The Wexner Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on cultivating Jewish leadership, is cutting ties with Harvard over what it described as the university’s inadequate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, which killed at least 1,400 people in Israel.
The split is the most recent development in an ongoing controversy at the Ivy League university resulting from a statement signed by a coalition of Harvard student groups in response to the attack, which said that the Israeli government was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Critics have said that Harvard was too slow to respond to the letter and not forceful enough when it did.
The university has become a microcosm of tensions arising at U.S. higher education institutions, where donors have distanced themselves and protests have broken out on campuses — all over responses to the war.