(Reuters) – Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin on Saturday called on his alma mater, Harvard University, to adopt “Western values,” saying turmoil on college campuses was the product of a “cultural revolution” in U.S. education.
Griffin, founder of US hedge fund Citadel, told the Financial Times in an interview that the US had “lost sight of education as a means of seeking truth and acquiring knowledge” over the past decade.
“Harvard should put front and center (that) it represents meritocracy in America…,” Griffin said, adding that schools should “embrace the Western values that 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 suspended donations to the school over its handling of anti-Semitism on campus.
“What we are seeing now is the end product of this cultural revolution in American education unfolding on American campuses, in particular, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed,” Griffin told the FT.
“Protests on college campuses are almost like performance art…” he said.
Griffin’s comments come amid arrests of dozens of pro-Palestinian activists at universities across America in the latest crackdown on demonstrations roiling US campuses.
The protesting students are demanding a ceasefire in Israel’s incursion into Gaza and have demanded that their schools be divested from companies with ties to Israel.
Since the first mass arrests at Columbia University on April 18, at least 2,600 protesters have been detained at more than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, D.C., according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization.
Griffin, who began trading from his Harvard dorm room, spoke at the Managed Funds Association conference in Miami in January about America’s elite universities and criticized university education, blaming the “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)”.
(Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Diane Craft)
