Biden counting on Penny Pritzker to help rebuild Ukraine despite debacle at Harvard

President Biden can only hope that major Democratic donor Penny Pritzker has more success with Ukraine than she’s having at Harvard University.

The billionaire Ms. Pritzker, who heads the Harvard Corporation, was recently named to serve in the newly created position of U.S. special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery, a post whose duties include attracting public and private investment to the war-torn country.

“Working in lockstep with the Ukrainian government, our allies and partners, international financial institutions, and the private sector, she will drive the United States’ efforts to help rebuild the Ukrainian economy,” Mr. Biden said Sept. 14 in a statement.

The pick doesn’t necessarily bode well for Ukraine, based on how events have unfolded at Harvard on Ms. Pritzker’s watch.

The Massachusetts-based Ivy League university is reeling from a reputation hit and an exodus of top donors driven by a furor over campus antisemitism under Harvard President Claudine Gay, who’s also facing a plagiarism scandal after less than six months on the job.

Criticism of Ms. Pritzker’s leadership is climbing with each day that Ms. Gay remains in office. Ms. Pritzker herself now faces public calls to step down along with Ms. Gay, the university’s first Black president.

“Resign, President Gay! And Penny Pritzker, too. I don’t care how much money you gave to Harvard,” said Richard Grenell, a former Trump administration official who holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard.

“You both are cheapening our degrees,” he wrote on Dec. 26 on X. “The damage is getting worse with your lies. You’ve lost our confidence.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and Harvard grad, said last week that Ms. Gay should “resign in disgrace,” along with “every member of Harvard’s board who covered up for her and allowed this to happen.”

Bonnie Glick, who served as deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, said “Penny Pritzker needs to fire Claudine Gay, cut all of Gay’s ties to Harvard, and then she and her board need to resign.”

Ms. Pritzker, who previously sat on Mr. Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has served since 2018 on the 12-member Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body. She was elected senior fellow in February 2022, a few months after making a $100 million gift to the Harvard economics department.

Certainly she’s invested in Ms. Gay’s success. In 2022, Ms. Pritzker headed the search committee that selected Ms. Gay, then dean of the arts and sciences faculty, to succeed outgoing President Lawrence Bacow in what the Harvard Crimson described as the “shortest Harvard presidential search in almost 70 years.”

There’s also an Obama connection. Former President Barack Obama, a Harvard Law School alum, privately lobbied the board to keep Ms. Gay after her disastrous testimony at a Dec. 5 House hearing on campus antisemitism, according to the Jewish Insider. Mr. Obama has not commented on the report.

Ms. Pritzker, the sister of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, served as commerce secretary during Mr. Obama’s second term. Before that, she was a top fundraiser for Mr. Obama, credited with helping fuel his meteoric rise from the Illinois state legislature to the White House.

I don’t just want Gay to resign. I want Penny Pritzker gone, too. https://t.co/dgj3xO1sWO

— Dr. Menace (@Ermengrabby) December 26, 2023

The Harvard Corporation has been mum since issuing a Dec. 12 statement expressing its unanimous support for Ms. Gay, calling her “the right leader to help our community heal” and insisting that she committed “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

Ms. Gay has agreed to make seven corrections so far to her scholarly articles following more than 40 allegations of plagiarism. Her backpedaling failed to appease critics, who argue that students committing the same violations would have been suspended or even expelled.

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who has given millions to the university, said a reliable source told him that the board asked Ms. Gay to resign, and that she refused. She has also reportedly retained counsel.

“President Gay’s performance and her academic record issues provide plenty of cause for termination without compensation,” Mr. Ackman wrote on Dec. 24 on X. “But at every step so far, the Board has made the wrong call and dug a deeper hole for themselves and Harvard.”

He estimated that Harvard donors have withdrawn or paused “billions of dollars” in donations over Ms. Gay’s “mishandling” of the university response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.

None of that speaks well of Ms. Pritzker’s ability to manage what has been described as a generational crisis for the 387-year-old university.

“Penny Pritzker presides over a $50 billion Harvard enterprise,” Ms. Glick said on Newsmax. “She recruited an unqualified woman to preside over it as president of Harvard University because Claudine Gay fit the DEI profile — she’s a Black woman.”

Ms. Glick, the inaugural director of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University, said the result is that “she has now presided, as Bill Ackman is quick to point out, over the loss of billions of dollars in donations.”

“No responsible corporate board would ever allow that to happen,” she said.

The precedent set earlier this month at the University of Pennsylvania isn’t encouraging for Ms. Pritzker’s future as board chief.

Penn President Liz Magill resigned shortly after she and two other university presidents, including Ms. Gay, at the Dec. 5 hearing botched their responses to a question on how they would handle calls for “genocide of Jews.”

Also resigning was Scott Bok, chairman of the Penn Board of Trustees, the school’s governing body.