Britain’s second-richest man is among a cohort of billionaires bankrolling an “anti-woke” university in the US.
Sir Leonard Blavatnik has been named as one of the leading backers of the University of Austin (UATX), which launched in Texas last month with 92 students.
It has so far raised $200m (£153m) from a swathe of high-profile investors, who are supporting the start-up university’s “fearless pursuit of truth”.
Sir Leonard, who is worth £29.2bn according to The Sunday Times Rich List, donated $1m to UATX in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel last October.
UATX’s other backers include Harlan Crow, the property developer and Republican donor, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, and Jeff Yass, the New York-based investor who alone has donated $35m, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The university, which uses the tagline “dare to think”, welcomed its initial class of first years in September.
The curriculum offers students the chance to explore “forbidden courses”, which include “advanced inquiries into moral judgments, debates within conservatism, and the state of evolutionary biology”, according to its website, while also building studies around classical texts and entrepreneurialism.
Free speech disillusionment
Bosses from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and The Boring Company have also been involved in developing the school’s engineering programme.
Support for UATX has gained traction among billionaire businessmen disillusioned with the lack of free speech across the US higher education system.
The scale of this support is reflected in the fact that the $200m raised by UATX so far is nearly half the $486m that Harvard received in gifts and donations in the year to June 2023.
Donations to UATX reportedly accelerated following Hamas’s Oct 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in pro-Palestine protests across many US campuses.
Mr Crow, one of the leading donors to UATX, told The Wall Street Journal that the university was an attempt to celebrate Western ideals and foster free speech.
He said: “Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilisations in their entirety. Many people think that’s a bad idea.”
Sir Leonard – who is Jewish – suspended donations to Harvard in protest against the university’s president’s failure to answer questions about anti-Semitism on US campuses.
Born in Ukraine during the Soviet era, Sir Leonard initially made his fortune in Russia before building an investment firm in the US. He holds both British and American citizenship.
As well as donating to UATX, he also previously gifted £75m to Oxford University, which in 2010 was used to build the Blavatnik School of Government.
Sir Leonard was contacted for comment.