Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin today called on Harvard University – which he attended and which he funds with endowments – to embrace “Western values”, arguing that unrest on American campuses is the result of a “cultural revolution” in American education. system.

Griffin, founder of the US hedge fund Citadel, told the Financial Times in an interview that the US in the last decade “forgot that education is the means of seeking truth and gaining knowledge”.

“Harvard needs to make it clear (that) it supports meritocracy in America…,” Griffin said, adding that universities should “embrace the Western values ​​that have built one of the greatest nations in the world.”

Griffin, who has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University, announced in January that he had stopped donating to the university because of his administration’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus.

“What you’re seeing now is the culmination of this cultural revolution in American education, and it’s unfolding on American campuses, specifically, using the model of the oppressor and the oppressed,” the billionaire investor told the FT. “Protests on university campuses are almost like performance art…”.

“Freedom of speech does not give someone the right to break into a building or vandalize it.” “This is not freedom of speech. This is simply anarchy,” he argued.

Griffin’s remarks come amid the arrests of dozens of pro-Palestinian activists at universities across America in the latest in a series of crackdowns on protests that have roiled US campuses.

The protesting students are calling for a ceasefire in the Israeli operation in Gaza and have called on their universities to end deals with companies with ties to Israel.

Since the first mass arrests at Columbia University on April 18, at least 2,600 protesters have been detained at more than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington City, according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization.

Griffin, who graduated from Harvard, spoke at the Managed Funds Association conference in Miami in January about America’s elite universities and criticized higher education, accusing it of a “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)” agenda.