“What you’re seeing now is the end product of this cultural revolution in American education playing out on American campuses, in particular, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed,’ he told the Financial Times.

“Harvard will embrace our Western values that have built one of the greatest nations in the world, foster those values with students, and ask them to manifest these values throughout the rest of their life.”

I am pretty sure over the entirety of its existence, scholars and thinkers at Harvard have made fundamental contributions to Western civilisation in ways the whole hedge fund industry never did, or rather against so many ways in which the industry has subverted fundamental values of the West.

Griffin continued: “Many wealthy donors have valuable insight into transformation and improvement strategies that are clearly needed at this time.”

Only wealthy donors? Mr Griffin, try not to be so obvious!

“The narrative on some of our college campuses has devolved to the level that the system is rigged and unfair,” he said, “and that America is plagued by systemic racism and systemic injustice.”

But really, do Western values include free speech?

“Freedom of speech does not give you the right to storm a building or vandalise it,” he said. “That’s not freedom of speech. That’s just anarchy.”

Well, I guess one man’s free speech is another man’s anarchy.

Of course, Griffin is not the only one. Fellow hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman has successfully engineered the ouster of Harvard’s first female black president Claudine Gay, who proved to be a bit too protective and tolerant of student protesters against the slaughter in Gaza. Ironically, accusations of plagiarism against Gay ricocheted back to Ackman’s wife, a former MIT professor.

Ackman, however, threatened to set up a plagiarism-detective team to track the published records of the editorial staff of Business Insider, the news publication that published the expose about his wife. Ackman has called the reports defamatory.

Private equity hotshot Marc Rowan has had similar success at the University of Pennsylvania. He called on fellow wealthy donors and alumni to put pressure on the university administration because of its alleged tolerance of “hate and racism” by pro-Palestinian students and scholars.

As a result, Penn president Liz Magill and board chairman Scott Bok both resigned.

Gay, Magill and Bok were the Chinese-proverbial chicken that was killed to frighten the monkey. Since then, administrators at top US universities have heard the message loud and clear. They have been busy calling in riot police with guns, tasers and stun grenades blazing to crack down on their own students – and professors in some cases – at the first sign of trouble.

It’s money see money do, sorry, I meant monkey see monkey do. In the US today (and Germany as well), it’s radical and antisemitic to oppose genocide, and to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and Washington to stop arming Israel.

Personally, I think “the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed” is pretty apt. What else do you call the wanton slaughter of children in the thousands in Gaza by the Israeli war machine with US, German, Italian and Canadian weapons, and an Anglo-American media industry that justifies the atrocities?

What do you call university students who, armed with nothing but their ideals, shout “enough is enough” at armed riot police before them, and against all the money and power in America – because they are answering the call of global conscience against their own complicit government?

By the way, university, another great Western invention, is supposed to be independent and free of outside interference. But these billionaires think just because they have made massive donations they can engineer the academic equivalent of corporate takeovers and board ouster.

Perhaps that’s their “Western values” in action!