Harvard venture$ out in bid to save face

The executives overseeing Harvard University’s $51 billion endowment reportedly trekked around Silicon Valley last week, meeting with deep-pocketed investors as the Ivy League school looks to repair its battered image.

The team at Harvard Management Co., the nation’s largest college endowment, visited firms including Sequoia

Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Andreessen Horowitz, according to The Wall Street Journal.

It’s unclear if any of the VC capital firms HMC’s leadership visited have ever donated to Harvard itself, though many venture capitalists have spoken out in recent months that they see pro-Palestinian bias in academia, the Journal reported.

Kleiner Perkins chairman and Harvard alum John Doerr, for example, was ranked by Forbes as dishing out the second-largest donation to a US school ever after cutting Stanford University a $1.1 billion check in 2022.

Harvard has recently lost about that much in donations, as wealthy donors like billionaire businessman Len Blavatnik — who’s gifted the school roughly $270 million — closed their checkbooks after the school failed to discipline students who spewed antisemitic rhetoric on campus.

Disgraced ex-President Claudine Gay’s initial statement in response to the Hamas attacks also has been cited by some managers as “too weak,” the Journal reported.

In many meetings, HMC representatives discussed discontent surrounding Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which critics say have gone too far in recent years.

A spokesperson for the HMC declined to comment.