Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin called on his alma mater Harvard University on Saturday to embrace "Western values", saying that the turmoil across college campuses was the product of a "cultural revolution" in U.S. education.
Griffin, founder of U.S. hedge fund Citadel, told the Financial Times in an interview that the U.S. had "lost sight of education as the means of pursuing truth and acquiring knowledge" over the past decade.
"Harvard should put front and center (that it) stands for meritocracy in America...," Griffin said, adding that schools should "embrace 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 said in January that he has halted donations to the school over how it handled antisemitism on campus.
"What you're seeing now is the end-product of this cultural revolution in American education playing out on American campuses, in particular, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed," Griffin told the FT.
"The protests on college campuses are almost like performative art..," he said.
"Freedom of speech does not give you the right to storm a building or vandalise it," he added.
"That's not freedom of speech. That's just anarchy."
(Reuters)