Anu Needham is an accomplished author, editor and professor. If you go to her webpage at Oberlin College, however, she is invariably referred to as the “Donald R. Longman Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and Comparative Literature.” Donald Rufus Longman was my grandfather’s brother and a 1932 Oberlin graduate. Honestly, I don’t know anything about my uncle Don’s politics.

I know he wrote some books about marketing and cost analysis. I know he was an early venture capitalist in biotechnology, and very generous to his alma mater. I know in the photo on the right, taken in 1913 on my grandfather’s ninth birthday, he seems to be dressed as a girl. I suppose I can at least surmise that Oberlin’s reputation for left-wing politics didn’t put him off.

Now, Ross Douthat has an entire column in Saturday’s New York Times that amounts to a complaint that hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin donated $300 million to his alma mater. This has supposedly annoyed everyone.

The problem is that Griffin is a big Republican donor and the recipient of his gift is Harvard University. Douthat suggests that progressives are annoyed that a big supporter of Ron DeSantis will have his name adorned on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, while conservatives are angry that a conservative is funding “the Kremlin on the Charles, the fons et origo of so many liberal follies, the central shrine in the academic-progressive cathedral.”

Douthat is mainly upset that Griffin didn’t even specify some pet project but rather just threw the money into Harvard’s already huge endowment.

Could this money have been better spent? Yeah, sure. But Douthat’s overall argument is dependent on the idea that there’s some inherent conflict between conservative politics and supporting the preeminent institution of higher learning in the United States of America. That may well be true in the aggregate, but the idea that every Ivy League-educated plutocrat in the country is somehow obligated to turn their back on their own upbringing is downright bizarre.

I assume that Griffin gave to Harvard because he values the education he received there. Obviously there’s some vanity involved, and perhaps a desire to reach for a bit of immortality. I’m sure those considerations influenced my Uncle Don’s decision to give lavishly to Oberlin, too, but I never thought it was a political statement on his part.

And, by extension, it’s a reach to say it’s a political statement for Harvard to accept Miller’s gift.

As for the ideological critiques of Griffin’s gift, they both capture key dilemmas facing our political coalitions. For the left, to imply that Harvard is functionally right-wing because it takes money from Republicans is wildly overstating things, but the truer observation is that progressivism’s self-image as a champion of the underdog is in deep tension with progressivism’s entrenchment as the official ideology of the highly educated upper classes, and Griffin’s largess is a condensed symbol of that tension.

Can a movement for social justice be credible and capable if it’s intertwined with plutocracy and seems to originate and thrive in institutions that perpetuate socioeconomic privilege? Or is the contemporary left destined to always be a handmaiden for the woke-washed forms of capital, the Bernie Sanders vision of class warfare yielding to Pride flags and consciousness-raising H.R. sessions inside Fortune 500 companies?

The problem here is not of Harvard or Griffin’s making, but a simple consequence of muddled thinking. We have right-wingers convinced that Ivy League schools are aligned in any meaningful way with the socialist fringe of the Democratic Party. If conservatives no longer want to be part of the cultural elite, they can stop applying to the Ivies, but the Ivies will still churn out a cultural elite without them. That Kenneth Griffin doesn’t subscribe to that kind of self-injurious stupidity is not a mark against him.

And we have left-wingers who seem not to understand that perpetuating socioeconomic privilege is what happens when a rich child gets a top notch eduction at a highly networked prestigious university. The Ivies can do more to promote social mobility but they’re supposed to deliver privilege as an end result. That’s not a design flaw, but a reasonably expected return on investment.

A much bigger problem than how venture capitalists and hedge fund managers spend their money is that conservatism has defined itself in opposition to academic excellence. I prefer my plutocrats to value education, and money spent on Harvard is money not spent on conservative politics.