Harvard pays the price for pro-Hamas protests, anti-Semitism on campus with 15% donation drop
On Thursday, Harvard University released its fiscal year 2024 financial report, which revealed a nearly 15% decline in donations compared to the previous year, marking the most significant drop in a decade.
According to the report, the Ivy League school received $1.38 billion in donations in 2023, which plunged to $1.17 billion in 2024.
‘Launched efforts to understand where and how we can improve.’
Despite the decline, Harvard did not lose its spot as the wealthiest university in the world. In fiscal year 2024, the Ivy League school generated a 9.6% return on its endowment fund, valued at $53.2 billion.
The significant donation dip can be attributed to several of Harvard’s top donors vowing to halt their funding over the university’s poor handling of the pro-Hamas campus protests.
In January, Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel LLC, a hedge fund, called Harvard students “whiny snowflakes” and said he would no longer donate to the institution.
“I’d like that to change, and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” Griffin stated. “But 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.”
He accused Harvard and other elite universities of “being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions, a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame.”
Griffin previously donated over $500 million to Harvard.
Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund firm, also declared he would no longer donate to his alma mater.
“I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment,” Ackman wrote in a lengthy X post.
Leonard V. Blavatnik, a billionaire philanthropist, stopped donating after previously providing Harvard Medical School with $200 million, the single largest donation to the school.
Former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in January following a massive plagiarism scandal amid already mounting criticism for her failed handling of the pro-Hamas protests.
Harvard’s new president, Alan Garber, wrote a message in the Ivy League school’s latest financial report, stating that the institution has “launched efforts to understand where and how we can improve.”
“Our task forces to combat antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian bias are focused on rebuilding not only a sense of belonging but also genuine acceptance among members of our community,” Garber wrote.
He noted that two of the school’s working groups “have outlined paths to more meaningful communication and constructive disagreement.”
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