Harvard University will name its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) after conservative megadonor Kenneth C. Griffin. The billionaire Citadel hedge fudge manager has donated $300 million to the school’s largest arts and science faculty, which houses dozens of academic departments and offers degrees in subjects including film and visual arts, art history and architecture. The donation was announced today, April 11, in the Harvard Gazette.
Griffin has donated more than $500 million to the university since graduating in 1989. He has also given millions to conservative politicians. Griffin spent $100 million halfway through 2022, half of which went to federal Republican candidates. He also said that the United States would be “well served” if Florida Governor Ron DeSantis became president and gave $5 million to DeSantis’ Political Action Committee (PAC) in 2021, a year he became the biggest backer of Republican super PACs. In 2019, Hyperallergic reported on his business Citadel’s the majority wins in CoreCivic, which owns and operates private prisons and detention centers.
Harvard University’s announcement drew strong reactions online. “America’s leading university is named after a guy who funds a governor behind book bans and anti-LGBT laws. You must be proud” tweeted Clara Jeffrey.
“What kind of person does it take to insist or even allow Harvard to rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after you?” Perhaps the kind of person who amassed a fortune of tens of billions of dollars by extracting wealth from working-class people,” added Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of the Civil Rights Corps.
Griffin also has a long history of philanthropy in the art world. Among other donations, he donated $40 million to the Museum of Modern Art (he previously served on the board), $19 million to the Art Institute of Chicago, and $25 million to the Shed at Hudson Yards. He currently serves on the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Griffin would have bought a $300 million Willem de Kooning painting, a $60 million Paul Cézanne painting, and a Jasper Johns that sold for $80 million, in addition to works by several other artists after- war and impressionists.
In a somber allusion to the power ceded by America’s billionaires, in 2021 Griffin spent $43.2 million to purchase an original copy of the first printing of the United States Constitution.
