Columbia University Provost Katznelson's Russell Sage Foundation Connection: Part 11

 

Columbia-Linked Russell Sage Foundation interlocked to MacArthur Foundation that helps fund Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

The Columbia University provost who failed to immediately meet the demands of the Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW 2110 union during its 2021 strike at the Upper West Side university, 2019-2020 Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar” Ira Katznelson, also sat on the Russell Sage Foundation’s board of trustees between 1992 and 2002.

And since 2016, a member of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation board of directors since 2012, Harvard Law School Professor and former Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, has also been sitting on the Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees—whose current vice-chair is Columbia Graduate of Journalism Professor and former Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann. 

Before joining the board of the “non-profit” MacArthur Foundation (whose assets now exceed $7 billion) in 2012, Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Minow was also a MacArthur Foundation “consultant” between 2001 and 2008; while the current MacArthur Foundation president, former Harvard Law School Professor and current Knight Foundation board member John Palfrey, was the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University’s executive director between 2002 and 2008. As the Berkman Klein Center’s website noted in an article, titled “John Palfrey takes over the MacArthur Foundation as its sixth president”, which was posted on Sept. 23, 2019:

“John Palfrey, the Berkman Klein Center’s executive director from 2002-2008, spoke with The Harvard Gazette about his new position as the president of the MacArthur Foundation.  

“`At the Berkman Klein Center we were grantees of the MacArthur Foundation. That was certainly a way we got to know…the foundation…The foundation supported our work…,’ Palfrey said.

 `…To have been a grantee…that was hugely helpful in thinking how one would help to lead a philanthropic organization.’”

And, coincidentally, since former Harvard Law School Dean and current Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Minow joined the MacArthur Foundation’s board, the Berkman Klein Center, “which reports to both the Provost of Harvard University and the Dean at Harvard Law School and is administratively housed at Harvard Law School” according to its website, has been given 6 “charitable” grants, totaling over $1 million, by the “philanthropic” MacArthur Foundation—although “the Berkman Klein Center does not award degrees or offer courses.”

In 2015, for example a “charitable” grant of $600,000 was given to the Berkman Klein Center by the MacArthur Foundation “in support of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s research focused on data governance, transparency and countering hate speech;” purportedly “in order to protect freedom of expression.”

So, not surprisingly, “non-profit” Harvard University’s Berkman Klein center, which the MacArthur Foundation has helped fund while Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Minow has sat on the MacArthur Foundation’s board, posted a press release on its website on Dec. 5, 2018 which stated:

“Today the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced that Martha Minow…brings her broad expertise and experience to its Board of Directors…Martha Minow has been a long-time…supporter of the Berkman Klein Center...

“`We are so grateful for Martha’s continued…contributions…and are thrilled to collaborate even more closely together over the years to come as she joins the Board,’ said Urs Gasser, the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center…

“Minow is the latest addition to the Board of Directors, which shape the Berkman Klein Center’s overreaching vision and direction. The Board determines financial, research, academic, personnel, governance, and other key organizational decisions…”

Yet although the Berkman Klein Center, on whose board Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Minow sits, claims to be a “non-profit” organization, Berkman Klein Center Executive Director and Harvard Law School Professor Urs Gasser (who announced in April 2021 that he will be leaving his executive director position for a different job in Europe) has also apparently been the “Non-Executive Chairman” of the xUpery Ltd. “consulting firm” in Switzerland, whose corporate board of directors includes Domino Burki, a Managing Partner of DuLac Capital Ltd.

And, according to its website, DuLac Capital Ltd. offers “traditional as well as non-traditional investment management services,” has “a profound expertise in the areas of private equity and corporate finance,” and “due to” its “strategic cooperation with xUpery Ltd., a consulting and investment boutique headquartered in Zurich, we have a strong focus on investment opportunities in the context of digital transformations.”

In addition, according to the xUpery Ltd. website, the “consulting” firm of the soon-to-be departing Berkman Klein Center Executive Director Gasser “is an international consulting investment company specializing in digital transformation” that “invests in entrepreneurs who develop digital and digitedly-enable technologies” whose “markets include…media and entertainment” and “healthcare and financial industry; and Harvard Law School Professor Gasser’s xUpery Ltd. “predominantly provides seed (including startup and early stage) funding through its network of…investors, typically in exchange for equity ownership.”

In an April 16, 2021 email, this writer asked Harvard Law School Professor and xUpery Ltd. “Non-Executive Chairman” Gasser (who has also been a member of the German government’s Digital Council in recent years),  how he “would respond to Upper West Side Patch readers who might possibly assert that the MacArthur Foundation has inappropriately helped fund a Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, whose recently resigned executive director was apparently inappropriately involved in a `strategic cooperation’ with DuLac Capital Ltd., while also being a member of the German government's Digital Council, in recent years?”

But ‘non-profit” Harvard Law School’s departing Berkman Klein Center executive director-- on whose board of directors Russell Sage Foundation Trustee, MacArthur Foundation board and former Harvard Law School Dean Minow still sits—did not reply to this writer’s email. 

Also, coincidentally, after MacArthur Foundation board member Minow began sitting next to former Columbia Journalism School Dean Lemann on the Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees in January 2016, the “philanthropic” MacArthur Foundation gave a “charitable” grant of $1,750,000 in 2017 to the Department of Sociology of Columbia University “in support of the executive session on the future of justice policy as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge” and a “charitable” grant of $850,000 in 2018 to “non-profit” Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism “in support of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.”

(end of part 11. To be continued) (This article was first posted on the Upper West Side Patch website).