Bill Ackman
speaker
1,217 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 3 Jun
Bill Ackman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And then when the Congress, led by Elise Stefanik, announced an investigation of anti-Semitism on campus and concern about violations of law... The president was called to testify along with two other, you know, the president of MIT, you know, the president of University of Pennsylvania, who were having similar issues on campus.
I reached out to the president of Harvard and said, well, one, the Israeli government had gotten in touch and offered the opportunity for me to see the Hamas, if you will, GoPro film. And I said, you know what, I'd love to show it at Harvard. And they thought that would be a great idea. And so I partnered with the head of Harvard Chabad, a guy named Rabbi Hershey.
And we were putting the film up on campus. And I thought, you know, if the president were to see this, it would give her a lot of perspective on what happened. And she should see it before her testimony. And so I reached out to her, or actually Rabbi Hershey did. And, uh, he was told she would be out of town and couldn't see it.
Um, and then I reached out to her again, said, look, I'll, I'll facilitate your attendance in the, in the Congress, you know, come see the film. I'll fly you down. That was rejected. And then she testified. And I watched a good percentage, 80% of the testimony of all three presidents. And it was an embarrassment to the country, embarrassment to the universities. They were evasive.
They didn't answer questions. They were rude. They smirked. They looked very disrespectful to our Congress. And then, of course, there was that several minutes where finally, at least Stefanik was not getting answers to her questions. And she said... Let me be kind of clear. What if protesters were calling for genocide for the Jews? Does that violate your rules on bullying and harassment?
And the three of them basically gave the same answer. It depends on the context. And not until they actually... executed on the genocide, does the university have the right to intervene? And the thing that perhaps bothered me the most was the incredible hypocrisy.
You know, Harvard was, you know, each of these universities are ranked by this entity called FIRE, which is a nonprofit that focuses on free speech on campus. Harvard has been in the bottom quartile for the last five years and dropped to last before October 7th out of 250.
Harvard has become a place where free speech is not tolerated on campus, or at least... Free speech that's not part of the accepted dialogue or, you know, this whole notion of speech codes and microaggressions really emerged on the elite, you know, the Harvard, Yale campuses of the world.
And, you know, the president of Harvard's, then president of Harvard's explanation for why, you know, you could call for the genocide of the Jewish people on campus was Harvard's commitment to free expression. Right. And, you know, one of the more hypocritical statements of all time. And you really can't have it both ways. Either Harvard has to be a place where it's a free speech.
She basically said we're a free speech absolutist place, which is why we have to allow this. And Harvard could not be further from that. And so that was a big part of it. And I was in the barber chair, if you will, getting haircut. And I had a guy on my team send me the three-minute section. I said, cut that line of questioning. And I put out a little tweet on that.
And I call it my greatest hits of posts. It's got something like 110 million views. views. And everyone looked at this and said, what is wrong with university campuses? and their leadership, and their governance, by the way. You know, in a way, this whole conversation's been about governance. Harvard has a disastrous governance structure, which is why we have the problem we have.
President Harvard had a huge opportunity because she went third, right? The first two gave the world's most disastrous answers to the question. And she literally just copied their answer, which is itself, you know, kind of ironic in light of ultimately what happened.
First of all, I never threatened to use financial or other resources. The only thing I did here was I wrote public letters I spoke privately to a couple members of the board. I spoke for 45 minutes to the chairman. None of those conversations were effective or went anywhere as far as I could tell.
I think my public letters and then some of the posts I did and that little three-minute video excerpt had an impact. But it wasn't about, I mean, you can criticize me for being a billionaire, but that had, you know, it was really the words. It's a bit like, again, going back to the corporate analogy. It's not the fact that you own 5% of the company that causes people to vote in your favor.
It's the fact that your ideas are right. And I think, you know, I was disappointed after the congressional testimony, the Board of Harvard said that they were 100% behind, unanimously 100% behind President Gay. And so clearly I was ineffective. And ultimately what took her down was other, I would say, activists who identified issues with academic integrity.
And then she lost the confidence of the faculty. And once that happens... It's hard to stay. And I wanted her to be fired, basically, or be forced to resign because of failures of leadership, because that would have sent a message about the importance of leadership, you know, failure to stop a emergence of anti-Semitism on campus.
And, you know, there's some news today, the protests are getting worse.
Yes, there's certainly a tension. And I think, first of all, I think free speech is incredibly important and I'm on the side. I'm a lot closer to absolutism on free speech than otherwise. The issue I had was the hypocrisy, right? They were restricting other kinds of speech on campus, principally conservative speech, conservative views. So it wasn't a free speech absolutist campus.
And the protests were actually quite threatening to students. And there are limits to even absolutist free speech. And they begin where people feel, you know, intimidation, harassment, and threat to bodily harm, et cetera.
That kind of speech is generally, again, it's pretty technical, but as people feel that they're an imminent harm by virtue of the protest, that speech is at risk of not meeting the standards for free speech. But Harvard is a private corporation. And as a private corporation, they can put on what restrictions they want.
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