On September 22, 2022, one of Harvard’s most well-known dropouts Mark Zuckerberg ’06 and wife Priscilla Chan ’07 unveiled the Kempner Institute, a human and artificial intelligence research facility, and an accompanying $500 million grant. This gift was prorated over fifteen years and comprises over 10% of the total private research funding that Harvard receives every year. Their eye-popping donation is almost enough to forget the thousands of lives lost and the breach to American democracy as a result of Zuckerberg’s company Meta (Facebook’s parent company).
Harvard, in particular, needs to be careful about the impact of accepting donations from the morally corrupt. Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow endorsed Zuckerberg. “Mark and Priscilla are quite unique because they are among the very, very few philanthropic donors in the world who actually have every bit as much subject matter expertise—if not more—than the people that they are going to be supporting here,” Bacow told The Crimson last month. “They have given us this incredible opportunity for which we’re enormously grateful.”
In 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan founded the Chan Zuckerberg Institute (CZI) and pledged 99% of their Meta shares would be directed towards this charity. While Zuckerberg’s ill-gotten gains are helping to fund scientific research, criminal justice, and immigration reform, Facebook’s evils should disqualify his money and name from being projected around campus. Glorifying the Zuckerberg name gives students a poor role model of the priorities between morals and the power of money.
Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Institute are separated by little more than a thin layer of plaster. The bulk of CZI’s funding is pledged Meta stock, causing CZI’s budget and ability to effect change to be tied to Meta’s tumultuous fortunes. The foundation’s first few hundred employees had nearly all worked at Facebook before. It built a significant amount of its software through existing or former Facebook products. The most fundamental connection is that the foundation and company have the same co-founder who actively directs both initiatives. The decisions of one branch are explicit endorsements of the actions of the other.
Charitable donations have become incredibly popular in recent years, with total foundation assets in the United States totalling over $800 billion by 2018. These donations don’t come entirely free of charge. Instead, they buy the donor a considerable degree of influence and (in nearly all cases) a massive tax deduction. That influence can be reputational, boosting the donor’s image by association. That influence can also be direct, allowing donors to direct funds or gain related advisory positions.
Many charities are categorized as 501(c)(3)s as a way of avoiding endowment taxes in exchange from spending it in a nonpartisan manner. In practice though, the IRS will let the term nonpartisan stretch pretty far. Tax-free donations have been used to promote issues on both sides of the partisan barrier. This includes efforts to ban public education of critical race theory in seventeen states and for legal research again same-sex marriage (by The Heritage Foundation and Tim Gill, respectively).
Private unelected citizens have achieved massive national or international influence based on extremely large donations. The Kempner Institute’s funding of faculty positions, computing infrastructure, and student resources will accelerate the pace of research and fund talented students working on important problems. Yet these advances come with the hidden cost of rehabilitating Zuckerberg’s reputation. We must be careful about the asking price of philanthrocapitalism. It’s certainly not free.
Harvard has a history of endorsing morally corrupt people in exchange for donations. Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein laundered his reputation through institutions like Harvard after donations to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, where he maintained an office and key card access. After his 2008 arrest, a Harvard lab continued to display his photo and links to his website.
Epstein’s crimes are simple to condemn. Zuckerberg’s actions have a lot more nuance to them and certainly a broader reach. It can be easy to dismiss some of Facebook’s controversies as simple missteps by a company that intends to do good or maintain freedom of speech. Once you begin to really list them out, that position quickly becomes difficult to maintain.
Thousands of deaths underestimates the human cost of Facebook. According to the international aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, 6700 Rohingya (a minority ethnic group throughout Southeast Asia) were killed in a month through an ethnic cleansing organized and incited in large part on Facebook.
There’s a clear and direct link between Facebook’s actions in Myanmar and the resulting violence. According to the New York Times, Facebook “is so broadly used [in Myanmar] that many of the country’s 18 million internet users confuse [the app] with the internet.” This was part of a deliberate Facebook expansion strategy into developing countries where the company preloaded its app onto mobile phones and subsidized the cost of mobile data so that Facebook was free to use. If the only access to the Internet you ever had was on Facebook, it’s perfectly natural that you would believe much of the information that was presented to you.
Through Facebook posts, Myanmar’s military regime used this convenient pipeline to spread pictures of corpses alongside false claims that they were the result of Rohingya-perpetrated massacres. Along with these fake stories came anti-Muslim hate speech (the Rohingya people are overwhelmingly Muslim) which incited riots and ethnic violence. As late as 2018, Facebook didn’t have a single employee in the country of Myanmar, and less than ten moderators able to speak Burmese despite millions of users. A report by Amnesty International found that Facebook “substantially contributed to the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya.” It wasn’t until 2021 that Facebook banned Myanmar’s military government from its platform.
Closer to home, Facebook has been repeatedly found endangering American democracy and contributing to ideological polarization. According to the Wall Street Journal, internal Facebook research has shown that seeing radicalized content from friends gives users psychological permission to reshare and post such content. Facebook employees proposed an alteration to the social media that was rejected by Zuckerberg due to fears that the fix would negatively impact growth. In 2020, Facebook refused to suspend former President Donald Trump’s Facebook account after he infamously posted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This came despite Twitter’s conclusion that the same message from Trump’s account was in breach of their rules on glorifying violence.
With all that Facebook has done under Zuckerberg’s leadership, we shouldn’t allow him to patch holes in his dinged-up reputation through a massive donation to a leading research university. While the Kempner Institute’s funding will allow it to solve important problems in the quest to understand artificial intelligence, there are consequences that we simply can’t ignore. Harvard’s name and reputation shouldn’t be for sale.
Matthew Shum ’24 (mshum@college.harvard.edu) writes Forum for The Independent.