A Season for Giving

Last week, Carnegie Mellon University announced a $3 billion donation by billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin ’89 — the largest ever single donation to an American institution of higher education.

What Griffin didn’t do — and one must imagine that this caused a great deal of handwringing in the offices of Harvard bigwigs — was donate the $3 billion to his alma mater, Harvard. But we should not make too much of this apparent snub.

In January 2024, Griffin halted donations to Harvard over how it responded to campus antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. “Until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as 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,” Griffin said at the time.

Yet according to Griffin himself, he has recently resumed “modest” donations to Harvard. Even more significantly, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences raised about $800 million in fiscal year 2026, its best showing in at least five years.

The money is back — but what has really changed? In 2024, Griffin complained that the University had failed its educational mission, but most all of the changes Harvard has enacted appear to have been on the superficial level of the culture war. All the while, the content of a Harvard education has remained largely the same.

Griffin has historically been one of Harvard’s most generous donors, with contributions to the University totaling over $500 million. In 2023 — less than a year before cutting Harvard off — Griffin donated some $300 million to FAS. (Lest we forget, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences now bears Griffin’s name, as does the Office of Financial Aid.)

Since 2024, Harvard has undertaken a wide variety of initiatives to address the concerns of Griffin and other donors, like Leonard V. Blavatnik and Bill A. Ackman ’88, who voiced disapproval regarding the direction of the University. It seems to have worked.

Griffin recently expressed approval of the measures Harvard had taken towards addressing issues he cares about (namely, antisemitism) and that he expected to “support Harvard for decades to come.”

One can guess he approved of actions like the University’s controversial adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and the establishment of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.

Harvard has also begun probing donor interest in $10 million endowed professorships for “viewpoint diversity” and sent the ever-diplomatic President Alan M. Garber ’76 on a voyage to a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative thinktank.

The University’s new “institutional voice” policy (a term that might as well have replaced “Veritas” as Harvard’s motto) now allows administrators to avoid the quagmires of opining on controversial issues, since past statements tended to ruffle donor feathers. The College’s “Intellectual Vitality” initiative, meanwhile, feels more like an effort to deal with allegations of left-wing tyranny on campus.

Harvard seems to be trying everything to avoid a repeat of the 2024 donor backlash.

Yet, how much have the fundamentals of the University shifted? Did Harvard resume “educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues?” The better question is, did we ever really stop? Probably not.

What did change was that the Trump administration’s assault on higher education placed the value of universities in starker relief, and Harvard’s stand against that assault invited a groundswell of support for the University and earned the admiration of many donors. One must wonder if Griffin felt a bit of Crimson patriotism tickle his heart.

It should be noted that Griffin dismissed the notion that his gift to CMU was a slight towards Harvard. Rather, it seems as though his choice had much more to do with CMU’s willingness to establish a third satellite location in Griffin’s adopted hometown of Miami. (Harvard, on the other hand, has no satellite locations.)

For all of Harvard’s surface level changes, its fundamentals remain unaltered. Donors ought to continue to appreciate its enduring value.

Andrew W. Shlomchik ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Quincy House.