The investment team overseeing Harvard’s $51 billion endowment met with deep-pocketed Silicon Valley venture capitalists to try to repair the university’s reputation, The Wall Street Journal reports.

After losing $1 billion in donations, the nation’s largest college endowment made the unusual move last week due to donors’ and money managers’ outspoken criticism of Harvard’s weak response to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

The management team — including Harvard Management Company CEO N.P. “Narv” Narvekar, Chief Investment Officer Rick Slocum, and Managing Director John Shue — met with leading VC firms to address their concerns about antisemitism at Harvard under former President Claudine Gay.

Private-equity executive Paul Finnegan, the endowment’s chair, who also attended the meetings, said they discussed whether Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives had gone too far and how some students and professors feel they must censor their views and speech.

The VCs included Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Andreesen Horowitz, Israeli-born investor Elad Gil, and Stripe CEO Patrick Collinson. Gil and Collinson have been the among most vocal detractors of Harvard and other elite universities that, they charge, have a pro-Palestinian bias.

On the East Coast, Slocum has also met with Josh Kushner of Thrive Capital in New York. Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

Besides a concern that the VC firms might drop Harvard as a client, according to sources familiar with the tour, Harvard’s endowment has increased its venture exposure in recent years.

It also has delivered poor returns compared to other university endowments. In the past 10 fiscal years ended June 30, Harvard’s endowment has risen by an average of 8.2% a year, and 9.1% in the past five years — both the second-worst records in the Ivy League.

Narvekar was hired in 2016 from Columbia University to turn around the fund. He is the endowment’s fourth CEO in a decade, not counting interim chiefs.