Major Harvard donor Bill Ackman demanded on Wednesday that the university’s board resign following Claudine Gay’s departure as school president, condemning their “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies and calling out their politically connected leader.
In a 4,000-word tirade on X, the hedge fund manager specifically named board head Penny Pritzker — a billionaire heiress to the Hyatt hotels fortune, the sister of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), and an official in both the Obama and Biden administrations.
“The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department,” Ackman wrote, after detailing why he believed Gay to be a “DEI-favored candidate.”
Ackman differentiated between “diversity in its broadest form,” which includes “diversity of viewpoints,” from fake diversity, as in the “political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”
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The mega-donor has been amongst Gay’s most vocal critics following the school’s lack of appropriate response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent antisemitic terrorist-sympathizing from students.
Ackman, a 1992 Harvard graduate, previously stated that Gay, a black woman, was hired due to the board’s DEI initiative, rather than “identifying the best leaders for our prestigious universities.” This came after he demanded that the presidents of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and University of Pennsylvania “resign in disgrace” after they refused to condemn calls for Jewish genocide during an early December congressional hearing.
While former UPenn president Liz Magill resigned mere days into the intense backlash sparked by the hearing, Gay dragged her feet until her academic background was publicly dissected in the media, revealing several accusations of plagiarism and stoking criticisms of Harvard’s diversity-focused hiring process.
Gay’s long-awaited Tuesday resignation made her the shortest-serving president in Harvard’s history.
Despite her antisemitism and plagiarism controversy, the board publicly defended Gay and mourned her when she quit.
Pritzker, along with the other fellows of Harvard College, claimed Gay faced “racist vitriol directed at her,” and said they accepted her resignation “with sorrow.”
The board leader, who has a $3.5 billion net worth according to Forbes, was tapped by the Biden administration in September 2023 to manage Ukraine’s economic recovery from the ongoing war.
Pritzker, a key fundraiser for Democrat candidates, is also a close associate of former President Barack Obama, for whom she was the U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 2013 to 2017.
With her wealth and political connections, she’s managed to keep getting into administrative positions despite her involvement in the 2001 collapse of Superior Bank, which was co-owned by her family. At the time of its failure, Prtizker was a board member of the bank’s holding company, responsible for leaving about 1,400 depositors out about $15 million according to U.S. News.
Bill Ackman, CEO and founder of Pershing Square Capital, visits the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, on November 10, 2015. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Since then, Pritzker has continued to enjoy undeserved public and private-sector leadership opportunities, including serving as a board member of Microsoft.
Ackman’s rant continued to tear into Harvard’s board for promoting the DEI policies that allowed Gay to skirt by while doing damage to the school’s educational environment and reputation, calling on them to resign:
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.
The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.
The ODEIB [Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging] should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Gay’s resignation was celebrated by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who questioned the three university presidents at the December 5 congressional hearing when they infamously declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus.
According to Ackman, he “came to learn that 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.”
Unsatisfied with Gay’s resignation alone, he argued that the school’s leadership requires a total overhaul.
“The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats,” Ackman wrote, pointing out that board members had publicly denied the plagiarism claims before investigating them.
He also complained that “racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism.”
“While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country… You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe,” Ackman posted.
Harvard has appointed Provost Alan Garber, who sat behind Gay while nodding in agreement during her controversial congressional testimony, as interim president for now.