Much has been made of the deep-pockets donors who have withdrawn support for colleges and universities which turn a blind eye — at best — to anti-Semitism on campus. When I spotted the article cited below in my news feed, I just assumed it was about Bill Ackman, but that wasn’t the case.

Major Harvard donor withdraws financial support amid ongoing anti-Semitism backlash

Ken Griffin is the latest wealthy alumnus to halt payments over university’s handling of hate speech on campus following Oct 7 attacks

by Our Foreign Staff • Tuesday, 30 January 2024 • 7:21 PM GMT

A major Harvard donor has halted financial support for the university and accused elite US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future leaders.

That’s as far as you’d get following the original hyperlink embedded in the article title, unless you are a subscriber, which I am not. However, the article can be read for free here.

Ken Griffin, an alumnus who donated $300 million (£237 million) to Harvard last year, is the latest in a string of wealthy donors who have halted donations amid uproar over the university’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus after the Oct 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

Mr Griffin announced he was pausing support for Harvard unless it makes significant changes.

“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Mr Griffin said of Harvard at a conference in Miami on Tuesday.

The university, he said, must make clear that it will “resume its role of educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers”.

According to Bloomberg, he accused leading US colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of future statesmen.

Harvard is still struggling to resolve tensions even after Claudine Gay, its former president, resigned this month amid an onslaught of criticism over her response to anti-Semitism, as well as accusations of plagiarism in her scholarship.

Mr Griffin is not Jewish, but Presbyterian, and he has an estimated net worth of $37.3 billion, so he’s not exactly someone you want to piss off, not if he’s been giving you money out of the goodness of his heart.

Harvard’s published tuition, housing and fees rates indicate a total cost of $79,450 for the 2023-24 academic year. Mr Griffin’s $300,000,000 donation just last year would pay the entire cost for 3,776 full-time, in-residence students, or 14.94% of the 25,266 student body. Yet he now sees America’s oldest and most prestigious university as no longer “educating young American men and women to be leaders and problem solvers,” but just producing the whiniest and the wokeiest Special Snowflakes™, perhaps something that should cost less than $79,450 a year. Heck, you could just have them work as Starbucks baristae and get that much out of them!

Mr Griffin isn’t exactly a hard-core conservative, having donated $5,000,000 to Nikki Haley’s Super PAC in her attempt to deny Donald Trump the 2024 Republican nomination. Bill Ackman, another pissed off Harvard donor, is a committed Democrat, one who is concerned that President Biden will be unable to defeat Mr Trump. These aren’t big MAGA people deserting our top universities!