Bill Ackman’s campaign against Harvard followed years of rancor

In the two-month battle over the fate of Harvard’s president, billionaire investor William A. Ackman has cast himself as a protector of Jewish students and a standard-bearer for people who believe universities have created a hostile atmosphere for critics of liberal orthodoxy.

But behind his anger lie personal grievances that predate the tumult that has engulfed campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Mr. Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, resents the fact that officials at his alma mater, to which he has donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, have not followed his advice on various issues . .

Most recently, this has included how to respond to complaints of anti-Semitism and the specter of violence against supporters of Israel on campus.

“It would have been smart of her to listen, or at least pick up the phone,” Mr. Ackman said in an interview, detailing a recent outreach to Dr. Gay described being part of a flurry of calls, texts and letters to university officials.

On Tuesday, Harvard’s board of directors announced that Dr. Gay, the first black president, would remain in her post despite calls for her resignation. Although Mr. Ackman’s campaign — which included accusations that she was hired in part because of her race and gender — failed to unseat her, it did succeed in shaping the debate over anti-Semitism on college campuses and to question the power of major donors to dictate. towards elite institutions. He said he wants to be a “positive force” at the school.

Those sensitive to the perception that a wealthy alumnus could exert such influence on the school began a campaign to remove Dr. to support gay. Mr. Ackman maintains support from some corners of campus, including Jewish groups that say the university was too slow to strongly condemn the Hamas attack and has since responded equivocally to the threatened violence against Jewish students. Mr. Ackman noted that on a recent trip to campus he met 230 Jewish students at a town hall.

“When the history of this moment is written, Bill will be a part of it,” said Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad, who hosted Mr. Ackman on campus.

Mr. Ackman, who regularly posts on social media with nearly a million followers, stands almost alone among Harvard’s high-profile donors in making himself a public opponent of the school. Other wealthy Harvard donors, such as the financier Kenneth Griffin, have pushed their perspectives only behind the scenes.

University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned this weekend amid organized opposition from the school’s high-profile alumni. She, Dr. Gay and Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, caused a furore at a congressional hearing last week when they appeared to dodge questions about whether students should be disciplined for calling for the genocide of Jews.

“I don’t think we would have seen anything close to the level of opposition to these institutions if it weren’t for Bill Ackman,” said Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a outspoken critic of university diversity programs. and topics such as critical race theory. Mr. Rufo praised the hedge fund manager as an “elite turncoat,” a sentiment shared by a half-dozen Harvard donors who said they supported Mr. Ackman’s goals but were reluctant to speak publicly and discuss their relationship with harm the school.

There are others who disagree. Ben Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School, described Mr. Ackman as “an interloper.” “We can’t function as a university if we have to answer to random rich guys and the gangs they mobilize on Twitter,” he said.

Mr. Ackman, 57, has an estimated fortune of $3.8 billion and a history of donating to Democrats, according to Forbes. He founded the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital and spent years waging high-profile, protracted battles against companies he believed were mismanaged. He lost a billion dollar bet against the nutritional supplement company Herbalife, which he called outright fraud – allegations that have never been proven. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he made $2.6 billion, betting that the stock market would fall.

In recent years, Mr. Ackman has also regularly covered current public issues, including the pandemic, the Russian attack on Ukraine, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. and the various goings-on surrounding Elon Musk.

The key to the Pershing Square playbook, which Mr. Ackman appears to have adopted in his battle against Harvard, is a pledge to go to any lengths to pressure companies to bend to his will.

He has given tens of millions of dollars to Harvard over the years, but is not among the top donors at a school that has raked in numerous nine-figure donations. His biggest gift came in 2014, when he and his ex-wife announced a $25 million donation to expand the economics department and endow three professorships.

More recently, he donated a smaller amount to the rowing team, a team he joined as a student.

But interviews with him and ten employees showed that the relationship with his alma mater gradually deteriorated.

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Ackman recalled that Dr. Gay, then dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, visited his Manhattan waterfront office a little more than a year ago. Topics of discussion included Mr. Ackman’s plans to donate more money.

The 45-minute conversation was pleasant, he recalled, which is why he expected her to be receptive to his input about two months ago, when he called her to discuss his concerns about the danger to Jewish students after the deadly 7 attack October in Israel, and his disappointment with the university’s official response to it.

Dr. Gay forwarded his message to Penny Pritzker, leader of Harvard’s board of trustees, who engaged Mr. Ackman in what he described as “a completely disappointing conversation.” Ms. Pritzker did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Ackman has been studying privately at Harvard for the past three years, say several people who have discussed the subject with him, partly after the university’s administration rejected his suggestions for setting up a testing laboratory to bring in students and staff . back to campus during the pandemic.

Two years ago, in a previously unreported incident, Mr. Ackman told members of Harvard’s fundraising team that he might not give another cent because they had not heeded his advice on how to invest a previous donation, said two people with knowledge of the exchanges. Mr. Ackman sent a series of fiery letters to Harvard administrators questioning their financial acumen. He donated even more money anyway.

When asked about that episode, Mr. Ackman said it was “a distraction from other things” and declined to answer questions about it. A Harvard spokesman declined to comment on the school’s interactions with Mr. Ackman.

Mr. Ackman compared the university’s lack of commitment to him to companies he pushed to bring about change in his early days as an activist investor. He then called the CEOs and did not get his calls returned. Now, he said, it is more common for company boards to invite him.

On November 4, he wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Gay, outlining his concerns about anti-Semitism on campus and what he called double standards on campus for various racial and ethnic groups. He offered a detailed list of actions he wanted the university to take.

After sending that letter, he said he had minimal contact with Harvard. He kept asking questions about Dr. Gay on social media and in public forums, including by promoting claims that Dr. Gay had plagiarized academic research.

The Harvard administration said that Dr. Gay had not violated the school’s standards on research misconduct, but that she would retroactively add additional citations and citations to previous research.

Another billionaire financier who advocated for change at an elite university, private equity magnate Marc Rowan, tried a different approach. Mr. Rowan, who headed the board of advisors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, had publicly called for the university’s president to be ousted, but told employees last week that he was stepping back. because he was afraid this would do more harm than good to the university. associate the effort with a wealthy Wall Street investor, people briefed on the talks said.

Even some of Mr. Ackman’s supporters said in interviews that they wished he had followed the same advice, though they asked not to be named for fear of becoming Mr. Ackman’s target themselves. Mr. Ackman said a more subdued approach was not an option since he had no formal role on Harvard’s boards of directors. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said.

Mr. Ackman, who faced criticism after he tried to identify students in groups that blamed Israel for the Hamas attack, said he does not pay much attention to his opponents.

“For every email I’ve gotten that says, ‘You’re a racist.’ “I’ve heard a thousand people say, ‘What you say is what I believe,'” he said. “I’ve gotten calls from some of the most prominent people in the world saying, ‘I wish I could say what you’re saying.'”

He said he will continue to share his concerns with Harvard’s administration and others at the school. He predicted that too others would continue to mine Dr. Gay’s academic record. “I don’t see a scenario in which she survives in the long or medium term,” he said on Monday.

He declined to comment Tuesday on the news that Dr. Gay would keep her job.