A billionaire donor to Harvard University said it and other elite schools create “whiny snowflakes” and vowed not to donate to the institution until that changes.
“Which way are we gonna pick?” Citadel CEO Ken Griffin asked CNBC’s Leslie Picker Tuesday at the MFA Network’s Miami conference. “Are we gonna educate the future members of the House and the Senate and the leaders of IBM, or are we gonna 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? And that’s a really big issue.”
Picker then asked Griffin if he was still supporting Harvard financially, to which he responded with a terse, “No.”
“I’d like that to change, and I’ve made that clear to members of the corporate board,” Griffin said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”
Earlier in the interview, Griffin slammed former Harvard president Claudine Gay and two other heads of elite universities who, when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their school’s code of conduct, did not give a clear answer in a December congressional testimony.
“It was heartbreaking to me to watch the testimony in front of Congress when asked a very simple question about, ‘How would you react to calls for genocide on campus?’ I mean this is a simple answer: ‘You can ask my lawyers, but I’m gonna tell you as the president of fill-in-the-blank university, there is no tolerance for calls for genocide on my campus.'”
Griffin was one of several prominent alumni who criticized Harvard’s immediate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, pushing the school to come out forcefully in defense of the Jewish state. He said the same month that he would not hire the heads of student organizations who signed a letter blaming Israel for the massacre.
He has given generously to Harvard in years past. In April 2023, he gave $300 million to the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which the college renamed after him. That donation made his total philanthropic contribution to the school over four decades reach more than $500 million.
Griffin, who has also contributed to many Republican campaigns, is not the only donor to no longer give to an elite school in the wake of its response to the Hamas attacks. Former U.S. ambassador to China and Russia Jon Huntsman said in October that his family would cut off donations to the University of Pennsylvania given the institution’s “silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel.”
