For Sale: Harvard naming rights, few questions asked

Should Harvard rename itself “AR-15 University,” if the price is right?

It’s not as absurd as it sounds. Harvard actually is renaming its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire hedge fund executive and Republican megadonor Kenneth Griffin, who is donating $300 million on top of a previous gift of $200 million. Griffin’s companies held investments in gun and ammunition manufacturers worth over $200 million as of December 31, 2022.

Harvard, which prides itself on being “the oldest institution of higher education in the United States,” is also the wealthiest. Its $50 billion-plus endowment is bigger than the GDP of most countries. It’s not as if the lights would go out if it chose not to take money from a major investor in weapons manufacturers whose irresponsible practices result in tens of thousands of deaths each year.

By accepting Griffin’s money and name, the storied school has aligned itself with the mass killing industry. Thanks to the lobby that Griffin supports, background checks aren’t needed to buy guns in the U.S., including assault weapons: the weapons of choice for mass shooters. Nor, it seems, are they needed to buy universities.

Griffin’s investment holdings included shares in gun manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger, which make and sell assault weapons. A Ruger assault pistol was used to kill 10 people at a Boulder, Colorado supermarket in 2021. Smith & Wesson AR-15 assault rifles were used in mass shootings that killed 17 children and teachers at a high school in Parkland, Fla., seven parade-goers in Highland Park, Ill., 16 in a social center in San Bernardino, Calif., and worshippers at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., to name a few.

If gun manufacturers cared about the lives and safety of others, they would make it harder for disturbed civilians to obtain weapons of war and use them to massacre children and adults. Instead, they have responded to the gun violence epidemic by making guns more lethal, and selling more of them to more people.

It’s not as if they don’t know any better. In 2000, Smith & Wesson agreed to monitor its sales network, not to allow assault weapon sales by its dealers, and not to market to children. Then it reneged. An FTC complaint and multiple lawsuits allege that Smith & Wesson ads target young men at risk of committing mass violence — increasing the likelihood of mass slaughters.

In the late ’90s, some gun dealers asked Ruger to cut off sellers who supply crime guns; Ruger refused. The company’s co-founder, Bill Ruger, famously said that “no honest man needs more than ten rounds in any gun.” Today, he’d be called gun-grabber. Ruger makes AR-15s with 30-round magazines.

Such are the enterprises from which Mr. Griffin profited. He did take at least one action to prevent gun violence: moving his own headquarters from Chicago toMiami in search of safer streets.

What he should have done is move his investments away from companies that flood the streets with guns, or use his leverage to persuade the gun and ammo makersto adopt responsible business practices to prevent people who shouldn’t have guns from getting them.

Gun violence is a global crisis. The gun industry facilitates almost 50,000 deaths a year in the U.S., and more in Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America. Changing this demands a cultural shift that prioritizes human life over corporate greed. Harvard is lending its name to the wrong side of that dichotomy by honoring a donor who supports the reckless gun industry. The message seems to be that money – at least lots of money – is what matters.

One would hope an educational leader would offer more wisdom. The true mission and value of education is learning from experience in order to improve the world and people’s lives. My own Harvard commencement was dominated by calls to divest from South Africa’s apartheid regime. But in the decades since, while I have worked to reform the U.S. gun industry, my alma mater seems to have learned nothing.

Jonathan Lowy is president of Global Action on Gun Violence and a graduate of Harvard College, class of 1983.