Billionaire investor pans student protests at alma mater Harvard as ‘anarchy’
Kenneth Griffin says university should embrace ‘Western values,’ put meritocracy ‘front and center’
Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin called on his alma mater Harvard University on Saturday to embrace “Western values,” saying that the turmoil across college campuses was the product of a “cultural revolution” in US education.
Griffin, founder of US hedge fund Citadel, told the Financial Times in an interview that the US had “lost sight of education as the means of pursuing truth and acquiring knowledge” over the past decade.
“Harvard should put front and center [that it] stands for meritocracy in America…,” Griffin said, adding that schools should “embrace Western values that have built one of the greatest nations in the world.”
Griffin, who has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University, said in January that he has halted donations to the school over how it handled antisemitism on campus.
“What you’re seeing now is the end-product of this cultural revolution in American education playing out on American campuses, in particular, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed,” Griffin told the FT.
“The protests on college campuses are almost like performative art..,” he said.
“Freedom of speech does not give you the right to storm a building or vandalize it,” he added. “That’s not freedom of speech. That’s just anarchy.”
Student-led demonstrations against Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza have roiled US campuses since the fighting broke out on October 7, when the Palestinian terror group led a thousands-strong invasion into Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages.
The protesting students are demanding a ceasefire in the war and have demanded their schools divest from companies with ties to Israel.
The pro-Palestinian rallies — which some Jewish groups have described as antisemitic — have intensified since April, when a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University was violently dispersed by law enforcement.
Since the first mass arrests at Columbia University on April 18, at least 2,600 demonstrators have been detained at more than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, DC, according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization.
Griffin, who started trading in his Harvard dormitory, spoke at the Managed Funds Association conference in Miami in January about America’s elite universities and criticized the education at the universities blaming the “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) agenda.”
Harvard has been beset by controversy over campus anti-Israel activism since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. In February, a congressional committee issued subpoenas to Harvard administrators as part of a broader investigation into antisemitism at the university. Two weeks earlier, the Department of Education opened an investigation into the university’s treatment of pro-Palestinian students targeted by pro-Israel harassment.
In January, Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, resigned under pressure following plagiarism allegations and a congressional hearing in which she dithered on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated campus policy.
