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A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s allegedly premier Ivy League colleges, took a break from her job the other day to praise Luigi Mangione.
Dr. Julia Alekseyeva, who describes herself as a “socialist and ardent antifascist” and goes by the social media handle “@thesoviette,” went on TikTok and said she was never prouder to work at the same school that graduated the 26-year-old suspected murderer of UnitedHeathcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The song “Do You Hear The People Sing?” from “Les Miserables” was the backdrop of her creepy missive, real “workers of the world unite” material. Later in a separate social media post, the good doctor (of God knows what) referred to Mangione as an “icon.”
The twisted message of all this is pretty apparent: Wasting Thompson is just swell because it fits a certain social justice narrative. People who fit the left’s definition of a greedy capitalist deserve to die.
If you’re wondering what pedagogy like that accomplishes, consider this: UPenn was one of the hotbeds of Jew-hating in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. Its administrators’ indifference to the wild celebrations led to the forced resignation of its president, Liz Magill.
Alekseyeva, who has since apologized, didn’t respond to a request for comment; a rep for Penn tells The Post her comments “were antithetical to the values” of the university, and that Alekseyeva has “retracted them.”
Better late than never, of course. But I am a finance writer. So I started asking my Wall Street sources, how can a school afford the luxury of employing wackos who would go there in the first place?
Penn charges its undergraduate students more than $85,000 a year to be brainwashed with leftism, and according to my Wall Street sources who follow the college finance racket, bloated tuition bills still aren’t enough to make ends meet.
That’s where the school’s multibillion-dollar endowments come in.
Indoctrination funding
They are the funding source of the progressive indoctrination we have in the college classroom. The incoming Trump administration has a prime opportunity to end this madness by taking aim at how they have rigged the education system at taxpayers’ expense.
Consider: UPenn’s endowment comes in at around $23 billion; Harvard’s at $53 billion. By comparison, the hedge fund known as Point72 run by long-time trader (and Mets owner) Steve Cohen has assets under management of $35 billion.
Yes, these guys are big and powerful in the markets. College endowments invest in everything from private equity to venture capital startups to plain vanilla stocks and bonds. Their investment officers are chronicled in the mainstream media alongside some of the best money managers in the world. They often throw off double-digit returns because of their size, which puts them at the front of the line for the most lucrative investment opportunities.
Lately, some of the biggest have turned to private equity funds with investments in China to manage some of their dough. One such fund, Singapore-based-Hillhouse, has offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Yale endowment was a big Hillhouse client.
People at Hillhouse say the firm has been reducing its exposure to the communist Chinese economy. But if you know anything about China Inc., any business domiciled there is closely linked to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
You see where I’m going with this. Yale witnessed some of the most nasty anti-Israel protests following Oct. 7, largely condoned by school administrators with their near-silence. Yet not a peep out of this crew about the Chinese government’s oppression of religious minorities such as the Uyghurs.
And they do all this with substantial taxpayer assistance that goes beyond the usual stuff like increasingly forgivable student loans and government grants for idiotic research. The endowments are largely tax-free, which is how Donald Trump can start to end this madness if he and his people have the guts to go there.
Big endowments don’t have taxes on their capital gains. Ditto for dividends. They get away with paying a meager 1.4% tax on income. There’s talk in Trump circles of moving it to 35% or more since such untaxed gains effectively give the endowments license to finance the most bizarre stuff coming out of the university system.
And here’s where things could get interesting. Let’s focus on UPenn, which has an endowment investment structure typical of the Ivies.
Based on my reading of its annual report, private equity represents the largest chunk of money in UPenn’s $23 billion endowment, more than $8.4 billion compared to $7.8 billion in 2023. Taxing the fund, combined with a slowdown in fundraising from rich Wall Streeters like alum Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, could force the endowment to sell PE holdings, which are notoriously illiquid.
The result is a cash crunch, forcing administrators to make some hard decisions — including whether paying for TikTok-happy, Mangione-smitten profs like Alekseyeva is worth it.
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