Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin on Saturday called on his alma mater, Harvard University, to embrace “Western values,” saying unrest on college campuses was the product of a “cultural revolution” in American education.
Griffin, the 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 gaining knowledge” over the past decade .
“Harvard should bring to the forefront the fact that it champions 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 had stopped his donations to the school because of its handling of anti-Semitism on the campus.
“What you see now is the end product of this cultural revolution in American education that is taking place particularly on American campuses, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed,” Griffin told the FT.
“Protests are like performative art”
“Protests on college campuses are almost like performance art…” he said.
“Freedom of expression does not give you the right to storm a building or vandalize it,” he added. “It’s not free speech. It’s just anarchy.”
Griffin’s remarks come as dozens of pro-Palestinian activists have been arrested at US universities in the latest crackdown on protests rocking US campuses.
Protesting students are demanding a ceasefire on Israel’s incursion into Gaza and have demanded that their schools divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Since the first mass arrests at Columbia University on April 18, at least 2,600 protesters have been arrested at more than 100 demonstrations in 39 states and Washington, D.C., according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization. .
Griffin, who began trading in his Harvard dorm, spoke at the Managed Funds Association conference in Miami in January about America’s elite universities and criticized education at universities, blaming “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) program”.
News Source : www.jpost.com
Gn bussni
