Notable & Quotable: On Ken Griffin’s $300 Million Harvard Donation

From “Conservative Donors: Wake Up!” by Heather Mac Donald in the Summer issue of City Journal:

To understand just how confident Harvard can be in its irresistible appeal to donors, consider one of its recent windfalls. In April 2023, hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin bestowed $300 million on the university, close to the largest single donation in the institution’s history. . . . Griffin is not your usual high-value donor—not a George Soros, Bill Gates, or David Geffen, say. He is a conservative.

(Of course, there is no escape from Harvard’s diversity obsessions. Griffin’s gift will itself be managed according to diversity principles. Harvard’s financial overseers brag about having increased the diversity of their staff and of the external financial companies they employ. Presumably, Griffin selects his own money managers based on merit, not on race and sex.)

Griffin could have worked with the administration to create courses in Western civilization, given his regard for the Constitution. If the faculty threw a tantrum, as the Yale faculty did in 1995 at the prospect of a $20 million gift to strengthen the humanities curriculum, that eruption would itself have been clarifying.

Griffin is accustomed to deal-making. He warned Chicago for years that he was prepared to decamp if it did not control crime. When it came to Harvard, he seems to have set aside his business sense and his beliefs. . . .

Griffin’s gift signals to his fellow businessmen, including to other conservatives, that the path to prestige still leads through the Ivy League. And it signals to universities that they will continue to pay no price for a political agenda antithetical to mainstream American values, one that proclaims racism as the fundamental American trait. As long as this reflexive giving remains the norm, the project of reforming universities from the inside out is doomed to fail. It is time to start building elsewhere.