Billionaire Len Blavatnik joins growing list of donors who are pausing gifts to Harvard University amid anti-Semitism scandal

A billionaire has joined the list of Harvard alumni and donors who are pausing their giving to the school, which supports President Claudine Gay, despite accusations that anti-Semitism is being denied a campus and plagiarism is being committed.

Len Blavatnikm, whose family foundation has given the Ivy League at least $270 million, will stop donating to his alma mater until what they see as “rampant anti-Semitism on campus” is addressed, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Gay, who has apologized for her testimony, also faces accusations that she plagiarized about half of the 11 magazine articles on her resume.

Blavatnikm and his wife Emily, who are Jewish, are the youngest donors to cut the university's financial support after Gay's congressional testimony in which she refused to say the call for genocide of Jews on campus is inconsistent with the rules of the school.

Leslie Wexner, the former CEO of L Brands – the parent company of Victoria's Secret, said his foundation was halting donations to Harvard after pro-Palestinian protests broke out at the school following Hamas's attacks on Israel on October 7.

The Wexner Foundation sent a letter to the Harvard Board of Overseers on October 16, informing them that their “financial and programmatic relationship” with the university has ended.

The foundation's donations enabled up to ten public and government professionals from Israel each year to earn a one-year degree from the Harvard Kennedy School. Leslie Wexner, who previously ranked in the Harvard Business Review Top 100 Best Performing CEOs, is of Russian Jewish descent.

Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife Batia also withdrew support from Harvard in October after 31 school organizations signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas' attacks.

The couple said they would stop donations “in protest of the shocking and insensitive response of the university's president, who did not condemn the letter from student organizations that blamed Israel for the massacres.”

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who has donated hundreds of millions to his alma cause, also halted donations after the war broke out and has since led a campaign to replace Gay.

The school, the wealthiest in the country, is heavily dependent on its donations – by far its largest source of income.

But Harvard has been fierce in its commitment to stand by Gay, even after new allegations of plagiarism moved from conservative media to more liberal outlets like CNN and The New York Times.

It comes as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced it will expand the scope of its investigation into Gay's work and demanded the school turn over all documentation related to the plagiarism allegations. The committee had already opened an investigation into anti-Semitism on Harvard's campus after Gay's testimony, which was heavily criticized.

“Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community,” the Republican representative said. Virginia Foxx, chair of the committee.

Meanwhile, top Republicans in Congress have called for withholding billions in federal funding from universities that support anti-Semitism to root out the rot in American higher education.

Foxx warned that Harvard could lose funding if it is found not to have taken the plagiarism allegations seriously.

The academic initially submitted two corrections to articles from 2001 and 2017 after she was accused of plagiarism, adding “quotes and citations,” a Harvard spokesperson said. However, following additional claims of plagiarism, the Ivy League said Wednesday that Gay also had three spots in her Ph.D. thesis to add attributions.

Harvard told the Boston Globe that they found “examples of double-talk without appropriate attribution” in Gay's 1997 dissertation, titled “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics.”

Gay was first publicly accused of plagiarism by right-wing media, most notably by blogger Christopher Rufo, who outlined issues in her dissertation and a series of articles earlier this month.

Just hours after the allegation was published, the university said it was pursuing Gay after quietly investigating the claims in October and determining that her conduct did not amount to academic misconduct.

While Harvard's administration said they found no violation of the school's policies in Gay's work, The Harvard Crimson, which reviewed the examples of alleged plagiarism, came to a different conclusion.

The school's newspaper wrote that some of Gay's writings “appear to violate Harvard's current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.”

While some of the Free Beacon's claims contain minor citation issues, the Crimson said others are “more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences that are virtually identical to other work and contain no citations.”

The student publication notes Harvard's rule on what constitutes plagiarism, saying that when copying language “word for word,” scholars must “give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear by citing the source, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear source reference.'

Gay was accused of copying two paragraphs from the work of then-Harvard scholars D. Stephen Voss and Bradley Palmquist. One paragraph is almost identical, except for a few words.

Gay defended her work to The Boston Globe: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have ensured that my scholarship meets the highest academic standards.”