📚 Crisis Comms 101

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Tonight: Ivy League schools are getting a lesson in crisis comms as donors threaten to cut off funding. Plus: America's wealth has ballooned (but we're still not very happy about it.) Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

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Last updated October 18 at 5:16 PM ET

Updates on the Israel-Hamas war

In Israel, President Biden urged the region to seek peace and not to be "consumed" by rage. For the latest, follow CNN's live updates.

📚 CRISIS COMMS 101

College campuses are used to being a flashpoint for heated political speech. But as war rages in Gaza, outrage among some donors to America's elite institutions is boiling over.

This week, several high-profile donors have said they would yank their donations to the University of Pennsylvania, and at least one is calling for the school's president to resign over what they see as insufficient condemnation of antisemitic behavior on campus. At Harvard, a nonprofit founded by billionaire Les Wexner said it would cut ties with the university over its "tiptoeing" on terror attacks against Israel.

Among the donors who say they're cutting off funding to UPenn are former US Ambassador Jon Huntsman and private equity billionaire Marc Rowan. On Wednesday, venture capitalist David Magerman said he would halt donations to the school and urged all "self-respecting" Jews to do the same.

How we got here

UPenn hosted a Palestinian literary festival last month, featuring some writers who, according to the school's own leaders, had a history of making antisemitic remarks. UPenn issued a statement ahead of the festival condemning antisemitism broadly. But after Hamas' attack on Israel earlier this month, simmering resentments over the event turned to a boil.

The backlash against Harvard started over a letter from student groups that blamed Israel's "apartheid regime" for the deadly attack by Hamas. While the letter provoked widespread outrage, Harvard itself didn't address the issue directly until two days after the letter was published.

The donor retreat is so bad at UPenn that one former trustee, Vahan Gureghian, wants the school's president, Liz Magill, to step down, claiming she is "not really up to the job of being the president of one of the eight or so most elite universities in the world.

In response, UPenn referred CNN to a statement Magill issued Tuesday, saying the school has a "moral responsibility to combat antisemitism and to educate our community to recognize and reject hate in all its forms."

The chair of UPenn's board of trustees, Scott Bok, said Monday that the "unanimous" sense among current and former trustees was that Magill and the leadership team "are the right group to take the University forward."

Why it matters

The dust-ups at UPenn and Harvard underscore a dilemma college leaders around the country face as they play the role of administrators, educators and, crucially, fundraisers.

Campuses are, in the American ideal, meant to be settings for civil political discourse, and it's on school leaders to balance demands from students, professors, and deep-pocketed alumni — all of whom tend to pummel their chosen school with diametrically opposed demands on any given issue.

In the case of the Palestinian literary festival, it's worth noting that dozens of Jewish members of the UPenn community wrote to Magill to express their enthusiasm for the event days before it was scheduled last month. They even criticized her for making a pre-emptive condemnation of antisemitism. Three dozen members of the UPenn faculty also wrote a letter in student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian to support the festival.

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NUMBER OF THE DAY

$24,000

The annual cost of family health insurance coverage at work soared 7% this year to an average of nearly $24,000, according to KFF's Employer Health Benefits Survey, released Wednesday.

Employees are shelling out an average of $6,575 for their share of the premium, up almost $500 from last year, while their companies foot the rest of the bill.

For single coverage, the average annual premium rose to $8,435, also up 7% from last year. Workers are picking up just over $1,400 of the tab, about $75 more than last year.

💰 BUILDING WEALTH

One of the trickiest things about the current US economy (and an especially a thorny issue for political strategists right now) is how Americans say they feel about the economy (bad) despite how things are going (pretty great, on the whole).

Today, the Fed published more evidence that despite the pandemic's hardships, the net effect on Americans' finances has been extremely positive.

See here: American households experienced a record surge in wealth between 2019 and 2022, buoyed by a combination of stimulus checks, a booming stock market, and rapidly rising home values.

Over those three years, real median net worth swelled 37% to $192,900— more than double the rate of the second-largest upswing on record, according to the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances.

That 37% jump was largely fueled by asset growth. Meaning, if you own a home or invest in the stock market, you did especially well.

Why it matters

Taken in context, the data underscore the continued strength of the US economy as a whole.

Not only are we wealthier, we're also more likely to be employed. Consumers, despite telling pollsters they feel crummy about the economy, are still spending money like they think things are going to be OK.

Of course, surveys are broad and people are people with their own individual worries and lived experiences, so we can't blame anyone for being in a bad mood. (I mean, just read Twitter, er, X, for an hour and try to stay optimistic about anything...)

For all the very real strengths the economy, we're not in a utopia. (Check out the staggering cost of health care in our Number of the Day.)

The Fed survey also showed that income inequality widened over the same three years. And while it was a lucrative time for homeowners, if you're a first-timer trying to break into the market now ... it's a hellscape. A wildly expensive, tiny hellscape with no backyard and bad wiring that someone is inevitably going to submit an all-cash offer for.

My colleague Alicia Wallace has more.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

📉 Tesla reported its weakest quarterly profit in two years, earning $2.3 billion and falling short of Wall Street expectations. (CNN)

📺 Netflix shares surged after the company said it would raise prices — again — on some customers. (CNN)

💼 Longtime Costco chief executive Craig Jelinek will step down at the end of the year. (CNN)

✏️ Apple quietly announced its next-generation Pencil that works with iPads and now includes USB-C charging. (CNN)

👀 Investors and Fed officials trying to make sense of surging Treasury yields are fixated on a number that exists only in theory, known as the "term premium." (WSJ)