Claudine Gay may have resigned as president of Harvard University, but the top school just lost another major donor.
Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel and one of Harvard’s billionaire alumni, has said he plans to stop his sizable donations to the Ivy League.
“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Griffin said during the MFA Network conference in Miami on Tuesday.
As of April 2023, Griffin’s donations to the school came out to more than $500 million in total, the Harvard Gazette reported.
But Griffin said he was done unless the school would “resume its role educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers.”
Earlier, Griffin questioned if Harvard would “get back to their roots of educating American children, young adults, to be the future leaders of our country” before bemoaning what he called a “DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame.”
“Are we going to educate the future members of the House, the Senate, and the leaders of IBM?” he asked. “Or are we going to educate a group of young men and women who are just caught up in a rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee, and ‘This is not fair’ and frankly, just, like, whiny snowflakes. Like, where are we going with education in elite schools in America?”
He’s not the only billionaire to wade into the drama around the elite school after Gay refused to say that calls for genocide against Jews would be banned on campus during a congressional hearing.
The hedge-fund manager and Harvard alum Bill Ackman was a leader in the campaign to push Claudine Gay to resign over her testimony — and over accusations of plagiarism.
The Harvard Crimson reported that Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard, had backed a former Facebook exec for a slot on the Harvard Board of Overseers.
