My Take | Hedge fund stars go after US university student protesters
- Billionaire investors think just because they make massive donations to universities they can engineer the academic equivalent of corporate takeovers and board ousters
If you want to know about the egregious conceit and self-entitlement of America’s biggest moneymen, Ken Griffin’s latest critique of the “cultural revolution” in US universities is a learning moment.
The hedge fund supremo, who has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University, told his alma mater to embrace “Western values”.
The arrogance of billionaires! It’s a bit like telling the pope how to be Catholic.
“What you’re seeing now is the end product of this cultural revolution in American education playing out on American campuses, in particular, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed,’ he told the Financial Times.
“Harvard will embrace our Western values that have built one of the greatest nations in the world, foster those values with students, and ask them to manifest these values throughout the rest of their life.”
I am pretty sure over the entirety of its existence, scholars and thinkers at Harvard have made fundamental contributions to Western civilisation in ways the whole hedge fund industry never did, or rather against so many ways in which the industry has subverted fundamental values of the West.