As Harvard fights Trump, the spotlight turns to Penny Pritzker

Now the two families are at odds again, but this time the stakes are far higher and could reshape the future of Harvard and higher education.

As President Trump threatens billions of dollars in federal funding in a bid to remake the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university, an old familiar foe is in his crosshairs: Penny Pritzker, billionaire heiress to a share of the Hyatt hotel fortune and senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing board.

As the highest-ranking board member — outside of the president — at the famously liberal university, the 66-year-old Chicago entrepreneur and former commerce secretary under Barack Obama has become a target for critics and conservatives.

Pritzker first drew conservative ire over her handling of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was forced to resign in January 2024 after just six months amid complaints of rising campus antisemitism and allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. Pritzker had chaired the presidential search.

Now, as Harvard defies Trump’s demand to change its governance, admissions policies, hiring practices, and more, critics such as billionaire alum Bill Ackman and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are turning up the heat on Pritzker.

It is a battle that pits billionaire against billionaire, and Pritzker is primed for a fight as a leader with decades of boardroom experience. In strong-arming Harvard, Trump is going after an institution that has been close to her heart for nearly 50 years — a community that became like family after her father died young and her mother spiraled into depression.

For those who know Pritzker, it is no surprise she wants the university to fight back, even if the costs are steep.

“In some ways, it’s not about Harvard,” said former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, a Harvard alum who knows Pritzker well. “It’s about the role of higher education in society, in democracy — all of that is being challenged right now.”

The administration has pressed the school for major changes, including new hiring and admission policies to achieve what it calls “viewpoint diversity” at the institution. While Harvard has made some changes in line with Trump’s demands, such as renaming its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and halting funding for affinity group celebrations during commencement, the school has refused to cede as much ground as the White House would like. Harvard has sued the Trump administration for what it calls an unconstitutional abuse of federal power. In the most recent exchange of fire, Harvard on Friday obtained a court order blocking the administration’s move this week to bar the school from enrolling international students next year.

The letters and lawsuit bear the name of president Alan Garber, with the backing of the Pritzker-led Corporation. But not everyone endorses this approach. Notably, some major donors agree with Trump that Harvard has lost its way.

One of the loudest critics has been Ackman, who has called for Pritzker to be replaced, finding fault with things from financial management to dealing with Trump. He said that he, too, wants his alma mater to meet this moment and succeed, but that doing so will require new people at the helm.

“In light of the degree of mismanagement and poor oversight, it is essential that Harvard change its leadership,” Ackman told the Globe. “It has been a complete disaster for Harvard and it’s only getting worse under Penny Pritzker’s leadership.”

In an era when politics is driven by personality, and billionaires have become celebrities, Pritzker keeps a decidedly low profile. She rarely gives interviews and hasn’t tweeted in nearly two years. Many who‘ve worked with her say she wields her influence behind the scenes, by listening, paying attention to details, and building consensus.

Her official title is senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the occasional face of a 13-person collective charged with shepherding an institution that has existed for four centuries and is determined to be around for centuries to come.

Pritzker declined to be interviewed for this story.

Pritzker was born in 1959 in Chicago, though her family moved to California soon after. She is the eldest of three kids of Donald and Sue Pritzker.

The Pritzkers descended from Jewish ancestors in Ukraine, who fled anti-Jewish pogroms after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881.

“Rumors spread that the Jews were responsible,” Pritzker said in 2016 remarks at a Holocaust Memorial Museum ceremony in Washington. “And riots erupted across Russia. My then-10-year-old great-grandfather hid in the attic with his father for more than 60 hours.”

They emerged from hiding to discover their grain store had been destroyed. Later that year, the family emigrated to the United States, and built a new life. It was a good one, and by the time Penny was a child, her father was the president of Hyatt Corp., which his older brother had founded in 1957, while Penny’s mother was a mainstay in the San Francisco society pages for hosting charity fund-raisers.

When Penny was 13, her father died suddenly, at age 39, suffering a heart attack after playing tennis. Her mother fell into depression, and then died suddenly herself, a decade after her husband, when she either fell or jumped from the cab of a tow truck after her car broke down.

“I tried to be positive and hold us together as a family,” Pritzker told Fortune magazine in 2014. Her teen years were unsettled, but she came to Harvard for college and found stability, graduating with a degree in economics in 1981.

“It was . . . a confidence-building place for her,” said a former Harvard classmate of Pritzker’s who asked not to be named. “She took Harvard very seriously, even as a young person.”

After Harvard, Pritzker earned her joint business and law degree from Stanford University, joined the family business, and in 1985 moved back to Chicago.

She first helped found Classic Residence by Hyatt, now known as Vi Senior Living, which created high-end communities for seniors as an alternative to nursing homes. She initially labeled the project a failure, but it proved successful after some adjustments and she caught the bug for working in the business world.

She later cofounded Pritzker Realty Group and airport parking company The Parking Spot, and served as the chair of TransUnion before starting her own investment firm, PSP Capital Partners, in 2011, where she serves as chair. All that, along with her share of the family fortune, made her very wealthy.

By the early 2000s, she was edging into national politics, chiefly in support of Obama, a fellow Chicagoan. Pritzker donated heavily to his 2004 Senate campaign, served as finance chair for Obama’s presidential run, and ultimately served as commerce secretary from 2013 through 2017, playing a key role in the development of the proposed, multicountry Trans-Pacific Partnership and working to rebuild the nation’s semiconductor industry years before the AI boom.

Pritzker generally avoided the spotlight. She told Chicago magazine in 2019 that she hates that people know her net worth because it doesn’t define her. (It’s about $3.9 billion, according to Forbes magazine.) And it’s her younger brother, JB — currently the governor of Illinois, one of the party’s more vociferous Trump critics, and a potential 2028 presidential candidate — who is the family politician.

Former colleagues spoke of her rigorous work ethic and thorough preparation, and of her ability to listen and connect with peers and counterparts. On one of her first days as a Cabinet secretary, Pritzker stood at the entrance of the Commerce Department in Washington and greeted employees, some of whom had worked there for years without ever shaking hands with the secretary.

“She often takes notes, which not every principal and person at her level does,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor who served as Obama’s chief economist. “She was a contributor and participant in every meeting, but I don’t remember her ever sort of going to the mat, or taking up lots of disproportionate oxygen either.”

All the while, she was active at her alma mater, joining the university’s Board of Overseers in 2002 and becoming a Corporation fellow in 2018. She also served on the board of the Harvard Allston Land Co., using her economic vision and real estate acumen to help craft the school’s long-planned expansion into Allston, where it’s developing a research campus that aims to be Harvard‘s answer to MIT’s Kendall Square.

“She saw very clearly that the future for universities — particularly research universities — was going to be at this intersection of where universities meet the private sector,” said Shaun Donovan, who served with Pritzker in Obama’s Cabinet as secretary for Housing and Urban Development and later advised on the Allston project.

Tom Glynn, former CEO of the Harvard Allston Land Co., served with Pritzker on two Harvard committees and remembered how detail-oriented she was, especially when the university was considering building a hotel — a subject Pritzker knows well.

“How many steps is it from the kitchen to the dining room,” Glynn recalled her asking. “Because if there are too many steps, it affects how hot the food is.”

By 2022, her ascension to senior fellow — chosen by the 13 members of the Corporation — felt like a foregone conclusion.

Pritzker stood out among the Corporation members with her experience in business, government, and philanthropy. She had also served as trustee at Stanford. And she had donated $100 million for a building to house Harvard‘s economics department. But while the Corporation is a who‘s who of business, civic, and academic leaders, the collective can function more like a cabinet than a traditional board of trustees with a chair making key decisions.

“If you were a fly on the wall and did not know who the senior fellow was at the beginning of the meeting, you could not have identified them at the end of the meeting,” said Lawrence Bacow, who spent 12 years on the Corporation, including five as president. “The president runs the meetings.”

The senior fellow does have one key job: chairing the search committee when Harvard hires a new president. Less than four months after she was named the top trustee, that duty fell to Pritzker, when Bacow first announced his retirement.

In a swift five-month search, Pritzker‘s committee selected Gay, the powerful dean of Harvard‘s faculty of arts and science. She lasted only six months, her tenure mired in controversy.

The blame wasn’t just on Gay; questions swirled about Pritzker, too. Did the search committee properly vet Gay? Would a more scrupulous review have turned up concerns about plagiarism?

“Let’s not sugarcoat it,” Pritzker told The Harvard Gazette, a university-run publication, near the end of 2024, “it’s been a painful and challenging year for Harvard.”

During the tenuous final weeks of Gay‘s tenure, Ackman and others targeted Pritzker and members of the Corporation, asking them to resign. Among such critics was Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a former Harvard Business School professor who now teaches leadership studies at Yale.

“Claudine Gay was a terrible choice. Her instincts were awful,” Sonnenfeld said. “She was disdainful of the legitimacy of critics, and the whole search process was badly done.”

Gay could not be reached for comment.

But Sonnenfeld has been watching his former school, and he’s been impressed with changes at Harvard, including elevating Garber from provost to president and adding some new members to the Corporation

“They’ve put together a fantastic, rebuilt board, and have been addressing the issues quite successfully,” Sonnenfeld said. “The governance has vastly improved, and I think they should be celebrated for it rather than turned into cartoon caricatures because of their failures 18 months ago.”

It is difficult to pinpoint who, exactly, is responsible for the change in tune. The Corporation is notoriously secretive — unlike other universities whose boards of trustees publish minutes of their meetings and even open some to the public.

But like her colleagues in the Obama administration, those who know Pritzker from her time on Harvard‘s boards see her as a leader who can help a group reach consensus.

“I can never remember, at least during my 12 years on the Corporation, a vote that we took that wasn’t unanimous,” Bacow said. “People will express contrary points of view at various times. But in the end, we talk things through until everybody’s comfortable with it. And Penny is excellent in doing that.”

To close observers, board members have coalesced in the face of extreme pressure from Trump. They appear to be unified behind Garber, Pritzker, and Harvard‘s impulse to “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” as Garber wrote in an open letter last month.

“In contrast to last year and the apparent indecisiveness of the Corporation . . . the Corporation and the president have clearly acted as one and are united,” said Bill Kirby, a Harvard Business School professor and former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

That unity, and defiance of the White House, has come with a cost. The administration has moved to cut billions of dollars in federal grants, launched a Department of Justice probe into whether the university violated a Supreme Court ban on affirmative action in admissions, and most recently sought to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. And it has singled out Pritzker as its prime target.

“The Harvard Corporation, which is supposed to competently and professionally manage Harvard‘s vast academic, financial, and physical resources, is run by strongly left-leaning Obama political appointee Penny Pritzker, a Democrat operative, who is catastrophic and running the institution in a totally chaotic way,” wrote McMahon, the education secretary, in a recent letter to Garber.

As tumultuous a time as it is for Harvard, some view it not as a sign of weakness, but of resolve. For now, Harvard seems prepared to defend itself, while at the same time reckoning with what it means to be Harvard in this moment.

“Harvard is being challenged to reexamine that,” said Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor who also teaches at Harvard‘s Kennedy School, “and I think that Penny is the right person to have at the helm of the governing board at a time like this.”

Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com. Follow him @bostonglobemark. Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan. Shirley Leung is a Business columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com.