How the world’s richest university is selling out to technofeudalism – and who’s really pulling the strings
The news that Harvard, of all institutions, is cutting PhD programs “due to budget issues” is pure absurdity.
This is a university sitting on an endowment that just ballooned to nearly 57 billion dollars as of this fiscal year. Yes, billion with a “b.” It’s racking up record investment returns and donations while claiming the poorhouse is just around the next Gothic arch.
We’re supposed to believe the cause is “financial pressure”?
That’s like hearing Jeff Bezos is switching to ramen because he came up short on laundry quarters.
Harvard’s endowment is a mind-bogglingly large pool of investments, real estate, and private equity, designed to throw off enough annual returns to keep the institution in cashmere and imported orchids forever. This isn’t an emergency fund. It exists specifically to finance Harvard’s mission, from research to financial aid to toilet paper, year after year.
Last year alone, the endowment kicked out 2.5 billion dollars for annual operations, covering almost 40 percent of the university’s operating budget. And yes, Harvard reported an operating deficit of 113 million dollars. But that deficit came after the endowment grew by nearly 4 billion dollars, with net assets increasing by more than 4 billion overall. The rest of us should be so broke.
Are federal cuts real? Sure.
The Trump administration slashed research grants, and Congress raised the endowment tax, costing Harvard hundreds of millions. Those decisions hurt, and they have real consequences. But a normal institution would dip into reserves, trim perks, or squeeze costs around the edges. You don’t wipe out entire PhD cohorts unless you’re moving toward a very different vision of what higher education is supposed to be.
So what’s the real game?
Follow the money to the boardroom.
Three weeks ago – while Harvard announced these cuts – they quietly appointed Mary Erdoes to the Harvard Management Company board overseeing that $57 billion endowment.
Erdoes is CEO of JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management. According to a November 2025 Senate Finance Committee memo, she was “in constant contact” with Jeffrey Epstein for years after his 2008 conviction. In one email, Epstein told her there were “21 million reasons” he wanted to talk. She personally approved JPMorgan continuing to work with Epstein even after the bank supposedly fired him as a client in 2013.
JPMorgan paid $75 million to settle claims that it enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking network. Now Erdoes helps manage Harvard’s money.
She’s not the only Epstein connection swimming in Harvard’s financial pool. Former Harvard President Larry Summers maintained extensive correspondence with Epstein until his 2019 arrest – correspondence so damning that Trump ordered a Justice Department investigation and the House floated launching its own probe. Summers’ wife, Harvard professor Elisa New, had her research funded by a gift from billionaire Leon Black – brokered by Epstein.
The endowment isn’t just money. It’s a network.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel has been waging war on universities for fifteen years.
His Thiel Fellowship pays young people $200,000 to drop out of college. In 2014, he compared modern universities to “the corrupt Church in 1514” – places where people buy indulgences for salvation they don’t need. Larry Summers called it “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.”
But the dropout pipeline isn’t just philosophical anymore. It’s operational.
Thiel Fellows are now running parts of the federal government. Luke Farritor, a 2024 Thiel Fellow, recruited for Elon Musk’s DOGE through the Thiel Fellow WhatsApp group chat. These twenty-somethings with no government experience gained access to Treasury Department payment systems, IRS databases, and Social Security records. They’re not just skeptical of institutions – they’re dismantling them from the inside.
And Thiel’s endgame is now explicit. In April 2025, his company Palantir launched the “Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship” – high school graduates skip college entirely for internships at a surveillance company. The motto? “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.”
Why fund PhD programs that produce independent thinkers when you can train compliant surveillance workers directly?
This is technofeudalism in action.
Look around. Universities everywhere are starting to behave less like cathedrals of knowledge and more like venture-backed SaaS companies, “unbundling” themselves into intellectual platform landlords.
When power shifts from industrial capitalists to digital rentiers, value no longer comes from collective production or broad learning. It comes from controlling pipelines, data, and access. Why fund history or pure science when you can steer resources toward patentable biotech, glossy short-term credentials, or whatever aligns fastest with capital-hungry tech platforms? Open-ended research and critical thinking become loud, expensive side effects instead of the core mission.
Cut German. Axe Sociology and History. Keep the tech and finance engines humming. Fewer long-term thinkers, more compliant knowledge gig-workers.
The Thiel network understands something most people don’t: universities aren’t just degree factories. They’re the infrastructure of democratic knowledge production. They create people who ask inconvenient questions, who investigate power, who produce research that can’t be bought.
That’s exactly why they have to go.
Harvard can plead poverty all it wants, but what it’s really doing is following the money and the power – appointing Epstein’s banker to manage its billions while gutting the programs that might produce the next generation of people who’d investigate those connections.
It’s turning the world’s most famous university into a prestige wrapper atop a global corporate knowledge stack, open only to the renters and rentiers of the technofeudalist economy.
If this is the future, don’t call it progress.
Call it what it is: selling out, at Ivy League scale.
SOURCES:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/1/hmc-new-directors-2025/
https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/continuing-epstein-investigation-wyden-releases-new-analysis-detailing-how-top-jpmorgan-chase-executives-enabled-epsteins-sex-trafficking-operation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/07/politics/musk-doge-staffers-federal-government-downsizing-invs
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-peter-thiel-trump-administration-connections/
https://finance.harvard.edu/endowment