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OPINION

By Opiyo Oloya

Billionaire Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of hedge fund Citadel who just nine months ago gave $300m to Harvard University, last week declared he would not give a penny more to the university.

His reasons: Harvard University is full of “whinny snowflakes.” Speaking at a conference in Miami last Tuesday, the billionaire asked, “Are we going to educate the future members of the House and Senate and the leaders of IBM? Or are we going to educate a group of young men and women who are caught up in a rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee” and added, ‘This is not fair, and just frankly whiny snowflakes?”

To be sure his intentions were clear, Griffin added, “Until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role [of] educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

Griffin is not the first rich man to use his wealth to demand conformity and compliance with his way of thinking.

His anger seemed directed generally at the ongoing conversation and debates across North American colleges and universities about the role of equity, diversity and inclusion on campus.

These are not new concepts, but they forcefully shine light on racism, sexism and other forms of discriminatory and exclusionary behaviour directed toward minorities, especially black and brown people.

Specifically, Griffin is angry that discussion under the guise of academic freedom often morph into criticisms of behaviour of the dominant white culture. Some hard criticisms about how America treats its minorities are seen as attempt to cancel white culture, and make white people feel guilty about racists incident from historical past.

The reference to oppressor and oppressee as was often raised in context of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer, is seen as unfair.

Griffin and others like him, including failed Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis do not accept the argument that America is built on a racist premise that holds the supremacy of a dominant race over other races. Instead, they intensely resent the argument that tackling oppression requires looking at the way the oppressors work — through the various institutional and systemic arrangements, including policies and laws.

It is not a problem for Griffin, for example, if there are still oppressive systems in the American society. Rather, he is concerned, foremost, that students attending Harvard and other universities are learning about oppressors and, secondly, turning into activists to fight what they see as oppression.

Griffin’s tantrum is not unique from another famous incident involving Fox TV host Laura Ingraham who in June 2020 following the killing of George Floyd told NBA basketball great LeBron James to “Shut up and dribble.”

Ingraham’s outburst at attempting to shut James up for daring to speak about police treatment of black people recalled the paternalistic way some white people see the participation of black and brown people in public discourse on important matters.

The underlying, but clear expectation is that black and brown people should be happy with whatever handouts they get from society. LeBron James should be grateful that basketball made him a very rich black man, and he should not complain when bad things happen to black people.

But academic institutions like Harvard are exactly where difficult debates and conversations should occur because these are also places where people with different expertise come together to discuss ideas.

In fact, for as long as universities have existed, perhaps from the time of Plato and Aristotle, they have been hotbeds for radical ideas that flew in the face of the society of the time.

Astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei believed the world was round, and revolved around the sun and for that he was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church in 1633. It took 300 years before he was cleared of the charges.

Steeped in tradition of academic freedom and freedom of speech, universities offer the opportunity to talk about difficult topics.

While conformity may seem attractive because it avoids the messiness of disagreement, it also lacks the rigour of debate, of challenging the orthodoxy and saying, “Hey, look at this evidence that contradicts what you have just said.” For instance, regardless of one’s viewpoints about the war in Israel and Gaza, universities provide spaces to discuss it, to consider the impact of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and the subsequent Israeli war in Gaza that has impacted millions of Palestinian lives.

Do the policies of the current Israeli government toward Palestinians create conditions for potential genocide as was argued by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, and about which the court ruled in the affirmative over a week ago? Or should these policies instead be seen from the lenses of Israel protecting its citizen from harm?

What about the criticism of Ethiopia for killing of Tigrayan people? Should we discuss China’s policies toward Muslim minorities, the Hui and Uyghurs, or allow it to shape western’s foreign policy toward Beijing without questioning it?

In November 2019, the tiny West -African nation of Gambia took Myanmar before the International Court of Justice for the treatment of mainly Muslim Rohingya minority ethnicity.

As the world watched, Gambia’s minister of justice Abubacarr Tambadou stated before the court that the actions of Myanmar’s military rulers against the Rohingya amounted to genocide.

He argued he filed the case “to stop these acts of barbarity and brutality that have shocked and continue to shock our collective conscience. To stop this genocide of its own people”.

If we can discuss Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya, why can’t we discuss the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians?

Throughout human development and progress, after all, precisely these contradictions, debates, and disagreements, often within universities that have spurred new thinking and different ways of doing things.

While we hold that the round wheel is the most efficient way of propelling bicycles today, it does not preclude the possibility that future inventors may find other mechanisms to propel the bicycle forward.

Whatever those mechanisms will be, if they ever come to exist at all, their inventors will have continued the long tradition of tinkering with ideas, to challenge existing thinking to create new ones.

Simply put, billionaire Griffin and those who use big dollars as a carrot to promote their viewpoints on campus while silencing others do not improve academic discourse within institutions. They end up creating dead-spaces where critical thinking and research are shunned. The society Griffin and many like him wish to create, in other words, does not foster progress, development and growth.

They kill the very goose that lays the golden egg.

Opiyo.oloya@gmail.com

Twitter: @Opiyooloya

Dr Opiyo Oloya is the Inaugural Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada