Ken Griffin Ends Relationship with Harvard Due to Displeasure with Student Activism

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin on Tuesday accused elite colleges of creating “whiny snowflakes” instead of educating and said he has stopped financial donations to alma mater Harvard University for the time being.

Griffin, who has a net worth in excess of $30 billion, has reportedly contributed more than $500 million to Harvard over the years.

Speaking at the MFA Network event in Miami, the founder and CEO of Citadel told CNBC he has halted donations to the school but would “like that to change.”

America’s elite institutions are “lost in the wilderness of microaggressions [and] a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame,” Griffin said. He added that they are teeming with “young men and women who are just caught up in the rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee, and ‘this is not fair,’ and frankly just, like, whiny snowflakes.”

“Until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role [of] 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,” he said.

Griffin previously vowed not to hire any Harvard student who signed onto an open letter at the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas that blamed the Jewish state for the militant group’s brutal Oct. 7 attack.

During the CNBC interview, he also condemned antisemitism and criticized former Harvard President Claudine Gay for her response to a question during a December House Education Committee hearing about whether calls for Jewish genocide would constitute harassment. Gay, who has since resigned, gave a vague answer that immediately sparked an uproar and led to calls for her to step down.

“This is a simple answer: ‘You can ask my lawyers, but I’m going to tell you as the president of fill-in-the-blank university, there is no tolerance for calls to genocide on my campus,’ ” Griffin said.

According to Forbes, Griffin is not the only donor to close the checkbook to Harvard in the aftermath of the school’s response to rising antisemitism on campus.

Fellow Harvard alumnus and billionaire Len Blavatnik also pledged to stop donating to Harvard following its response to the Oct. 7 massacre.