Harvard Corporation; By Their Progressive Donations You Will Know Them

By Chuck Warren

Harvard Corporation’s board has decided to stick together behind President Claudine Gay. Plagiarism and indifference to calls for a second Holocaust are not enough for the Board to hold their employee accountable. One might scratch one’s head, but a look at the members of the board explains why this is so.

The Harvard board, as you can read below, is diverse in all aspects except ideology. Its members come from different practices, ethnicities, and professions, from law to finance to academia, but this diversity of experience is only at the service of left-wing causes. With a couple of exceptions, all are from large blue cities, having grown up and lived in blue bubbles, and are committed progressives and Democrats. Most of them have probably not talked with an average Republican voter in decades. The wealthy ones are Democratic donors, and the others are former Democratic officials. All are committed to DEI policies and boast how they have implemented them everywhere they have worked. One is actually a professional DEI consultant.

So, it should not be surprising that what is plainly obvious to the vast majority of Americans, that Mrs. Gay is a menace to what used to be a great American institution and an embarrassment to her supporters, is lost on them. They are so wrapped up in their own progressive bubbles that they have lost common sense. They could have saved themselves from this problem if they welcomed a few dissenting voices in their midst, a conservative intellectual or a former Republican official respected across the aisle, who could challenge what is conventional wisdom at a Harvard board meeting and nowhere else. But their insistence that everybody should fall in line has now resulted in a national scandal, and they cannot understand why.

Take a look at who is on the board of Harvard.

Timothy R. Barakett
A financial investor, originally from Canada now residing in New York, Barakett has only donated money to Democratic candidates and PACs. His recipients include the Maryland Democratic Party, the 2022 progressive candidate for Maryland governor, Wes Moore, and Sara Gideon, the Democrat who ran against Susan Collins in 2020. Out of all the Republicans to defeat, Barakett chose the most centrist one who had voted to convict Donald Trump to go after that year, proving that even centrists are too far right for his taste.

Kenneth I. Chenault
Chenault is the CEO of American Express. Another New Yorker, Chenault boasts about implementing DEI policies at American Express to “make an impact.” So much so that an Arizona district court has sent a lawsuit against his company to arbitration over discrimination against white people in hiring practices. His donations over the last two cycles have been only to Democrats, mostly center-left candidates and the DNC, to which he has given six-figure donations.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Cúellar is a former justice of the California supreme court, appointed by Jerry Brown. After leaving his position, he became the president of the lefty peacenik think tank, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington D.C.

Paul J. Finnegan
Finnegan is a co-CEO of a private equity firm in Chicago, Madison Dearborn Partners. Like a good private equity firm, the mission of Madison Dearborn Partners is to maximize profit for their clients. Of course, I am joking. The firm’s website has a page dedicated to assuring its clients that their investments are DEI- and ESG-friendly. Personally, Finnegan has mostly donated to Democrats candidates and PACs. The only two exceptions are Adam Kinzinger after voting for Donald Trump’s impeachment and Jesse Reising, a congressional candidate in 2022 who lost his primary. He has also given large donations to a nonpartisan PAC that elects veterans. The rest of his recipients include $100,000 to Mainstream Democrats PAC, progressive candidates Mandela Barnes and Raphael Warnock, and centrist Democrats like Michael Bennett and Maggie Hassan. More than investing in progressives or center-left candidates, he simply supports the Democratic nominee in every race. The exception was 2020, when he gave the maximum amount allowed to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Biddy Martin
Martin is the president of Amherst College. She is from Campbell County, Virginia, and a career academic administrator who has held every administrative position in academia. She boasts about implementing diversity and inclusion policies at Amherst and how she supports freedom of speech as long as that freedom comes with the responsibility of saying acceptable ideas.

Karen Mills
Mills is the former president of a private equity group. A registered Democrat, she would go on to work for the Democratic governor of Maine and then become the head of the Small Business Administration under Barack Obama.

Diana Nelson
Nelson is a Minnesota resident and an executive at the hospitality industry. She has never given money to a Republican. Her recipients are all Democratic candidates and PACs. They include Gian Raimondo’s successful campaign for Rhode Island governor, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Osoff, Michael Bennett—all Democratic Senators—DNC, Senate Democrats’ Super PAC, Arizona Democratic Party, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Joe Biden.

Penny Pitzker
The Pitzker name is associated with Democratic donations in Illinois. Pitzker’s brother is the Democratic governor of the state, and she served as the Secretary of Commerce for Obama before being called back by Biden to oversee Ukraine reconstruction efforts. She has only donated to Democratic candidates and causes, including six figures to the Democratic Party, party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, and candidates for swing seats like Conor Lamb and Mark Kelly. In 2020, she gave money to both Cory Booker and Joe Biden.

Tracy Palandjian
Palandjian is a nonprofit executive from Boston who specializes in working with governments and corporations to implement DEI policies.

Shirley M. Tilghman
Tilghman is the former president of Princeton University, a science professor, and originally from Toronto, Canada. Despite her science background, at Princeton, she focused on promoting social causes, such as increasing the racial diversity of the faculty and the student body and creating ethnic studies centers.      In 2013, she became the first Princeton president to celebrate the contributions of “alternative genders” to Princeton, proving that a strong ideological commitment can convince even a scientist out of scientific realities.

Ted Wells Jr.
Wells is a co-chair and partner at a major New York law firm. A registered Democrat and the chairman emeritus of NAACP’s legal defense board. He has donated small amounts to a couple of local Republican candidates and a conservative Republican Senator from Alaska. The rest have only gone to Democratic causes and candidates, ranging from centrists like Joe Manchin to left-wing progressives like Tammy Baldwin and Wes Moore. In 2020, he was initially a supporter of Cory Booker before throwing his support behind Biden.

This board consists of center-left to far-far-left progressives. At a Harvard meeting, Bernie Sanders would count as a centrist. This ideological conformity is becoming all too common in elite American institutions, and the elites keep scratching their heads over why so many Americans reject their ideas. Of course, at their meetings, they go around and ask this question over and over again. The problem is that they all agree that it’s the American people’s fault for not being educated at Harvard, because there’s nobody there to tell them that the emperor is naked.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.