Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund titan and the 35th richest person in the world, recently donated $300 million to Harvard University — a gift so large that the university announced it would rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after him. Harvard has only named a school after a donor three times since 1638.
Griffin’s donation is a reminder of how the vanity and influence-peddling of the super-rich lead to retrograde philanthropy. Harvard is the last place that needs financial gifts. And the constant stream of funds from ultra-wealthy people to ultra-elite institutions only helps replicate and deepen extreme inequality in our society.
This wasn’t Griffin’s first donation — he gifted Harvard $150 million in 2014, and cumulatively he’s contributed over half a billion dollars to the country’s most prestigious institute of higher learning. Yet even that fortune will make little difference to Harvard’s financial outlook; currently the university’s endowment fund holds over $50 billion — the largest academic endowment in the world, and larger than the gross domestic product of at least 90 countries.
Giving money to schools like Harvard is fluffing the cushions for a tiny hyper-elite stratum of the population.
Harvard is, of course, one of the most competitive higher education institutions in the world, and it mostly serves people from well-off or highly affluent backgrounds. The university, like many schools, also shows extreme favoritism toward children of alumni, and keeps a “Dean’s Interest List” to identify applicants tied to major donors or potential donors. Giving money to schools like Harvard is fluffing the cushions for a tiny hyper-elite stratum of the population that is guaranteed to play a hugely disproportionate role in shaping American life. The accumulation of gratuitous donations simply widens the resource gulf between this stratum and the general public.
But it would be naive to assume that Griffin, a 54-year-old alumnus of…
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