Billionaire investor Ken Griffin calls on Harvard to embrace ‘Western values’
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Kenneth Griffin has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University, but has halted donations to the school over how it handled antisemitism on campus.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON - Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin called on his alma mater Harvard University on May 11 to embrace "Western values", saying that the turmoil across college campuses was the product of a "cultural revolution" in US education.
Mr 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 centre (that it) stands for meritocracy in America...," Mr Griffin said, adding that schools should "embrace Western values that have built one of the greatest nations in the world."
Mr 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," Mr 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 vandalise it," he added.
"That's not freedom of speech. That's just anarchy."
Mr Griffin's remarks come amid arrests of dozens of pro-Palestinian activists at universities across America in the latest crackdowns on demonstrations roiling US campuses.
The protesting students are demanding a cease-fire in Israel's incursion into Gaza
Since the first mass arrests at Columbia University
Mr 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 criticised the education at the universities blaming the "DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) agenda." REUTERS
