Nitish Pahwa
SLATE
Thu, December 14, 2023
If you’d like to diagnose a particularly acute case of Main-Character Syndrome as it pertains to the latest college-campus handwringing, might I suggest Bill Ackman? The controversial 57-year-old hedge fund manager has injected himself into the outrage over a messy congressional hearing on antisemitism in universities this month, most notably by becoming the leading voice of an all-out pressure campaign to force Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to resign.
After a clipped video of three university presidents testifying before Congress appeared to show them waffling when asked how their schools address hypothetical calls for a Jewish genocide, Ackman cheered the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, and made public threats to go after MIT President Sally Kornbluth. But it was the president of Harvard, Ackman’s alma mater, who became the target of his extreme and unadulterated ire.
In the past month, he has amplified misinformation around Gay’s career; shared a petition calling for a no-confidence vote on her leadership; boosted a tweet baselessly framing a letter that Gay wrote in 2020—calling for expanded “teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality”—as a nefarious “agenda”; and tweeted myriad ridiculous and offensive statements about Gay, over and over.
Thu, December 14, 2023
If you’d like to diagnose a particularly acute case of Main-Character Syndrome as it pertains to the latest college-campus handwringing, might I suggest Bill Ackman? The controversial 57-year-old hedge fund manager has injected himself into the outrage over a messy congressional hearing on antisemitism in universities this month, most notably by becoming the leading voice of an all-out pressure campaign to force Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to resign.
After a clipped video of three university presidents testifying before Congress appeared to show them waffling when asked how their schools address hypothetical calls for a Jewish genocide, Ackman cheered the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, and made public threats to go after MIT President Sally Kornbluth. But it was the president of Harvard, Ackman’s alma mater, who became the target of his extreme and unadulterated ire.
In the past month, he has amplified misinformation around Gay’s career; shared a petition calling for a no-confidence vote on her leadership; boosted a tweet baselessly framing a letter that Gay wrote in 2020—calling for expanded “teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality”—as a nefarious “agenda”; and tweeted myriad ridiculous and offensive statements about Gay, over and over.
(They include accusing Harvard of only hiring Gay, a Black woman, to satisfy a diversity, equity, and inclusion requirement, as well as fatuous declarations about how “the DEI movement” has brought about “the McCarthy era Part II.”)
You don’t have to defend all parts of the presidents’ testimony—indeed, Gay herself apologized to the Harvard Crimson for getting “caught up” in “policies and procedures” in her responses—to recognize that bad-faith calls for these presidents to resign have been just a touch too loud.
There’s undoubtedly been an uptick in open antisemitic rhetoric and violence in the United States since Oct. 7, when Hamas forces killed, assaulted, and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli citizens. A small number of the many U.S. protests against Israel’s retaliatory offensive in the Gaza Strip—which has now killed about 18,000 Palestinian civilians—have featured some antisemitic elements or some whitewashing of Hamas’ barbarity. All of this warrants unequivocal condemnation.
What it does not warrant, however, is a response that equates activists who are justly concerned over the mass displacement and death of Palestinian Arabs with neo-Nazis calling for Jewish genocide. Critiques of the state of Israel are not attacks on all Jewish people, but—surprise, surprise—right-wingers are not interested in navigating arguments about that in good faith. Instead, they have pounced on a tantalizing opportunity to attack “diversity” and the left through ham-fisted rage-bait.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, the Republican chair of the House committee that oversaw the university hearing, has herself gleefully trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies about immigration and George Soros, while excusing fellow Republicans (including Donald Trump) who’ve done the same. But she was able, through the hearing, to conflate vague, context-dependent slogans like “globalize the intifada” with automatic calls for a Jewish genocide, using the confusion to berate the university presidents for any equivocation about whether this speech violated their school codes of conduct. Questions with important free speech implications were reduced to social media soundbites, and Magill resigned four days later.
The outrage has not abated, however, and few have been as outraged as Ackman. But his reactions are somewhat selective. The financier is pals with Elon Musk, who publicly kowtows to white supremacists and amplifies hateful rhetoric around Jewish figures; he even restored Kanye West’s Twitter account just a year after booting the rapper off the platform for his vile, unmistakable antisemitism. Ackman has consistently brushed off such inconvenient facts; he defended Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after the presidential candidate implied that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and doesn’t seem to care that another candidate he likes, Vivek Ramaswamy, has baldly endorsed the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory. No—Ackman’s saved his invective to lambaste perceived wrongdoings at Harvard, instead.
In October, he demanded a hiring blacklist to penalize Harvard students who were part of organizations that co-signed a letter claiming Israel bears responsibility for the Hamas attack. (Talk about McCarthyism.) In November, about a month before the congressional hearings, he penned a social media open letter to President Gay that accused Harvard’s DEI office specifically of discriminating against Jewish, white, and Asian students (a common and unfounded talking point among the conservative Silicon Valley set). He claimed there had been little to no trouble with antisemitism at Harvard in recent years prior to Oct. 7 (an absolutely bizarre thing to say), and implied that the mere presence of pro-Palestine student rallies is no different from violence against Jewish students. On Dec. 3, just before the hearings, Ackman posted another letter reiterating the same points.
Following the hearings, Ackman doubled down—quadrupled down—in tweets that implied that Gay only got her job because she’s a Black woman and calculated the probabilities of future resignations. He also penned a letter to Harvard’s governing boards reading, in part: “Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history.” (Quite a way to whitewash the history of Harvard-employed slaveholders, not to mention its past discrimination against Jewish applicants!)
Indeed, Ackman wanted so badly to be the alum responsible for ousting President Gay that he whined about not being “polled” by the Harvard Alumni Association before it expressed its support for her. He then boosted dubious “reporting” from far-right activist Christopher Rufo that accused Gay of plagiarism in her past academic work, charges that Harvard’s governing board had previously reviewed and determined to be “a few instances of inadequate citation” that merited “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” (Rufo, it should be mentioned, recently held a Twitter Space where a participant advocated for electing white nationalists as allies in power against the left.)
In one sense, it all worked: Ackman’s name has certainly been featured in plenty of coverage of the hullabaloo—the Wall Street Journal spotlighted his “ruthless quest to oust college presidents.” In another sense, though, Ackman’s campaign to push himself as representative of real Harvard values was belied not just by the alumni association, but also by hundreds of its professors, hundreds of Black alumni, and by the Harvard Crimson’s editorial board, all of whom stood by Gay.
Ackman certainly seems to believe his campaign backfired: When the Harvard board officially announced Monday night that Gay would not be leaving, Ackman cited anonymous reports that the board was “concerned it would look like they were kowtowing to me.” Elon Musk, whose social network is rife with actual antisemitism, echoed former Trump aide Stephen Miller’s reply to Ackman that Harvard should be defunded.
Bizarre as all of this is, Ackman’s self-promotion has obscured a perhaps far baser motivation for attacking Harvard. A New York Times report published Tuesday noted that “Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, resents that officials at his alma mater, to which he’s donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, have not heeded his advice on a variety of topics.” These include his ideas for a testing lab to get students back to campus during the peak of the COVID pandemic, and his ultimately empty threat to withhold donations from Harvard fundraisers “because they hadn’t heeded his advice on how to invest an earlier donation.”
The donation, Ackman expounded in a tweet, consisted of $10 million of stock in a private company, Coupang, that Ackman gave to the school in 2017 under the agreement that “if and when the company went public in a few years, if the stock was worth more than $15m, I would have the right to allocate the excess realized value above $15m to the Harvard-related initiative of my choosing.” Harvard’s endowment managers sold this stock in March 2020, and Ackman only learned of that when Coupang readied for an IPO in 2021. Ackman contends that the “the premise of the [Times] story is false” but he “continue[s] to have a serious issue with Harvard” over l’affair Coupang.
What’s the point of all this? I have no doubt Ackman is at least somewhat sincere in his public mission to rout out campus antisemitism; he has often spoken of his upbringing in a Jewish family and about finding a welcome home in Harvard’s Jewish communities. But because I’ve been familiar with Ackman and his punditry for a while now—including his characterization of Kyle Rittenhouse as a “patriot,” his interest in RFK Jr.’s COVID vaccine skepticism, and his 2022 funding of an anti-social-justice financial firm launched by Vivek Ramaswamy, long before the latter’s candidacy—I suspect there’s also something else at play here.
It’s no secret that the famed tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley are miffed by the yearslong “techlash” that’s downgraded them from visionary innovators to profit-seeking manipulators in the eyes of the public, the press, the government, and their own employees. It’s also no secret that, as part of their backlash to that backlash, many of those tech figures have denounced all four of these pillars of society in turn—assuming a reactionary posture where only they deserve to be the overlords of a world gone mad, marking a stark pivot in their political strategies.
Countless absurd, troubling examples of this may be gleaned from just the past few years alone: the persistent support for Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, which has been celebrated by white nationalists as helping to extend the reach of white nationalist messaging; concerted efforts to influence urban politics, starting with attacks on criminal justice reformers in San Francisco and extending to efforts to build techie-utopian cities; and the self-fashioning of these investors and coders into all-around pundits who weigh in on everything from geopolitical conflicts to constitutional law to human health, no matter their (lack of) expertise in the subject matter.
Increasingly, elite Big Tech players are allied with far-right influencers against the Big Tech–skeptical left: A.I. enthusiasts are making common cause with eugenicist philosophers; Silicon Valley is embracing disreputable “reporters” like Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger; and Musk is actively encouraging antisemitic conspiracy-mongers like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Kanye West. Now Ackman, too, is boosting his clout and power with the assists of Rufo, Musk, and white nationalist Stephen Miller. That trend, frankly, is far worse for Jewish Americans—including those on Harvard’s campus—than anything President Gay has said or written.
You don’t have to defend all parts of the presidents’ testimony—indeed, Gay herself apologized to the Harvard Crimson for getting “caught up” in “policies and procedures” in her responses—to recognize that bad-faith calls for these presidents to resign have been just a touch too loud.
There’s undoubtedly been an uptick in open antisemitic rhetoric and violence in the United States since Oct. 7, when Hamas forces killed, assaulted, and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli citizens. A small number of the many U.S. protests against Israel’s retaliatory offensive in the Gaza Strip—which has now killed about 18,000 Palestinian civilians—have featured some antisemitic elements or some whitewashing of Hamas’ barbarity. All of this warrants unequivocal condemnation.
What it does not warrant, however, is a response that equates activists who are justly concerned over the mass displacement and death of Palestinian Arabs with neo-Nazis calling for Jewish genocide. Critiques of the state of Israel are not attacks on all Jewish people, but—surprise, surprise—right-wingers are not interested in navigating arguments about that in good faith. Instead, they have pounced on a tantalizing opportunity to attack “diversity” and the left through ham-fisted rage-bait.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, the Republican chair of the House committee that oversaw the university hearing, has herself gleefully trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies about immigration and George Soros, while excusing fellow Republicans (including Donald Trump) who’ve done the same. But she was able, through the hearing, to conflate vague, context-dependent slogans like “globalize the intifada” with automatic calls for a Jewish genocide, using the confusion to berate the university presidents for any equivocation about whether this speech violated their school codes of conduct. Questions with important free speech implications were reduced to social media soundbites, and Magill resigned four days later.
The outrage has not abated, however, and few have been as outraged as Ackman. But his reactions are somewhat selective. The financier is pals with Elon Musk, who publicly kowtows to white supremacists and amplifies hateful rhetoric around Jewish figures; he even restored Kanye West’s Twitter account just a year after booting the rapper off the platform for his vile, unmistakable antisemitism. Ackman has consistently brushed off such inconvenient facts; he defended Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after the presidential candidate implied that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and doesn’t seem to care that another candidate he likes, Vivek Ramaswamy, has baldly endorsed the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory. No—Ackman’s saved his invective to lambaste perceived wrongdoings at Harvard, instead.
In October, he demanded a hiring blacklist to penalize Harvard students who were part of organizations that co-signed a letter claiming Israel bears responsibility for the Hamas attack. (Talk about McCarthyism.) In November, about a month before the congressional hearings, he penned a social media open letter to President Gay that accused Harvard’s DEI office specifically of discriminating against Jewish, white, and Asian students (a common and unfounded talking point among the conservative Silicon Valley set). He claimed there had been little to no trouble with antisemitism at Harvard in recent years prior to Oct. 7 (an absolutely bizarre thing to say), and implied that the mere presence of pro-Palestine student rallies is no different from violence against Jewish students. On Dec. 3, just before the hearings, Ackman posted another letter reiterating the same points.
Following the hearings, Ackman doubled down—quadrupled down—in tweets that implied that Gay only got her job because she’s a Black woman and calculated the probabilities of future resignations. He also penned a letter to Harvard’s governing boards reading, in part: “Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history.” (Quite a way to whitewash the history of Harvard-employed slaveholders, not to mention its past discrimination against Jewish applicants!)
Indeed, Ackman wanted so badly to be the alum responsible for ousting President Gay that he whined about not being “polled” by the Harvard Alumni Association before it expressed its support for her. He then boosted dubious “reporting” from far-right activist Christopher Rufo that accused Gay of plagiarism in her past academic work, charges that Harvard’s governing board had previously reviewed and determined to be “a few instances of inadequate citation” that merited “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” (Rufo, it should be mentioned, recently held a Twitter Space where a participant advocated for electing white nationalists as allies in power against the left.)
In one sense, it all worked: Ackman’s name has certainly been featured in plenty of coverage of the hullabaloo—the Wall Street Journal spotlighted his “ruthless quest to oust college presidents.” In another sense, though, Ackman’s campaign to push himself as representative of real Harvard values was belied not just by the alumni association, but also by hundreds of its professors, hundreds of Black alumni, and by the Harvard Crimson’s editorial board, all of whom stood by Gay.
Ackman certainly seems to believe his campaign backfired: When the Harvard board officially announced Monday night that Gay would not be leaving, Ackman cited anonymous reports that the board was “concerned it would look like they were kowtowing to me.” Elon Musk, whose social network is rife with actual antisemitism, echoed former Trump aide Stephen Miller’s reply to Ackman that Harvard should be defunded.
Bizarre as all of this is, Ackman’s self-promotion has obscured a perhaps far baser motivation for attacking Harvard. A New York Times report published Tuesday noted that “Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, resents that officials at his alma mater, to which he’s donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, have not heeded his advice on a variety of topics.” These include his ideas for a testing lab to get students back to campus during the peak of the COVID pandemic, and his ultimately empty threat to withhold donations from Harvard fundraisers “because they hadn’t heeded his advice on how to invest an earlier donation.”
The donation, Ackman expounded in a tweet, consisted of $10 million of stock in a private company, Coupang, that Ackman gave to the school in 2017 under the agreement that “if and when the company went public in a few years, if the stock was worth more than $15m, I would have the right to allocate the excess realized value above $15m to the Harvard-related initiative of my choosing.” Harvard’s endowment managers sold this stock in March 2020, and Ackman only learned of that when Coupang readied for an IPO in 2021. Ackman contends that the “the premise of the [Times] story is false” but he “continue[s] to have a serious issue with Harvard” over l’affair Coupang.
What’s the point of all this? I have no doubt Ackman is at least somewhat sincere in his public mission to rout out campus antisemitism; he has often spoken of his upbringing in a Jewish family and about finding a welcome home in Harvard’s Jewish communities. But because I’ve been familiar with Ackman and his punditry for a while now—including his characterization of Kyle Rittenhouse as a “patriot,” his interest in RFK Jr.’s COVID vaccine skepticism, and his 2022 funding of an anti-social-justice financial firm launched by Vivek Ramaswamy, long before the latter’s candidacy—I suspect there’s also something else at play here.
It’s no secret that the famed tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley are miffed by the yearslong “techlash” that’s downgraded them from visionary innovators to profit-seeking manipulators in the eyes of the public, the press, the government, and their own employees. It’s also no secret that, as part of their backlash to that backlash, many of those tech figures have denounced all four of these pillars of society in turn—assuming a reactionary posture where only they deserve to be the overlords of a world gone mad, marking a stark pivot in their political strategies.
Countless absurd, troubling examples of this may be gleaned from just the past few years alone: the persistent support for Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, which has been celebrated by white nationalists as helping to extend the reach of white nationalist messaging; concerted efforts to influence urban politics, starting with attacks on criminal justice reformers in San Francisco and extending to efforts to build techie-utopian cities; and the self-fashioning of these investors and coders into all-around pundits who weigh in on everything from geopolitical conflicts to constitutional law to human health, no matter their (lack of) expertise in the subject matter.
Increasingly, elite Big Tech players are allied with far-right influencers against the Big Tech–skeptical left: A.I. enthusiasts are making common cause with eugenicist philosophers; Silicon Valley is embracing disreputable “reporters” like Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger; and Musk is actively encouraging antisemitic conspiracy-mongers like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Kanye West. Now Ackman, too, is boosting his clout and power with the assists of Rufo, Musk, and white nationalist Stephen Miller. That trend, frankly, is far worse for Jewish Americans—including those on Harvard’s campus—than anything President Gay has said or written.
Harvard President Claudine Gay corrects two scholarly articles following allegations of plagiarism
Sabrina Souza and Matt Egan, CNN
Fri, December 15, 2023
Ken Cedeno/Reuters
Harvard President Claudine Gay submitted corrections to two scholarly articles published in 2001 and 2017 following allegations of plagiarism, University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain told CNN on Friday.
Harvard commissioned an independent review of Gay’s writings following the plagiarism accusations. Gay denied the allegations, saying in a statement last week that she stands by the integrity of her scholarship.
“Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards,” she said.
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body, on Tuesday announced that the review revealed inadequate citations in a few instances but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” It said then that Gay would request “four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
Swain on Friday confirmed Gay made the corrections in an emailed statement. He said that the edits involved “quotations marks and citations,” correcting a reference to three articles, according to Harvard’s student newspaper the Crimson.
Bill Ackman a billionaire Harvard donor and vocal critic of Gay, has recently been calling on Gay to resign, in part because of allegations of plagiarism. But the Harvard Corporation said that the review was requested before Ackman first made his claims of plagiarism last Saturday.
“With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles,” the Harvard Corporation said in its Tuesday statement. “At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.”
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What firing or not firing a university president accomplishes
Harold Maass, The Week US
Thu, December 14, 2023
The University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The House on Wednesday passed a bipartisan resolution rebuking the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over their testimony on their handling of rising antisemitism on college campuses since the Israel-Hamas war erupted. Lawmakers at a Dec. 7 congressional hearing asked whether someone calling for genocide of Jews would violate campus rules, and the administrators gave what The Boston Globe described as "legalistic and equivocal answers" that outraged alumni, donors, and politicians.
Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT survived calls to step down. Harvard's board called Gay "the right leader to help our community heal" in "this tumultuous and difficult time." But, CNN noted, Penn President Liz Magill resigned last weekend after donors canceled gifts and the board of the university's Wharton Business School called for new leadership.
Scott Bok, the chair of Penn's board of trustees, also resigned. He told USA Today that Magill had been "over prepared and over lawyered" before heading into a "hostile forum." "She provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony," he said. Will all of this scrutiny and criticism of university presidents have any impact on the thorny issue of protecting free expression — and stamping out hate speech — on college campuses?
Booting college presidents accomplishes nothing
Universities can't salvage their reputations by publicly shaming their presidents, says Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in The Boston Globe. "A history of punishing speech is what sapped the presidents' credibility in the first place." At Harvard, "using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context." Instead of expanding "forbidden speech" to include antisemitism and Islamophobia, "universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom." The way to fight "deplorable speech" is to refute it, not criminalize it.
That's why standing by these university leaders was the right thing to do, says Jill Filipovic at CNN. "On the merits, they are correct. Context does matter. And permitted speech should be as broad as possible." Their "most effective questioner," Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), set a trap for them when she asked Magill — "Yes or no?" — whether calling for genocide of Jews violates Penn's rules. "She was referring to the now-common pro-Palestine chants 'from the river to the sea' and the use of the word 'intifada,'" gray areas. College administrators should "limit campus speech" only when it "threatens or harasses or incites," not when some simply find it "ugly and offensive."
"Antisemitism is a real, significant problem at Harvard and across the United States," says the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the university's student newspaper. Vicious posts are everywhere on social media, and hate crimes against Jewish people in New York City have tripled from October 2022 to October 2023. But "the problem of antisemitism demands nuanced and serious discussion. Instead, it's been treated as a prop in political theater."
Leaders must be held accountable
There is nothing phony about the fear of Jewish students who "feel unsafe on campus," says Alan Dershowitz in The Boston Globe. They are responding to "actual incidents" of harassment. Gay's defenders insist the pressure to fire her was inconsistent with Harvard's commitment to academic freedom. But university presidents should be held accountable for the atmosphere on campus. It's fair to call them out for failing "to make Jewish students feel safe."
"Harvard may think this will all blow over," says Joe Concha in The Messenger. But standing by Gay won't stop donations from drying up, or Jewish students from seeking other schools where they feel protected. One thing keeping Gay on the job won't do is make Harvard a place where all feel safe.
"Too few people understand basic concepts of academic freedom and free expression" on college campuses today, says Danielle Allen in The Washington Post. We've "gotten lost" trying to "protect intellectual freedom and establish a culture of mutual respect at the same time." It's essential to discipline people for genuine harassment, like distributing antisemitic or Islamophobic flyers. It's also OK to correct or challenge ideas we think are wrong, just as a professor would correct a student's math. Schools must write clear policies that encourage free debate while discouraging a "culture of intimidation." The "health of our democracy" depends on it.
Bill Ackman took a Wall Street tactic to an Ivy League fight in his attempt to oust Harvard’s president
Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN
Fri, December 15, 2023 at 12:08 PM MST·6 min read
When Bill Ackman, a financier who got rich betting against companies’ stocks, decided to wage a battle against Harvard’s president, he relied on a strategy that earned him a reputation as one of the most ruthless investors on Wall Street.
Ackman, a Harvard alum who sits on the law school’s board, and a handful of other deep-pocketed donors have been furious over what they see as Harvard’s inaction on antisemitism on campus. That anger reached a boiling point earlier this month when Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, stumbled during congressional testimony and failed to give a full-throated condemnation of hate speech calling for genocide against Jews — comments that she later apologized for.
Of all the donors threatening to yank their money from Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and others, none have been as relentless as Ackman. The billionaire has posted open letters, tweeted and even pushed to publicly identify students who expressed anti-Israel sentiment in the days after Hamas’ attack.
In particular, Ackman wants Gay, the first Black woman to lead Harvard, fired. To that end, he has gone on X to claim (without evidence), that Harvard hired Gay only to fulfill diversity requirements. He has called Gay unqualified for the job and accused her of plagiarism — an accusation she and Harvard deny.
All of Ackman’s rabble-rousing to try to sway public opinion comes straight from the activist short-selling playbook that he practically authored. Put simply, activist shorts win when the company they’ve bet against fails. One of the most vital tools for executing such a play: a big, booming megaphone.
CNN has reached out to Ackman via his company, Pershing Square Capital Management. Representatives didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Ackman made his fortune as the founder and CEO of Pershing Square, a heavyweight hedge fund that notched a series of wins taking big stakes in companies like JC Penney, Target and Wendy’s. But recently, following some notable losses in the 2010s, Ackman has steered the fund away from the activist-short strategy he’s known for.
In the spring of 2022, Ackman announced that he had “permanently” retired from activist short-selling.
Of course, old habits die hard, and Ackman, who is 57 and worth just shy of $4 billion, according to Forbes, clearly isn’t done agitating.
His message to Harvard is not unlike the message he delivered to the businesses he has targeted in the past: Run your business the way I say, or watch me and my followers tank your stock (and your reputation). The financial saber-rattling succeeded in getting other big donors and right-wing pundits to align around his view. But it also catalyzed anger among conservative activists, some of whom responded by doxxing dozens of the students Ackman accused of antisemitic speech.
Ackman’s crusade to get Harvard’s president fired hit a big snag this week when the university’s board rallied to her side. But it hasn’t silenced Ackman, who continues to air his grievances on social media and sling allegations of antisemitism against Harvard. That’s also part of the short-seller playbook: keep hammering your target no matter what.
There may be a sizable hitch in Ackman’s strategy, however, in applying ruthless capitalist maneuvering against a venerated Ivy League school: Harvard isn’t Wall Street.
Why Ackman hasn’t won
Harvard University President Claudine Gay. - Ken Cedeno/Reuters
Infamously, Ackman in 2012 made a $1 billion bet against Herbalife, the multi-level marketing company that sells dietary supplements. He claimed the bet was an ethical choice and that Herbalife was a scam. But he had a powerful foil: Carl Icahn, a rival activist investor who promoted the company’s stock just as loudly as Ackman trashed it. In 2018, Ackman ended his short bet, and Icahn claimed he made $1 billion from the ordeal.
Similarly, Ackman may have met his match with Harvard. Despite his attacks, more than 700 faculty members, 800 Black alumni and ultimately, on Tuesday, Harvard’s highest governing board, came to Gay’s defense. At Harvard, Ackman isn’t just going up against C-suite executives and corporate board members, he’s taking on a phalanx of donors and power players who are just as wealthy and savvy as he is — including billionaire Penny Pritzker, the Harvard Corporation’s most senior leader.
Harvard is a private institution, and the people Ackman needs to persuade to turn off the money supply aren’t only everyday shareholders but the wealthy donors who, so far, haven’t publicly condemned Gay or Harvard as vociferously as he has.
Even if he had, Harvard may be able to withstand the punishment. Harvard’s nearly $51 billion endowment is bigger than the GDP of some small countries.
Taking on Harvard
Ackman started sounding off about Harvard’s handling of antisemitism on campus shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack. He called for the students who blamed Israel for the attack to be outed so “that none of us inadvertently hire” them.
Later, he said on X that the leaders of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania should “resign in disgrace” over their congressional testimony.
His campaign against Gay hasn’t managed to oust her. But Ackman carried the banner for an army of pundits and wealthy donors who have been on the attack against what they perceive as the leftist agenda on college campuses.
Ackman this week denounced the doxxing trucks prowling Harvard’s campus, which have displayed students names and faces and called Gay “the best friend Hamas ever had.” But in a follow-up post on X, he suggested the trucks harassing Gay may serve a legitimate purpose.
“Perhaps the doxxing trucks will give President Gay some perspective on what it is like to be Jewish and/or Israeli on the @Harvard,” he wrote on X.
If Harvard were a publicly traded company, its stock may have fallen the minute Ackman went on offense, causing other investors to flee. But Harvard isn’t beholden to shareholders with a fiduciary duty to maximize value. As a private institution, it serves an array of parties, including students, faculty and alumni, many of whom bristle at the notion that one wealthy donor could wield such outsize influence.
“We can’t function as a university if we’re answerable to random rich guys and the mobs they mobilize on Twitter,” Ben Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School, told the New York Times this week.
Why Ackman could still win
What undid former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was ultimately a total revolt against her: A donor threatened to pull a $100 million gift from the university. Politicians called for her ouster. And her own boards at Wharton and Penn ultimately rebelled against her.
Ackman has some powerful allies on his side, too. New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik has not let up on her calls to oust Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth, who, like Gay, struggled to say whether calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate school rules.
Stefanik and her peers continue to probe antisemitism on campuses, and Ackman continues to bang the drum against Gay.
If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from Ackman’s Herbalife saga, it’s that Ackman rarely backs down, even if it costs him a small fortune.
Who is Bill Ackman, Harvard's fierce and ultra-wealthy critic?
George Glover
Fri, December 15, 2023
Bill Ackman is known in the world of investing for risky bets that sometimes pay handsomely — and sometimes not. He waged an unsuccessful six-year campaign against dietary-supplement firm Herbalife, and made a now-legendary bet that the COVID-19 pandemic would tank the stock market.
He's already known for combativeness in business, describing himself in a 2012 interview as "unfiltered." Increasingly, he's just as outspoken on politics.
Since Hamas' terrorist attacks on Israel October 7, Ackman has led corporate America in condemning elite US colleges, their students, and their leaders for failing to address what he sees as a rise in on-campus antisemitism.
That campaign has resulted in Wall Street firms rescinding job offers to students, and political scrutiny of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. As Ackman and his peers kept up the pressure, Penn president Elizabeth Magill, stepped down after a rough Congressional appearance.
Here's what you need to know about Ackman, including how he made his billions and his stances on hot-button issues.
Billionaire investor
Bill AckmanYouTube / Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Ackman, 57, is the son of real-estate mogul Larry Ackman, who helped finance iconic New York buildings including Manhattan Plaza and Chelsea Market. The younger Ackman received his MBA from Harvard in 1992, the same year he cofounded investment firm Gotham Partners with a fellow graduate.
In his 12 years running Gotham, he made a high-profile bet against the bond insurer MBIA — which paid off during the 2008 financial crisis — and started a feud with activist investor Carl Icahn that has now rumbled on for two decades.
In 2004, Ackman used tens of millions of dollars of his own money to set up Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund he still runs today. In its lifetime, Pershing Square has delivered returns of over 1,500%, according to an annual investor letter published earlier this year. The benchmark S&P 500 stock-market index is up around 440% over the same period.
Some of Ackman's best-known Pershing Square trades include building up big stakes in Target and Chipotle Mexican Grill, unsuccessfully shorting shares in Herbalife, and turning $27 million into $2.6 billion by hedging against stocks crashing during the pandemic. The latter move had been inspired by watching the 2011 film "Contagion", starring Matt Damon, he said.
In 2023, Ackman disclosed a billion-dollar investment in Google parent Alphabet and has made around $200 million betting against 30-year US Treasury bonds, which cratered in late September and early October with investors fretting about the Federal Reserve's interest-rate hikes.
Forbes estimates his net worth to be $3.8 billion, making him the world's 765th-richest person.
Polarizing politics
What makes Ackman a relative rarity among Wall Street's elite is his outspokenness — in contrast with more media-shy hedge-fund legends, such as Citadel's Ken Griffin and Point72's Steve Cohen.
Ackman has historically donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats including Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Pete Buttigieg.
But he called on Joe Biden to step down last month, warning that the incumbent president's "legacy will not be a good one if he is the nominee." He also said in November he's become "much more open to Republican candidates", and has given money to PACs supporting Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, formerly a Democratic candidate and now independent.
It's on Elon Musk's social-media platform X that Ackman shares the majority of his opinions, often clashing with establishment views. His account had just under a million followers as of Wednesday.
The billionaire joined Twitter in 2017. For his first three years on the platform, he posted infrequently — but he became more active and widely-followed after the pandemic, during which he implored the US government to lock the population down and speed up its vaccination rollout.
On X, he's voiced support for high-profile figures including Kyle Rittenhouse ("a civic-minded patriot"), Sam Bankman-Fried ("telling the truth"), and Elon Musk ("not an antisemite"). He's also repeatedly defended RFK Jr.'s skepticism of vaccines — and called for Harvard to release the names of members of the student organizations behind a letter blaming Israel for Hamas' October attacks.
Now, Ackman has zeroed in on Harvard president Claudine Gay, as well as MIT's Sally Kornbluth and the University of Pennsylvania's Liz Magill, all of whom he said should "resign in disgrace" for a perceived failure to condemn on-campus antisemitism during a congressional hearing earlier this month. Magill stood down Sunday, but Harvard and MIT have released statements backing Gay and Kornbluth.
Ackman has reserved particular fury for Gay, his alma mater's first Black president. In a post on X last week, he claimed, without presenting evidence, that someone with "first-person knowledge" told him Harvard wouldn't consider a candidate for that position who didn't meet Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) criteria.
Business Insider's Linette Lopez wrote in October that Ackman's reputation now on Wall Street was "king of uninformed, unnecessary, and seemingly unlimited tweets."
When Magill resigned this week after her Congressional appearance, Ackman posted on X: "One down."
With one university president's scalp under his belt, it's unlikely Ackman will stop.
Business Insider
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