The University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa is launching a frantic investigation into an alleged leak after Breitbart News reported that private donations had plummeted by two-thirds after the institution boycotted Israel.
As Breitbart News reported:
The University of Cape Town (UCT), once one of South Africa’s most widely-respected academic institutions, has decided to preserve its boycott of Israeli universities despite losing nearly two-thirds of donor funding since doing so.
…
On Saturday, UCT’s council held a meeting to consider a resolution to rescind the earlier boycott resolutions.
One speaker reported:
We need every cent that we can get. No amount of donor funding is ever going to replace what we have lost from USAID, from the federal government, from NIH [U.S. National Institutes of Health]. We need every cent that we can get. The VC’s [vice-chancellor’s] reports reflects a catastrophic and significant drop in individual donor funding in the last year, dropping 50 million Rand, from 77 million to 28 million. That’s in the VC’s report. We are chasing away money at the very time that we need it. The damage that we are doing, some insist can’t be avoided, but some of it is self-inflicted.
The council was also informed that hundreds of academic jobs would have to be cut due to recent losses in funding.
After a lengthy debate, the UCT council voted narrowly against rescinding its boycott of Israeli institutions, with 13 votes in favor of rescinding the boycott and 14 votes in favor of preserving it, despite the cost.
In response, UCT’s Acting Registrar, Prof. Kathy Idensohn, issued a letter Tuesday proposing a quasi-judicial inquiry in which each member of the university council will be required to submit a sworn affidavit that they did not leak information.
Breitbart News submitted the following four questions to UCT’s media office:
1. Does the university believe that such an investigation is consistent with the principle of transparency?
2. Why should the general public not be allowed to know the impact of the anti-Israel boycott on fundraising, given that UCT also receives public funds?
3. Why should U.S. taxpayers, who fund programs at UCT, be prevented from knowing about the state of UCT’s finances?
4. Given that successive U.S. administrations of both parties have opposed academic boycotts of Israel, and that the Trump administration has already withdrawn grants from universities that tolerate antisemitism, why should U.S. taxpayers continue to fund anything at UCT?
The author earned an M.A. in Jewish Studies from UCT.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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