former communications director for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, called universities the “new wedge issue” — a dynamic for which they were unprepared, he said.
“All of these things are conspiring to become a perfect storm of research for colleges and universities that they’ve never really experienced,” he said of his company’s decision to open a dedicated higher education practice. “Every step is scrutinized, and then you add the political element of hearings in Congress, demagoizing some of these issues, and they face significant reputational threats.”
Marathon Strategies is trying to prevent some of its clients from being called to testify before Congress by generating more positive attention, Singer said.
But simply hiring an expensive consultant to help deal with Congress doesn’t always lead to success. Harvard and Penn hired the leading law firm WilmerHale to help prepare for the December hearing. In the aftermath, the presidents of both schools resigned.
Singer noted that while coverage of higher education institutions was previously largely delegated to trade publications, major newspapers are now taking an interest. Another university communications professional, who requested anonymity to discuss the increasingly sensitive environment for higher education institutions, emphasized that their institution was now fielding press inquiries from reporters at different times.
A report from Singer’s firm listing the offerings of his new “DefendEd” practice noted that “weekly audits of the nation’s top universities and liberal arts colleges have increased by as much as 1,200% over the past decade “, based on a study the company conducted. The Marathon Strategies report states that the new program for universities will include a ‘Crisis Playbook’ and a ‘Plagiarism Overview’ for top leaders. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was forced to resign not only because of her performance at the December hearing, but also because conservative media reported allegations that she had plagiarized her academic work.
Schools have also turned to Democratic stalwarts for help dealing with the fallout from the pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses. The companies hired for this purpose include SKDK and Precision.
In addition, Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general whom Trump fired after she declined to defend his travel ban, is representing Harvard University in the congressional investigation into anti-Semitism on campus, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement. Yates, a partner at King and Spalding, did not return a request for comment. The company, along with WilmerHale, has also begun formally representing Harvard in a lawsuit filed by students who accuse the school of becoming a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and intimidation.”
A lawyer representing clients in congressional investigations speculated that anti-Semitism on campus would remain relevant at least until the end of the current Congress and possibly beyond, depending on whether Republicans retain control of the House.
“It is understandable that universities recognize that their turn may come in one form or another,” said the lawyer, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters about potential or current clients.
Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, argued that there seemed to be a lack of interest among political leaders in understanding the nuance surrounding campus policies. As a result, she added, leaders hire consultants to prevent others from misinterpreting their words.
“It’s a tool that campus leaders are going to have to arm themselves with that in the past we just didn’t think you needed, because simply rationally explaining your approach would have worked,” she said, calling it a new level. of useless ‘gamesmanship’ for higher education.
The result of this new landscape, she added, could force schools to devote limited resources to counselors, cripple university leadership and weaken institutions.
“It’s all part of a kind of playbook on how to dismantle these institutions over time,” Kezar said. “There is such a vulnerability for campus leaders if they don’t realize this.”
Michael Stratford and Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.