Marc Rowan, the billionaire donor who led the campaign to oust former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill over the administration’s response to allegations of antisemitism, now appears to have a role in aiming at a bigger target.
Rowan and his allies, according to The New York Times, were instrumental in developing the ideas used in the compact that President Donald Trump’s administration asked nine colleges including Penn to sign last week in exchange for preferential consideration for federal funding.
Rowan, CEO of New York-based Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, was circulating a document last winter, called a “university support and eligibility agreement” that listed some of the same principles and wording in the compact rolled out by the Trump administration last week, according to the Times. Both documents, for example, state “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned to the U.S. government,” the Times said.
» READ MORE: Penn ‘seeks no special consideration,’ president Jameson says in response to Trump proposal
The compact — which has already been roundly criticized by some inside and outside the Penn community as attacking academic freedom — represents the latest step in Trump’s effort to influence universities and reshape higher education. The administration is asking the colleges to ban the use of race and sex in hiring, admissions, and financial support for students; limit international undergraduate enrollment at 15%; and require applicants take the SAT or other standardized admission tests. It also says the schools should freeze tuition for American students for five years, prevent grade inflation, and make conservative students feel more welcomed on campus.
Colleges also would have to commit to “defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes,” the compact states. Schools have until Oct. 20 to respond.
» READ MORE: Donor and Wharton board chair Marc Rowan criticizes Penn’s arts and sciences school, drawing backlash
Rowan still has a leadership role at Penn, serving as chair of the advisory board at Wharton, Penn’s business school. The board “provides counsel and advocacy to the Dean regarding priorities and the future direction of the Wharton School,“ according to its website. He also until last month had the distinction of giving the largest single gift to Wharton in its history — $50 million in 2018. (Last month, math-genius investor Bruce I. Jacobs donated $60 million.)
It’s unclear what, if any, influence he may still have on Penn’s wider operations.
A spokesperson for Rowan did not respond to a request for comment.
Penn declined comment.
» READ MORE: Who is Marc Rowan, the billionaire Wharton grad who led the campaign to topple Penn’s leaders?
Penn President J. Larry Jameson in a statement to the campus community Sunday said the university would review the compact proposal based on Penn’s values and mission, but made clear that the university, which receives about $1 billion in federal funding annually, was seeking “no special consideration.”
“We strive to be supported based on the excellence of our work, our scholars and students, and the programs and services we provide to our neighbors and to the world,” he said.
A White House official told the Times that the administration got input for the compact from multiple sources, including philanthropists.
Rowan’s past efforts to influence Penn
Rowan’s criticism of Penn took on a high profile shortly after the Palestine Writes Literature Festival held on Penn’s campus in September 2023 and Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023. He began sending daily messages to Penn’s board of trustees, criticizing the school’s response to allegations of antisemitism. He urged donors “to close their checkbooks” until Magill and Scott L. Bok, former Penn board chair, resigned, faulting their handling of the festival.
» READ MORE: Penn faculty fear the donor who started the effort to oust Liz Magill is attempting to set the agenda for trustees
Magill and Bok both stepped down in December 2023 following a bipartisan backlash to Magill’s congressional committee testimony on the handling of antisemitism complaints on campus.
In the aftermath of their resignations, Rowan sent what was characterized as his final email to the trustees, questioning the university’s instruction, faculty hiring and political orientation. Among the questions, he asked whether the school should look at eliminating some academic departments — though he didn’t identify which — and examine “criteria for qualification for membership in the faculty,” citing a provision in the charter that allows trustees to set general policies around admission to the faculty. (The proposed compact states that universities must eliminate “units” that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”)
The email, titled “Moving Forward,” included 18 questions, some with as many as five parts. That raised fear among faculty leaders that Rowan was attempting to set the agenda for the university, in the style of a “hostile takeover.”
Rowan’s spokesperson said at the time that the questions Rowan raised were areas that trustees have jurisdiction over in the school’s charter.
In March 2024, Rowan publicly criticized Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, the home of 27 departments including a few that sponsored sessions of the Palestine Writes festival.
He said faculty members in Wharton — Penn’s business school from which Rowan graduated — as well as the engineering and medical schools, care about academic excellence and research.
“If you are in our arts and sciences school,” said Rowan, “not so much.”
Ramanan Raghavendran, chair of Penn’s board of trustees, declined to comment through an email on the compact or the report on Rowan’s involvement.
But Bok, the former board chair, said signing the compact “would cede to the government important aspects of student admissions, financial aid, faculty conduct, university finances and other matters central to Penn’s historic mission.”
“Applying such broad rules to a private university that is financed primarily by tuition dollars and the extraordinary generosity of its alumni seems particularly inappropriate,” he said.
If the nine colleges agree to the demands, it will “unfortunately increase pressure on others to do likewise,” he said.
He also questioned how the compact would be enforced. The Trump administration in the compact laid out penalties if violations and described a system of policing compliance.
“The amount of ongoing surveying, auditing, and disclosure required would be intrusive, require a significant bureaucracy to administer and create unhelpful divisions within the university community,” Bok said.
Penn reportedly targeted for being among ‘good actors’
The other eight colleges asked to sign the compact are: Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia.
May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, told the Wall Street Journal, that the colleges were selected because there was a belief they would be “good actors.”
“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” Mailman told the Journal.
“It is far from a point of pride to have been included,” Bok said.
Penn last summer reached an agreement with the Trump administration over the past participation of a transgender swimmer on the women’s swim team.
Penn agreed to apologize to team members of Lia Thomas, retroactively give Thomas’ individual Penn records to swimmers who held the next-best times, and adhere to a Trump executive order’s definition of male and female in regard to athletics.
According to the Times, both the compact and the document circulated by Rowan and his allies last winter called for school policies to “recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”
Some footnotes were the same and some provisions only had minor differences in wording, the Times said.