American academia has become engulfed in crisis since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. These institutions, once bastions for research and study, have become breeding grounds for virulent antisemitism. The student bodies have become so radical, unhinged, and violent that three college presidents in December were incapable of denouncing calls for Jewish genocide on their respective campuses, probably out of fear of reprisals, even eschewing describing such antics as harassment. They exposed how degraded higher learning has become before Congress last Christmas.
Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) was one of those college heads who took that position. It cost her a $100 million donation and her presidency position at the school. Claudine Gay of Harvard repeated similar lines, as did Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth, who has thus far remained in her position at the institution. Gay was forced out, not over her remarks about antisemitism, but because she got busted for numerous instances of plagiarism in her academic career.
It's a circus. Even John Fetterman (D-PA), a Harvard alum, has reportedly fled the progressive Left, saying he no longer recognizes his school. Bill Maher has lamented how these colleges, some of them considered elite institutions, have become hotbeds for crazies, where hating Jewish people is now a requirement to become a bonafide progressive. Like UPenn, Harvard is going to lose a lot of money, with hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin saying he’s no longer cutting checks to Harvard until drastic changes are made. Griffin has donated at least $500 million to the university. He’s no longer going to send money to a “whiny snowflake” factory (via NY Post):
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Longtime Harvard donor Ken Griffin has vowed to withhold financial support for the university unless it undertakes significant changes to its policy regarding antisemitism as the hedge fund billionaire lamented the “whiny snowflakes” that were being produced by Ivy League schools.
“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Griffin, the 55-year-old hedge fund billionaire who runs Citadel and Citadel Securities, told a conference in Miami.
Griffin, who graduated from the Cambridge, Mass.-based school in 1989, donated $300 million to Harvard in the last year alone and more than $500 million total.
The Florida native who recently relocated his company headquarters to Miami from Chicago has an estimated net worth of $36.8 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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“Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children — young adults — to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions, a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame, and just being lost in the wilderness?” Griffin said.
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Bill Ackman, another hedge fund billionaire who graduated from Harvard, originally proposed denying employment opportunities to students who signed on to the letter.
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Leonard V. Blavatnik, the Harvard Business School alum and billionaire philanthropist who made a record-setting $200 million donation to Harvard Medical School in 2018, said he would also withhold additional financial support.
It’s not like these changes occurred overnight. Academia has been heading full steam ahead into crazy town. The 2016 election accelerated that journey.
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