Columbia University’s billionaire donors are divided on whether they should continue funneling money into the Ivy League school.

Ultra-wealthy benefactors like New York Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced he is pulling financial support to his alma mater over the anti-Israel protests that are unfolding on campus. Kraft also started the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS). Kraft’s net worth is over $11 billion, as tracked by Forbes. 

Another graduate, billionaire industrialist Len Blavatnik, who also has a history of giving significant amounts of money to philanthropy, told FOX Business that the school’s “leadership must take immediate steps to ensure that Jewish students are protected from threats and intimidation, and that those who violate their policies are held to account.” Blavatnik has a net worth of over $31 billion, as tracked by Forbes. 

Blavatnik didn’t confirm if he was suspending his giving. However, sources told The New York Post he might also consider pulling back on his donations.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MOVES TO HYBRID LEARNING ON MAIN CAMPUS AMID ANTISEMITIC PROTESTS

The school started losing donors shortly after the war kicked off in early October after Hamas terrorists stormed Gaza in a surprise attack, killing over 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping over 200, some of whom remain hostages.  

During an interview with Liz Claman on “The Claman Countdown” on Oct. 26, 2023, Columbia University graduate, billionaire investor and Omega Advisors CEO Leon Cooperman pledged to suspend his giving.

“I think these kids at the colleges have sh*t for brains” Cooperman told Claman. “I’ve given to Columbia probably about $50 million over many years,” he continued. “And I’m going to suspend my giving. I’ll give my giving to other organizations.” 

This week, he told CNBC, he was “uncomfortable” with what is going on at the school but declined to elaborate on future donations. He did say he plans to support Columbia’s business school “when they solicit” him. 

Cooperman’s net worth neared $3 billion, per Forbes. 

In recent weeks and months, there has been an onslaught of anti-war protests not only at Columbia but other college campuses, including New York University, University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor and Yale, as tensions over the war in the Middle East continue to rise.

Pro-Palestinian students around the nation are condemning the assault on Gaza, which has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. But some Jewish students say there has been a rise in antisemitism. Some students at Columbia have recently told FOX News that they no longer feel physically safe. 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT ORDERS VIRTUAL CLASSES AS ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS TAKE OVER: ‘WE NEED A RESET’

At Columbia’s New York City campus, there has been “too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior” including antisemitic language, the school– which was forced to switch to hybrid learning for the rest of the semester — said in a statement.

 Protestors initially formed an encampment — setting up tents and refusing to leave— on the campus last week. More than 100 demonstrators who had been camped out on the campus were arrested, according to The Associated Press. 

The protesters marched in and around the campus demanding the school lose affiliations with groups that support Israel.

“There is a terrible conflict raging in the Middle East with devastating human consequences. I understand that many are experiencing deep moral distress and want Columbia to help alleviate this by taking action. We should be having serious conversations about how Columbia can contribute,” the school wrote in a statement. 

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However, the school continued, saying that there are many views and “we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.”

FOX Business’ Greg Norman contributed to this report. 

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is preparing to vote Thursday on reinstating net neutrality regulations for the internet, which a new report warns could cause a slowdown in the pace of internet speed increases and price improvements seen in the years since net neutrality’s repeal.

The FCC, which currently has a majority of Democrat appointees under the Biden administration, is planning to bring back net neutrality rules that allow the agency to regulate broadband internet access as a telecommunications service. That would return the FCC’s framework for regulating the internet to what the Obama administration put in place in 2015, which was later rolled back by the Trump administration in 2017 under a framework that classified the internet as an information service.

A Committee to Unleash Prosperity report notes the gains in internet speed and cost decreases that occurred in the wake of the Trump-era deregulation as well as the increased investment by internet service providers. 

“If the Biden administration can look at the experience of broadband in the last seven years and declare it a bad thing, something that needs to be reversed, there’s really no regulation that they would ever dislike and no deregulation that they would ever like, because this is about the most stunning success possible, and yet they’re going to reverse it,” Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, told FOX Business.

FORMER FCC HEAD AJIT PAI BLASTS NET NEUTRALITY VOTE AS ‘COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME’

The report found that median internet download speeds for wired internet connections increased by a factor of 5.8 between 2017 and 2023, while wireless speeds increased by a factor of 8.7. 

Although the report acknowledges that download speeds would have improved over time even under the net neutrality regulatory framework, the U.S. rose in speedtest.net’s average national download speed rankings from 45th in the world in 2017 to 16th in 2022, while the median speed ranking for the U.S. improved from 22nd to 15th between 2022 and 2023.

It also analyzed price changes for wired broadband and wireless internet, which declined by about 15% and 28%, respectively, from 2016 to 2022. For comparison, from 2010, when the Obama administration first proposed regulating the internet as a utility, to 2016, wired broadband prices declined 9% and wireless declined 22%.

NEW FCC RULES REQUIRE ‘NUTRITION LABELS’ FOR HIGH-SPEED INTERNET PLANS

The report noted that those positive results ran counter to the narrative advanced by net neutrality’s proponents as the Trump-era FCC moved to undo that regulation. 

“The predictions that were made when the deregulation was proposed in the beginning of the Trump administration where [that] this was going to be some kind of an apocalypse and the ‘end of the internet as we know it,’ things were going to load one word at a time,” Kerpen said.

“We don’t have to hypothesize or guess about what will happen because we’ve run the experiment now the last seven years, and if it was the end of the internet as we knew it, it was only because it got so much faster and so much cheaper – basically the opposite of everything that they said would happen,” he added.

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Kerpen also took issue with the FCC’s assertion in advancing its reinstatement of net neutrality rules that any disincentives for private investment by internet companies caused by the return of that regulatory framework will be offset by a $65 billion subsidy program from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“This is just kind of an insane way to think about things. I mean if you’re going to subsidize something with taxpayer money, you want to get the most for that money that you possibly can,” he said. “You want the incentives to be strong for private money to come in as well.”

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“The investment effect will certainly be negative, and I think that’s a big part of why we saw what we did,” Kerpen added. “When you get deregulation and incentives for a strong, competitive market, you get investments in higher speeds. I don’t think we would’ve seen the [five-times] jump in wired speeds and [eight-times] jump in wireless speeds if we hadn’t had the deregulation.”

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