Ken Griffin just made the largest single gift in the history of American higher education: $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, most of it to launch a new campus in Miami. If the school’s only problem were a shortage of cash, it would be on easy street now. It is not.
Nearly a month after associate professor Uju Anya deleted her X account amid a firestorm over a racist and violent Sept. 11 post, she is still on the faculty website. Donors should not send another dollar to Carnegie Mellon until that changes.
On Sept. 11, Anya wrote, “Die first, white man, then ask yourself why I’m dancing.” This is par for the course for her: She had already celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk. She celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh. In 2022, she wished Queen Elizabeth an “excruciating” death. Carnegie Mellon called those earlier posts “offensive and objectionable” and said they did not represent the university’s values. Yet, despite proving she’s learned nothing from these reprimands, she’s kept her job.
The same playbook is running now. Officials promised “swift action,” but that action never arrived. The school is instead staging fireside chats and press releases about Griffin’s money, as if the elephant in the room will vanish if they talk loudly enough about computer science and “climate resilience.”
Anya herself said on Instagram that Carnegie Mellon never even contacted her about the latest posts. Before she scrubbed her X account, she gloated that her department chairman had texted her that they were just deleting the angry emails. The chairman deleted his own X account shortly afterward.
She also claimed Carnegie Mellon knew exactly what it was getting and that the school had poached her from another institution. Her posts implied the university backed her views, like when she posted that “it should’ve been Trump” after Dolly Parton died. Conservative and white students cannot feel safe in a classroom run by someone who talks that way. She has no business shaping young adults.
Carnegie Mellon’s media relations line now goes straight to a full voicemail. They will not answer any questions.
About 98% of campaign contributions from individuals affiliated with Carnegie Mellon went to Democrats last cycle, according to OpenSecrets. That echo chamber is why Anya felt free to stand firm and claim her boss would trash the complaints.
Carnegie Mellon already receives more foreign money than any American university except Harvard. Federal data put its lifetime haul near $3.9 billion, much of it tied to Qatar. Now it wants a Miami campus that “organizes learning around societal challenges rather than academic majors” and lists “climate resilience” among the organizing themes.
People are free to waste their own money. But we should not cheer when the money flows to institutions that refuse to fire a professor who cheers political murder and racial death threats.
Universities should receive no taxpayer subsidy at all. Factory workers and plumbers should not be forced to underwrite worthless gender studies degrees for Starbucks baristas carrying $100,000 in student debt. Federal student aid and research grants keep the machine running even when the product is indoctrination. Anya’s salary is part of that product. So is the administrative class that issues statements and then goes silent.
UNIVERSITIES HEMORRHAGE PUBLIC TRUST BY FOLDING TO THE MOB
Griffin’s gift will rename a computer-science school and plant a flag in Wynwood. Fine. The same institution still lists Anya as an associate professor of second-language acquisition. Carnegie Mellon has issued similar statements about this same professor before. They are hoping the latest public relations disaster blows over the same way the 2022 episode did. Donors who keep writing checks are telling them the strategy works.
Higher education’s refusal to police its own radicals helps explain low levels of confidence in the system. Young people sit in classrooms with faculty who are sympathetic to (or even in favor of) socialism and cash taxpayer-backed paychecks. If elite campuses want private philanthropy, they should end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and take appropriate action against people who celebrate assassination, telling white men to die first. Until they do, the checkbook should stay closed. And taxpayer money should never have been on the table.
Corey DeAngelis is a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment.