Billionaire investor Ken Griffin calls on Harvard to embrace ‘Western values’ By Reuters

(Reuters) -Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin referred to as on his alma mater Harvard College on Saturday to embrace “Western values”, saying that the turmoil throughout faculty campuses was the product of a “cultural revolution” in U.S. training.

Griffin, founding father of U.S. hedge fund Citadel, informed the Monetary Instances in an interview that the U.S. had “overpassed training because the technique of pursuing fact and buying information” over the previous decade.

“Harvard ought to put entrance and centre (that it) stands for meritocracy in America…,” Griffin stated, including that faculties ought to “embrace Western values which have constructed one of many best nations on the earth.”

Griffin who has donated greater than half a billion {dollars} to Harvard College stated in January that he has halted donations to the college over the way it dealt with antisemitism on campus.

“What you are seeing now could be the end-product of this cultural revolution in American training taking part in out on American campuses, particularly, utilizing the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed,” Griffin informed the FT.

“The protests on faculty campuses are nearly like performative artwork..,” he stated.

“Freedom of speech doesn’t provide the proper to storm a constructing or vandalise it,” he added.

“That is not freedom of speech. That is simply anarchy.”

Griffin’s remarks come amid arrests of dozens of pro-Palestinian activists at universities throughout America within the newest crackdowns on demonstrations roiling U.S. campuses.

The protesting college students are demanding a cease-fire in Israel’s incursion into Gaza and have demanded their faculties divest from corporations with ties to Israel.

For the reason that first mass arrests at Columbia College on April 18, at the very least 2,600 demonstrators have been detained at greater than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, D.C., in line with The Attraction, a nonprofit information group.

Griffin, who began buying and selling in his Harvard dormitory, spoke on the Managed Funds Affiliation convention in Miami in January about America’s elite universities and criticized the training on the universities blaming the “DEI (range, fairness and inclusion) agenda.”