P.M. Edition for April 15. The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism is a cross-government group with unprecedented leverage to push for change at elite U.S. universities. WSJ higher education reporter Sara Randazzo tells us about the group, and how universities are responding to it. Plus, Beijing has told Chinese airlines not to place new orders with Boeing, the U.S.’s largest exporter. We hear from WSJ Heard on the Street columnist Jon Sindreu about what this means for Boeing’s business. And big-bank earnings for the first quarter showed that U.S. consumer spending remained resilient, despite economic uncertainty. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How is Boeing affected by China's actions?
So the stated goal, right, is to combat antisemitism, as is the name of the task force. But functionally, what is it doing?
Yeah, so functionally, what it's doing is really putting universities on notice. And they've been threatening funding against a bunch of big-name elite schools. And it did start out seemingly focused more on antisemitism. But some of the more recent battles, including what we're seeing with Harvard right now, are going beyond that into broader governance of college campuses and things that
many would say are going well beyond just combating anti-Semitism. And so it's really been a push and pull between, hey, we control federal funding to you, universities, so do what we say or we're going to pull this funding. And some universities saying, okay, we'll make some changes so that we get the funding back and others saying, you know, you can't tell us what to do.
How are schools reacting to this?
Schools are responding differently to the task force's individual demands. Columbia somewhat acquiesced to some things, whereas Harvard is kind of taking more of a stand. And I think other schools are trying to honestly just stay out of the crosshairs. There was a list of 10 universities that the task force put out. that it was going to have initial school on-campus visits for.
I've talked to several schools on that list who say they haven't had any robust conversations yet and they haven't seen them on campus. So the 10 universities on that list, I think, are more on notice, but then others are just watching it all and just trying to see where it all lands and what it might mean for them.
And for the schools that are on that list, are they pursuing legal action? What are they up to?
We haven't seen any actual lawsuits yet filed by a university against the administration. We feel like that probably could be coming at some point. We have seen some faculty lawsuits from Columbia and Harvard.
And for the ones that are on the list but haven't been fully in the crosshairs yet, we haven't seen any litigation, but I am sure they are all hands on deck preparing, maybe making some preemptive changes in terms of putting in better processes around student discipline or how things are dealt with if complaints come in about anti-Semitism and that kind of thing.
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