Harvard president Claudine Gay may be gone but billionaire investor Bill Ackman has already aimed his ire at a new target in the heated row over American universities’ response to the Israel-Hamas war.
The activist investor behind hedge fund Pershing Square has waged a campaign against leadership at his alma mater, Harvard, in the wake of the Oct. 7th terrorist attack by Hamas. Ackman has also pushed for the removal of leading figures at two other elite universities which have been accused of tolerating hate speech against Jews—an allegation the universities vehemently deny.
Upon learning that that Gay stepped down only six months into the job, Ackman took to social media to name his next target: Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard’s cross-town rival.
“Et tu Sally?” he wrote just a half hour after Harvard University newspaper The Crimson broke the news of Gay resigning on Jan. 2.
Gay, Kornbluth and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill all made national headlines following their testimony to Congress on Dec. 5, during which they fumbled answers on the policing of antisemitic hate speech on campus.
The trio were criticized for being overly bureaucratic, after Gay said calls for the genocide of Jews would only violate university guidelines depending on their context. Critics argued this was a clear double standard that would not have been tolerated in the case of other ethnic or religious minorities.
I am not right wing. I operate only in good faith, and am I am not a bully. I just pay attention to the facts and see where they take me. And Harvard didn’t roll over if you have been paying attention. She had the board’s publicly stated unanimous support only two or so weeks…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
Liz Magill, head of the University of Pennsylvania, was the first to fall once their testimony went viral on social media, thanks in part to a string of wealthy graduates from its Wharton School of Business that threatened to pull their funding pledges.
Harvard’s Gay initially survived Ackman’s campaign, however. Kowtowing to external pressure and condemning their first black president to the shortest tenure in her institution’s history could have reflected just as badly on the judgement of trustees like Penny Pritzker as well.
But revelations Gay had seemingly committed widespread academic fraud under Harvard’s own stringent standards in what few papers she had published subsequently undermined her authority and made her position untenable.
Ackman has called Gay a diversity hire and blamed DEI for the controversial testimony to Congress.
“The root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment,” he wrote on X.
MIT’s Kornbluth, herself Jewish, is the only one of the three women to have so far successfully resisted calls to resign—a fact Ackman now aims to correct.
‘Under DEI, capitalism is racist’
MIT could not be reached by Fortune for comment, but the university published a letter of unequivocal support following Kornbluth’s Dec. 5 testimony.
“[Sally] has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, all of which we reject utterly at MIT,” wrote Mark P. Gorenberg, chair of the MIT Corporation.
“This is what happens when liberal universities roll over for right-wing, bad faith bullies,” wrote Mehdi Hasan, a former show host on MSNBC, in response to Ackman’s wish to now see Kornbluth go. “They don’t get appeased. They just come back for more.”
🚨🚨🚨Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND… pic.twitter.com/hUY3SgoOOi
— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023
Ackman, who is Jewish and married to an Israeli, explained that the pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses initially sparking his activism turned out to be a symptom of a broader problem America needed to solve—DEI.
In a post on X on Jan. 3 Ackman wrote he believes campus protests against a war—that has so far claimed over 22,000 Palestinian and Israeli lives—is rooted in an ideology that co-opted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in pursuit of a political agenda Ackman argues is anti-meritocratic.
“Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed,” the billionaire speculator wrote. “According to DEI, capitalism is racist.”
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
Once this policy is viewed from its ideological heritage, he continued, the only conclusion he can reach is that DEI is “inherently inconsistent with basic American values” and will likely lead to more racism rather than less.
“The DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness,” he added.
Not all agree with Ackman. The former director of Harvard’s chapter of the Hillel campus organization for Jewish students warned in in the Crimson last week Israeli activists were employing a “McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare” in order to silence criticism of the country and deflect attention from Gaza’s mounting death toll.
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