GOP Mega-donor Who Bought The Constitution Now Owns Harvard's Grad School

This week, Harvard University announced it will rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire donor Ken Griffin, who has given $300 million dollars to one of the richest universities in the world.

Griffin, CEO of the multinational hedge fund Citadel Securities, is a mega-donor for the Republican party. In August 2022, Griffin gave $5 million to the Florida Republican Party, and at least $100 million more in 2022 to candidates, political action committees, and elected officials with conservative agendas. He is also a financial backer of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the presumed 2024 presidential candidate who spearheaed the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law and education reforms that make it easier to ban books from school libraries.


Griffin also famously outbid crypto investors to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution for $43 million.

“Harvard University is a not-for-profit organization, it is not taxed,” Koby Ljunggren, president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Automobile Workers (UAW) told Motherboard. “This is Harvard, basically taking this transfer of wealth from a billionaire, while every other public university around Harvard is suffering and underfunded. It blows my mind in a way because it really emphasizes the dynamic of private institutions versus public institutions and the destruction and tearing down of public education in the U.S.”

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The donation also comes to Harvard at a moment when Republican-controlled states are taking over public school districts, voting to defund public libraries, and introducing legislation that criminalizes educators and librarians for providing access to books related to race, sex, and gender.