Latest news with #PennyPritzker
Wall Street Journal
29-07-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Why the Billionaire Pritzkers Got Obsessed With Quantum
How did two of the billionaire heirs to the Hyatt hotel fortune turned politicians get obsessed with a technology so complex that even the tech-savviest struggle to comprehend it? A little bit of hometown pride and a lot of optimism. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker are behind a statewide quantum computing push that's beginning to take shape on Chicago's south side.
New York Times
26-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Harvard's Powerful Leader Faces Intense Scrutiny in Trump Fight
In the high-stakes negotiations between the Trump administration and Harvard University, the White House and a growing number of people at Harvard have at least one shared goal. They want Penny Pritzker, the head of the university's top governing board, out. Ms. Pritzker holds a powerful post as the leader of the Harvard Corporation that in normal times is also a quiet one. The corporation is the equivalent of a board of trustees at any other academic institution and is mostly focused on fund-raising, strategy and picking the university's president. But for Harvard, these are far from normal times. The government has cut billions in federal funds to the school and tried to ban international students — a quarter of its enrollment — from attending. The school has sued the government twice in the last several months, even as it tries to negotiate an end to a conflict that has forced painful belt-tightening. As Harvard's problems pile up, Ms. Pritzker's leadership has been called into question. On campus, prominent professors and donors are wondering whether she should go. And two Trump administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as delicate negotiations continue, say the hope is that the government's pressure campaign on the school will lead to her ouster. Ms. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, has donated $100 million to Harvard for a new economics building. She has close ties with the Democratic Party and her family has a history of bad blood with President Trump. She has also faced criticism over her handling of the controversy surrounding Harvard's former president, Claudine Gay, who resigned under pressure last year. Now, some people tied to the school say that Ms. Pritzker has become a distraction that seems to be hurting rather than helping the university's efforts to beat back an onslaught of Trump administration attacks. They suggested that she could be a concession whose resignation could help Harvard's efforts to negotiate with the White House, if she would only agree to leave. A dozen people, including friends, professors, alumni, major donors and Trump officials, discussed Ms. Pritzker's role and future at the school. Several asked not to be identified because they worried about endangering Harvard's talks with the administration. One administration official said that Ms. Pritzker's resignation has not been explicitly included as part of any offers. But unofficially, Trump officials have discussed a desire for her to leave to show Harvard's commitment to making changes. Some argued that there was a legitimate need to add fresh attitudes and skills to the board, though they conceded that such a move could be misconstrued as capitulation. 'The corporation should be accountable for some of the problems that have existed, and the chair of the corporation would be a natural person to be subject to turnover at a time like this,' said Dr. Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of the Harvard Medical School who has criticized both the Trump administration's interference in higher education and universities over free speech concerns. A prominent academic at Harvard suggested that Ms. Pritzker's departure would be a small price to pay. Unlike many of the demands that the Trump administration is making of the school, losing the board's leader would not compromise Harvard's academic freedom. But since the corporation is a self-appointing body, any change in its membership would have to come from within. Ms. Pritzker also retains many supporters at Harvard, who say she has led the school well through multiple crises. They point to her business and political expertise, and argue that a more reserved leadership style is what the post calls for at the moment. Jason Furman, who worked with Ms. Pritzker at the White House during the Obama administration and is now an economics professor at Harvard, said he believed the Harvard community is enthusiastic about its current leaders. 'A year ago, there were many people that were upset with the leadership, and now people are just generally quite unified,' he said, and 'quite reflexively against the idea that you would do something for Donald Trump.' Ms. Pritzker, 66, declined to be interviewed for this article. A spokesman for Harvard declined to comment. As the battle between Harvard and the White House enters what could be its final phase, Ms. Pritzker is in the fray, a close business associate said. She talks to Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard's president, every day, sometimes more than once a day, this associate said. And as the head of a corporation with the power to hire and fire the president, Ms. Pritzker has an outsize influence. Friends said she was unlikely to give in. Vivian Riefberg, who has known Ms. Pritzker since they met as freshmen at Harvard in the late '70s, said Ms. Pritzker cares most about 'seeking constructive engagement.' 'Some people like a fight. She likes to make a difference,' said Ms. Riefberg, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Ms. Pritzker was elected to the 13-member corporation in 2018. The members are quaintly known as 'fellows,' and she became the first woman to lead the board in 2022. Her first major decision was picking Dr. Gay as Harvard's president. Ms. Pritzker stood at the new president's side throughout the inauguration ceremony in 2023, beaming through her blocky glasses as speakers celebrated Dr. Gay as Harvard's first Black president. Three months later, Dr. Gay's tenure ended. She had flubbed a question in a congressional hearing about whether calling for genocide against Jews broke Harvard's rules. Dr. Gay was also accused of plagiarism. In the firestorm that followed, Bill Ackman, the Pershing Square hedge fund founder and a Harvard graduate, criticized Dr. Gay — but also Ms. Pritzker, for not doing due diligence before hiring her. After Dr. Gay resigned, Mr. Ackman called for Ms. Pritzker and other members of the corporation to follow suit. In May, Mr. Ackman again posted a call for Ms. Pritzker to step down. While she might be 'a fine person,' he wrote on X, 'she has led Harvard during a period of substantial damage to the institution's global reputation, the explosion of antisemitism on campus, and dramatic deterioration in Harvard's financial wherewithal.' Harvard has defended itself vociferously, though its leaders have said that they recognize that there are problems with antisemitism on campus and have been working to address them. The Trump administration has taken note of Mr. Ackman's criticism, however. Linda McMahon, the education secretary, sent a letter to Harvard saying that it should no longer seek grants from the government 'since none will be provided.' In her letter, Ms. McMahon cited Mr. Ackman. She also wrote, 'The Harvard Corporation, which is supposed to competently and professionally manage Harvard's vast academic, financial and physical resources, is run by strongly left-leaning Obama political appointee Penny Pritzker, a Democrat operative, who is catastrophic and running the institution in a totally chaotic way.' Many at Harvard believe that being so conspicuously branded as allied with one political party has become a handicap for Ms. Pritzker. She was the national finance chair of Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, and secretary of commerce in the second Obama administration. Her brother, JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, has established himself as an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump and is expected to run for president in 2028. Ms. Riefberg, her college friend, said Ms. Pritzker was able to transcend partisan politics. She recalled that she had been almost unanimously confirmed by the Senate as commerce secretary in 2013. (Senator Bernie Sanders was the lone dissenter.) The Pritzker family's conflicts with the president precede the current battle between Harvard and the government. Her uncle, Jay Pritzker, who established the Hyatt hotel chain with Ms. Pritzker's father, feuded with Mr. Trump over a hotel deal made in the '70s. 'There I was, at the lowest point of my financial life,' Mr. Trump told The New York Times in 1993, 'and they tried to force me to default or sell my hotel cheaply.' Mr. Trump promised to exact revenge. 'I always said, the first time I got back on my feet, the Pritzkers would be the first people I'd go after,' he told The Chicago Tribune in 1993. (Mr. Trump later sold his interest in the hotel.) As Mr. Trump attacks Harvard, alumni, faculty and donors have suggested that convincing taxpayers of Harvard's importance in American society has never been more urgent. But some complain that Ms. Pritzker has stayed out of the public eye. One alumnus who attended a dinner with her at the Harvard Club in New York remembers that she let Dr. Garber do all the talking and said little beyond hello, goodbye and thank you. In April, when the Trump administration issued a series of demands of Harvard, including exercising some control over hiring, teaching and admissions, it was Dr. Garber who signed a public letter saying that Harvard would fight. 'An elite institution like Harvard benefits from public support and is vested with public interest,' said Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs and a Harvard graduate. 'Leadership and oversight here comes with high profile. Don't take the job if you're not prepared for that. Shyness is not a virtue.' Members of a presidential advisory group on antisemitism remember that Ms. Pritzker did respond after several of them threatened to resign. Beaming into a video meeting from an airplane, Ms. Pritzker, who is a practicing Jew, according to her friends, assured them that their suggestions were being heard. Ms. Pritzker's allies say that it is more effective for Harvard to unite behind one voice, in this case, Dr. Garber. 'She does not pick fights for the sake of fights or headlines or fun and excitement,' said Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who got to know Ms. Pritzker during the first Obama presidential campaign. Dr. Furman, the economics professor, said she was acting appropriately in her role. 'You hear from the C.E.O., you don't hear from the chairman,' Dr. Furman said. As head of the board, he added, 'you're not supposed to be the face, but you're supposed to be a very, very key person in shaping the decision.' Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who has been sharply critical of the Trump administration and urged Harvard to fight back, said Harvard's leadership was perceived by many faculty members to be more attentive to donors and outside interests than to faculty and students. Still, he said, 'I don't think the federal government should be using its leverage to force out the leadership of a private university. That's authoritarianism.' Supporters say she brings her considerable business knowledge to the table, noting she rose to the top in male-dominated industries. Ms. Pritzker, who graduated from Harvard in 1981, is now the head of PSP Partners, a private investment firm, and she is worth $4.1 billion. Harvard's corporation is stuffed with eminent figures from Big Law, big business and elite academia. Perhaps not accidentally, however, the corporation's politics have shifted somewhat. This year, Kannon Shanmugam, who clerked for Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court justice, replaced Ted Wells, a lawyer and Democratic Party donor. So far the shift has not seemed to help Harvard's case. In recent days, the Trump administration has only escalated its attacks on the school. The fight with the Trump administration has convinced some people at Harvard that its governance model might need radical change. 'It might not be enough for Penny Pritzker to leave Harvard,' said Kit Parker, a bioengineering and applied physics professor on Harvard's Council on Academic Freedom, a group dedicated to supporting diverse points of view. 'It might need to be something much bigger,' he said. He added, 'It's hard to hold any one person responsible for what has happened at Harvard over the last 10 years.' Changing the board, he said, 'might be the one thing they can agree on without anyone losing face.' Kirsten Noyes, Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Michael C. Bender and Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
Bloomberg
18-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Khosla, Pritzker Back AI for Power Systems, Pest Control Startup
While many artificial intelligence tools are aimed at software developers and office workers, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker are investing in a startup deploying the technology for dirty, time-consuming infrastructure maintenance tasks like pest control and inspecting power poles and air-conditioning systems. San Francisco-based BrightAI has raised a $51 million Series Around led by Khosla Ventures and Pritzker's Inspired Capital, along with BoxGroup, Marlinspike and VSC Ventures. The round valued the company at around $300 million, according to a person familiar with the company who didn't want to be named discussing financial details. Upfront Ventures led a previous round, and the company has raised a total of $78 million.
Boston Globe
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Harvard picks conservative lawyer to serve on powerful board
'His deep devotion to Harvard and to the importance of academic values and academic freedom was abundantly clear during our conversations as part of the search process,' according to the statement, which was signed by Harvard president Alan Garber and Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker. Advertisement Harvard Corp. and Pritzker, have come under intense scrutiny since October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel, sparking the Jewish state's retaliatory response in Gaza. Critics including investor and alum Bill Ackman have assailed the board for its response to antisemitism on campus, as well as for selecting Claudine Gay as president, who was forced to resign months into her tenure after a plagiarism scandal and her disastrous testimony before Congress. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up More recently the board has drawn supporters and detractors for the school's decision to challenge the Trump administration in court. The government has pulled almost $3 billion in federal funding and tried to ban the school from enrolling foreign students, an order blocked by a federal judge. The administration has also chided Harvard for its left-leaning bias. Pritzker is a former Commerce Secretary under President Obama and sister to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Other members of the 13-member board include KKR & Co. Co-CEO Joseph Bae and Kenneth Frazier, the former chief executive officer of Merck & Co. Advertisement
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext
The intensely hostile letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to the leadership of Harvard yesterday has a lot going on. But the most notable thing about it is what it leaves out. To hear McMahon tell it, Harvard is a university on the verge of ruin. (I say McMahon because her signature is at the bottom of the letter, but portions of the document are written in such a distinctive idiolect—'Why is there so much HATE?' the letter asks; it signs off with 'Thank you for your attention to this matter!'—that one detects the spirit of a certain uncredited co-author.) She accuses it of admitting students who are contemptuous of America, chastises it for hiring the former blue-city mayors Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot to teach leadership ('like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation'), questions the necessity of its remedial-math program ('Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics?'), and accuses its board chair, Penny Pritzker ('a Democrat operative'), of driving the university to financial ruin, among many other complaints. The upshot is that Harvard should not bother to apply for any new federal funding, because, McMahon declares, 'today's letter marks the end of new grants for the University.' What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration's ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left's highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts. Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism ('the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik'), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal. The effort started with Columbia University. In early March, the administration canceled $400 million in federal funding for the university. This was framed explicitly as punishment for Columbia's failure to adequately address anti-Semitism on campus. The administration then issued a set of demands as preconditions for Columbia to get that funding back. These included giving the university president power over all disciplinary matters and placing the Middle Eastern–studies department under the control of a different university body. Columbia soon announced that it would make a list of changes that closely resembled what the administration had asked for. McMahon praised the changes and said that Columbia was on the 'right track' to get its money back, though the government has still not restored the funding. Having successfully extracted concessions from Columbia, the government moved on to Harvard. On March 31, the administration said that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard. As with Columbia, it argued that the university had not sufficiently combatted anti-Semitism on its campus. Harvard then began negotiations with the federal government. But on April 11, the administration sent Harvard a list of far-reaching changes that the university would have to make to continue to receive federal funding. These included screening international students for disloyalty to the United States and allowing an external body to audit faculty viewpoints to ensure diversity. [Rose Horowitch: Endowments are next] This was too much for Harvard. 'Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,' the university's lawyers wrote in a letter to administration officials. The university sued the Trump administration, arguing that the government had violated Harvard's First Amendment rights and failed to follow the procedures to revoke federal grants. The government retaliated. It immediately froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, announced that it would consider revoking Harvard's nonprofit tax-exempt status, and threatened the university's ability to enroll international students. Even as the war escalated, the putative rationale remained the same. Trump 'wants them to come to the table and change things,' McMahon told Fox News. 'It's a civil-rights issue on campus relative to the anti-Semitism.' McMahon never explained how cutting funding for biomedical research would help address anti-Semitism on campus. But the administration at least gestured in that direction. No longer. The offenses enumerated in the McMahon letter are a disconnected grab bag of grievances. The closest thing to a legal theory for denying Harvard future grant funding is the accusation that the school has violated the Supreme Court's ruling striking down race-based affirmative action. But revoking an institution's funding under federal nondiscrimination law requires following a multistep process that takes months, Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, told me. The government has to investigate a complaint and prove that the university will not take any steps to resolve the discrimination. Without showing that Harvard has violated nondiscrimination law—as opposed to merely asserting it, without evidence, in a rambling letter—the government can't refuse to award it grants. 'They went from step one to step five or six in a week,' Black said. 'There's no 'We don't like you' authority in the federal Constitution or in statutory law. In fact, quite the opposite: You're precluded from that.' Harvard's leaders have, under duress, acknowledged that the institution needs to make changes. Last week, the university released reports detailing incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias and a pervasive sense of non-belonging among Jewish students. It has announced that it will not support affinity-group graduation celebrations and that leaders will no longer make statements on political issues that don't affect the university's core function. 'We were faced with a set of demands that addressed some problems that I and others recognized as real problems,' Harvard President Alan Garber told The Wall Street Journal. 'But the means of addressing those problems is what was so objectionable.' The fact that the university is willing to make changes strengthens its legal case challenging the cancellation of funding. Several legal experts have predicted that the university will prevail in court. In a 2021 speech titled 'The Universities Are the Enemy,' then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, 'make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.' The solution, Vance said, was to 'honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' We've been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty. Article originally published at The Atlantic
