Billionaire Len Blavatnik will be pausing his donations to Harvard University over president Claudine Gay’s handling of antisemitism on campus, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
Blavatnik, who is worth an estimated $31.7 billion, has donated more than $270 million to Harvard through his family foundation, the outlet reported.
President Gay has been in hot water since she testified during a congressional hearing earlier this month and was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the university’s code of conduct. Her reply: It “depends on the context of the situation.”
During the hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) also pressed Gay over chants of “intifada” at student protests. Gay said the calls for violence do not violate the university’s code of conduct and claimed that the university is strongly committed to free speech and ideological diversity.
On October 7, the day Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, leading to the deaths of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, Harvard’s Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Group published a statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The statement failed to reference Hamas.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the letter explained. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” The note was signed by nearly three dozen other Harvard student groups and drew the condemnation of political and academic figures for its effort to justify terrorism.
In the days that followed, a billboard truck drove around campus highlighting signatories’ faces and names under the banned “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” At least ten student groups who originally signed the document ultimately withdrew their support.
Then Gay’s doctoral dissertation failed to stand up to scrutiny from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Christopher Brunet, who discovered multiple examples of plagiarism, creating a second scandal for the already-embattled school official.
After asking several scholars to review her papers, the Washington Free Beacon found that Gay had “plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work.”
The report found that Gay had paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors without proper attribution throughout four papers published between 1993 and 2017; Gay has published eleven papers in her career.
“The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism,” the report said. “Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that ‘it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.'”
The Harvard board has acknowledged it found instances of “inadequate citation” in the papers she has published and said Wednesday she would update her 1997 dissertation to include three citations. The announcement comes after Gay requested four corrections in two academic articles.
Earlier this month, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill resigned from her position amid fallout from her own controversial comments made during the congressional hearing. Before Magill tendered her resignation, UPenn donor Ross Stevens, the founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, pulled a $100 million gift from the university over her comments at the hearing.