The Wexner Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on the development of Jewish leadership, announced Monday it is ending ties with Harvard University for the “dismal failure” of university leadership to take a stand against Hamas’ attack on Israel.
The foundation, started by Victoria’s Secret founder Leslie Wexner and his wife, Abigail, wrote a letter to the university announcing the separation. The nonprofit has worked with the Harvard Kennedy School for more than 30 years, fostering a fellowship program that allows government and public policy professionals from Israel to study at Harvard for a year.
“We are stunned and sickened by the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians,” the foundation’s leaders wrote in a letter Monday to the university’s Board of Overseers.
Last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay released a video statement on the Ivy League’s YouTube page saying the university rejects terrorism, hate, and harassment of any groups of people, and it embraces free expression “even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”
“We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views,” Ms. Gay said in the video. “But that is a far cry from endorsing them. It’s in the exercise of our freedom to speak that we reveal our characters and we reveal the character of our institution.”
The Wexner Foundation said the school’s “cherished tolerance” for diverse perspectives has “narrowed” over the years and the foundation’s fellows “are increasingly marginalized.”
Since Hamas’s attack on Israel Oct. 7, the fellows “no longer feel marginalized,” but instead they feel “abandoned.”
“Harvard’s leaders were indeed tiptoeing, equivocating, and we, like former Harvard President Larry Summers cannot ‘fathom the administration’s failure to disassociate the university and condemn the statement’ swiftly issued by 34 student groups holding Israel entirely responsible for the violent terror attack on its own citizens,” the letter said. “That should not have been hard.”
Mr. Summers, an economist who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury and director of the National Economic Council, posted on X last week calling out the university’s lack of response to the “morally unconscionable statement” the students put out.
The foundation leaders determined that Harvard and the foundation “are no longer compatible partners,” citing an “absence of this clear moral stand.”
“We are grateful to the Wexner Foundation for its very long standing support of student scholarships,” a Harvard spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.
This rebuke comes after Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife Batia quit a Harvard executive board last week due to the university’s response to Hamas’ attacks on Israel.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.