Carnegie Corp. of NY Trustee Minow's MacArthur Foundation-Harvard U. Connection Revisited

Between 2012 and a few years ago, a current Carnegie Corp. of NY foundation Trustee, Harvard Law School Professor and former Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, was a member of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation board of directors. And after 2016, Carnegie Corp. of NY foundation Trustee Minow also sat on the Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees in recent years.


In addition, before joining the board of the “non-profit” MacArthur Foundation (whose assets exceeded $7 billion early in the current decade) in 2012, Carnegie Corp. of NY foundation Trustee Minow was also a MacArthur Foundation “consultant” between 2001 and 2008; while a MacArthur Foundation president in recent years, former Harvard Law School Professor and a Knight Foundation board member in recent years, 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, after former Harvard Law School Dean and current Carnegie Corp. of NY 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, was 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 helped fund when Carnegie Corp. of NY Trustee Minow sat on the MacArthur Foundation’s board, then 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 Carnegie Corp. of NY Trustee Trustee Minow then sat, claimed to be a “non-profit” organization, then-Berkman Klein Center Executive Director and Harvard Law School Professor Urs Gasser (who announced in April 2021 that he would be leaving his executive director position for a different job in Europe) had 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 then 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 then-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 then 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...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 then-departing Berkman Klein Center executive director-- on whose board of directors Carnegie Corp. of NY Trustee and former MacArthur Foundation board and former Harvard Law School Dean Minow then sat—did not then reply to this writer’s email.


Also, coincidentally, when current Carnegie Corp. of N Y Trustee and former MacArthur Foundation board member Minow began sitting next to former Columbia Journalism School Dean Lemann for awhile on the Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees in January 2016, the “philanthropic” MacArthur Foundation then 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.”