Before he landed at Harvard, Carlos Portugal Gouvea had stints at Yale Law School and Penn’s Wharton School of business. The Ford Foundation funds his Brazilian think tank.
The Harvard Law School professor arrested for firing a pellet rifle outside a Massachusetts synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur has ties to several of America’s elite institutions, which have hosted the DEI activist as a visiting professor and poured money into his Brazilian nonprofits.
Before he landed at Harvard, the professor, Carlos Portugal Gouvea, who told police when he was arrested he was shooting rats, not targeting Jews, spent 2018 as a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business. Those gigs followed the publication of a 2013 paper funded by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies advocating for the redistribution of goods in Brazil to reduce economic inequality.
Back in Brazil, Gouvea is a founding member of several nonprofits that have received lavish funding from American billionaires, including the Instituto Sou da Paz, a think tank that has received more than $2.7 million over the past decade from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Instituto Sou da Paz played a major role in securing the passage of a 2003 Brazilian gun control law that required its citizens to register their firearms in a national database and made it illegal to carry weapons outside of their homes. Although pellet guns, such as the one Gouvea used to “hunt rats” on Wednesday, aren’t considered firearms under Brazilian law, citizens are nonetheless barred from carrying them in public.
Gouvea also serves as CEO of the Global Law Institute, a Brazilian organization that has received at least $250,000 from the Ford Foundation since September 2022 to fund a program dedicated to “training young Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Quilombola researchers” to become influential voices in “climate justice, a just energy transition, and the rights of Indigenous and traditional peoples.”
Spokesmen for the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation did not return requests for comment.
Gouvea broke a car window on Wednesday after firing at least two shots from his pellet rifle in the vicinity of the Brookline, Mass., synagogue Temple Beth Zion before fleeing from the synagogue’s two private security guards. Public records show Gouvea’s address is about a half-hour walk away from the synagogue, indicating he traveled some distance with the weapon. Law enforcement officers arrested Gouvea, who said he was “using the pellet rifle to hunt rats in the area,” and charged him with illegally discharging a pellet gun, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and malicious damage of personal property. Local police said Gouvea was not targeting the temple and it was “coincidental” his “rat hunting” took place in the vicinity of a synagogue on the most sacred day of the Jewish calendar, according to the Boston Herald.
Much of Gouvea’s academic career has been dedicated to advancing left-wing policy goals. He argued in a 2009 paper that democratic political systems are legitimate only if they help the “construction of economic equality.” A 2013 study called for the redistribution of goods in Brazil to reduce economic inequality.
Gouvea is also the co-founder of GBLaw, a Brazilian law firm that focuses on diversity compliance matters for Brazilian public companies, according to his Harvard Law biography, though his law firm biography was recently taken offline. The law firm did not return a request for comment.
A Harvard Law spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon on Sunday the university—where Gouvea teaches classes titled “Sustainable Capitalism” and “Corruption and Inequality”—placed Gouvea on administrative leave following his “rat hunting” escapade last week. The move comes as Harvard University is at risk of losing its accreditation over Trump administration allegations the school acted with “deliberate indifference” toward discrimination against Jewish students following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre.
Gouvea, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, pleaded not guilty to all his charges on Thursday. He’s due back in court in early November.
