In the two-month battle over the fate of Harvard’s president, billionaire investor William A. Ackman has cast himself as the protector of Jewish students and the standard-bearer for those who believe universities have fostered an atmosphere hostile toward critics of liberal orthodoxy.
But behind his anger lie personal grievances that predate the tumult that has engulfed campuses since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Mr. Ackman, by his own admission and according to others around him, is unhappy that officials at his alma mater, to which he has donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, failed to heed his advice on a variety of subjects. .
More recently, this includes how to respond to complaints of anti-Semitism and the specter of violence against supporters of Israel on campus.
“It would have been wise for her to listen, or at least answer the phone,” Mr. Ackman said in an interview, describing a recent outreach to Dr. Gay that was part of a stream of calls, text messages and letters to university officials.
On Tuesday, Harvard’s board of trustees announced that Dr. Gay, its first black president, would remain in her position despite calls for her removal. Although Mr. Ackman’s campaign — which included the accusation that she was hired in part because of her race and gender — failed to overturn her, he succeeded in shaping the debate over the anti-Semitism in universities and to highlight questions about the power of major donors to dictate their decisions. the leadership of elite institutions. He said he wanted to be a “positive force” at the school.
Those who were sensitive to the idea that a wealthy student could exert such influence over the school began a campaign to support Dr. Gay. Mr. Ackman enjoys support from parts of campus, including Jewish groups who say the university was too slow to forcefully condemn the Hamas attack and has since erred in threatening violence against Jewish students. . Mr. Ackman said he met with 230 Jewish students at a town hall during a recent trip to campus.
“When the history of this moment is written, Bill will be a part of it,” said Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad, who welcomed Mr. Ackman to campus.
Mr. Ackman, who posts frequently on social media to nearly a million followers, is virtually alone among Harvard’s high-profile donors in making himself a public opponent of the school. Other wealthy Harvard donors, like financier Kenneth Griffin, only made their points behind the scenes.
University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned over the weekend in the face of organized resistance from the school’s high-profile alumni. Ms. Magill, Dr. Gay and Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sparked a furor at a congressional hearing last week when they appeared to evade questions about whether students should be disciplined if they called for the genocide of the Jews. .
“I don’t think we would have seen such a violent backlash against these institutions without Bill Ackman,” said Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a staunch conservative critic of university diversity programs. and topics like critical race theory. Mr. Rufo called the hedge fund manager an “elite defaulter,” a sentiment shared by a half-dozen Harvard donors who said they supported Mr. Ackman’s goals but were reluctant to speak publicly and to harm their relationships with 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 the rich and the mobs they’ve mobilized on Twitter,” he said.
Mr. Ackman, 57, has a fortune estimated at $3.8 billion, according to Forbes, and has a history of donating to Democrats. He founded the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital and for years waged high-profile, long-running battles against companies he believed to be the same. He lost a billion-dollar bet against the nutritional supplement company Herbalife, which I called an outright fraud – allegations that have never been proven. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he bet $2.6 billion on a decline in the stock market.
In recent years, Mr. Ackman has also frequently spoken out on hot-button issues, including the pandemic, the Russian attack on Ukraine, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the various events surrounding Elon Musk.
The key to the Pershing Square model, which Mr. Ackman appears to have adopted in his battle with Harvard, is his commitment to going to great lengths to pressure businesses to bend to his will.
He has given tens of millions of dollars over the years to Harvard, but is not among the top donors to a school that has received many nine-figure donations. His largest donation was in 2014, when he and his ex-wife announced a $25 million gift to expand the economics department and endow three chairs.
More recently, he donated a smaller amount to the rowing team, a team he joined while he was a student.
But interviews with him and 10 associates revealed a gradual deterioration in the relationship with his alma mater.
In Monday’s interview, Mr. Ackman recalled that a little more than a year ago, Dr. Gay, who at the time was dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, visited at his office on the Manhattan waterfront. Topics of discussion included Mr. Ackman’s plans to give more money.
The 45-minute conversation was pleasant, he recalled, and so he expected her to be receptive to his comments about two months ago, when he called her to share his concerns about the danger to Jewish students after the deadly October 7 attack in Israel, and his disappointment with the university’s official response.
Dr. Gay took his message to Penny Pritzker, head of Harvard’s board of trustees, who engaged Mr. Ackman in what she described as “a totally disappointing conversation.” Ms. Pritzker did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Ackman has worked privately at Harvard for the past three years, say several people who have discussed the subject with him, in part after the university administration rejected his suggestions on how to set up a testing lab to get students and staff. return to campus during the pandemic.
Two years ago, in a previously unreported incident, Mr. Ackman told members of the Harvard fundraising team that he might not give another penny because they had not heard his advice on how to invest an earlier donation, two people with knowledge of the exchanges said. Mr. Ackman sent a series of fiery letters to Harvard administrators questioning their financial acumen. He still ended up giving more money.
Asked about the episode, Mr. Ackman said it was “a distraction from other things” and declined to answer questions about it. Harvard declined to comment on the school’s interactions with Mr. Ackman.
Mr. Ackman compared the university’s lack of commitment to him to the companies he targeted in his early days as an activist investor pushing for change. Then he would call the general managers and get no response. Today, he says, it’s more common for company boards to invite him.
On November 4, he wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Gay, describing his concerns about anti-Semitism on campus and what he calls double standards on campus for different racial and ethnic groups. I proposed a detailed list of actions I wanted the university to take.
After sending this letter, he said he had little contact with Harvard. He continued to raise questions about Dr. Gay on social media and in public forums, including claiming that Dr. Gay had plagiarized academic research.
Harvard’s board of trustees said Dr. Gay had not violated the school’s standards for research misconduct, but would retroactively add additional citations to prior research.
Another billionaire financier pushing for change at an elite university, private equity mogul Marc Rowan, tried a different approach. Mr. Rowan, who headed the advisory board of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, had publicly called for the university president’s ouster but told associates last week that he was stepping down, fearing that it could do more harm than good. pairing the effort with a wealthy Wall Street investor, people briefed on the conversations said.
Even some of Mr. Ackman’s supporters said in interviews that they wished he had heard the same advice, although they did not want to be named for fear of becoming Mr. Ackman’s target themselves. Mr. Ackman said a wiser approach was not an option because he had no formal role on Harvard’s governing boards. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said.
Mr. Ackman, who was criticized after seeking to identify students belonging to groups accusing Israel of being responsible for the Hamas attack, said he did not pay much attention to his critics.
“For every email I get saying, ‘You’re racist.’ I’ve had 1,000 people tell me, ‘What you say is what I believe,'” he said. “I’ve had calls from some of the most prominent people in the world who have said, ‘I wish I could say what you’re saying.'”
He said he would continue to share his concerns with the Harvard administration and others within the school. He also predicted that others would continue to exploit Dr. Gay’s academic record. “I don’t see a scenario in which it survives in the long term or medium term,” he said Monday.
He declined to comment Tuesday on the news that Dr. Gay would keep his job.
