Biden relying on Penny Pritzker to assist rebuild Ukraine regardless of debacle at Harvard

U.S. News
By Carolina Stanton

President Biden can solely hope that main Democratic donor Penny Pritzker has extra success with Ukraine than she’s having at Harvard University.

The billionaire Ms. Pritzker, who heads the Harvard Corporation, was lately named to serve within the newly created place of U.S. particular consultant for Ukraine’s financial restoration, a submit whose duties embrace attracting private and non-private funding to the war-torn nation.

“Working in lockstep with the Ukrainian government, our allies and partners, international financial institutions, and the private sector, she will drive the United States’ efforts to help rebuild the Ukrainian economy,” Mr. Biden mentioned Sept. 14 in an announcement.

The choose doesn’t essentially bode effectively for Ukraine, based mostly on how occasions have unfolded at Harvard on Ms. Pritzker’s watch.

The Massachusetts-based Ivy League college is reeling from a status hit and an exodus of prime donors pushed by a furor over campus antisemitism below Harvard President Claudine Gay, who’s additionally dealing with a plagiarism scandal after lower than six months on the job.

Criticism of Ms. Pritzker’s management is climbing with every day that Ms. Gay stays in workplace. Ms. Pritzker herself now faces public calls to step down together with Ms. Gay, the college’s first Black president.

“Resign, President Gay! And Penny Pritzker, too. I don’t care how much money you gave to Harvard,” mentioned Richard Grenell, a former Trump administration official who holds graduate and undergraduate levels from Harvard.

“You both are cheapening our degrees,” he mentioned Dec. 26 on X. “The damage is getting worse with your lies. You’ve lost our confidence.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and Harvard grad, mentioned final week that Ms. Gay ought to “resign in disgrace,” together with “every member of Harvard’s board who covered up for her and allowed this to happen.”

Bonnie Glick, who served as deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development within the Trump administration, mentioned “Penny Pritzker needs to fire Claudine Gay, cut all of Gay’s ties to Harvard, and then she and her board need to resign.”

Ms. Pritzker, who beforehand sat on Mr. Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has served since 2018 on the 12-member Harvard Corporation, the college’s governing physique. She was elected senior fellow in February 2022, a number of months after making a $100 million reward to the Harvard economics division.

Certainly she’s invested in Ms. Gay’s success. In 2022, Ms. Pritzker headed the search committee that chosen Ms. Gay, then dean of the humanities and sciences school, to succeed outgoing President Lawrence Bacow in what the Harvard Crimson described because the “shortest Harvard presidential search in almost 70 years.”

There’s additionally an Obama connection. Former President Barack Obama, a Harvard Law School alum, privately lobbied the board to maintain Ms. Gay after her disastrous testimony at a Dec. 5 House listening to on campus antisemitism, in accordance to the Jewish Insider. Mr. Obama has not commented on the report.

Ms. Pritzker, the sister of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, served as commerce secretary throughout Mr. Obama’s second time period. Before that, she was a prime fundraiser for Mr. Obama, credited with serving to gasoline his meteoric rise from the Illinois state legislature to the White House.

The Harvard Corporation has been mum since issuing a Dec. 12 assertion expressing its unanimous assist for Ms. Gay, calling her “the right leader to help our community heal” and insisting that she dedicated “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

Ms. Gay has agreed to make seven corrections to date to her scholarly articles following greater than 40 allegations of plagiarism. Her backpedaling didn’t appease critics, who argue that college students committing the identical violations would have been suspended and even expelled.

Billionaire hedge-fund supervisor Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who has given thousands and thousands to the college, mentioned a dependable supply informed him that the board requested Ms. Gay to resign, and that she refused. She has additionally reportedly retained counsel.

“President Gay’s performance and her academic record issues provide plenty of cause for termination without compensation,” Mr. Ackman mentioned Dec. 24 on X. “But at every step so far, the Board has made the wrong call and dug a deeper hole for themselves and Harvard.”

He estimated that Harvard donors have withdrawn or paused “billions of dollars” in donations over Ms. Gay‘s “mishandling” of the university response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.

None of that speaks well of Ms. Pritzker’s capacity to handle what has been described as a generational disaster for the 387-year-old college.

“Penny Pritzker presides over a $50 billion Harvard enterprise,” Ms. Glick mentioned on Newsmax. “She recruited an unqualified woman to preside over it as president of Harvard University because Claudine Gay fit the DEI profile — she’s a Black woman.”

Ms. Glick, the inaugural director of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University, mentioned the result’s that “she has now presided, as Bill Ackman is quick to point out, over the loss of billions of dollars in donations.”

“No responsible corporate board would ever allow that to happen,” she mentioned.

The precedent set earlier this month on the University of Pennsylvania isn’t encouraging for Ms. Pritzker‘s future as board chief.

Penn President Liz Magill resigned shortly after she and two other university presidents, including Ms. Gay, at the Dec. 5 hearing botched their responses to a question on how they would handle calls for “genocide of Jews.”

Also resigning was Scott Bok, chairman of the Penn Board of Trustees, the school’s governing physique.

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