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 Harvard had introduced only a few months before bullying and harassment policies. And that's why Representative Stefanik focused on, it's not like she said, it's calling for genocide against the Jews, violate your free speech policy. She says, it's calling for genocide against the Jews, violate your policies on bullying and harassment.
And I think everyone looked at this when they said, it depends on the context. And they said, look, if you replace Jews with some other ethnic group, students have been, who've used the N word, for example, have been thrown off campus or suspended, you know, students who've, you know, hate speech directed at LGBTQ people. has led to disciplinary action.
But, you know, attacking, spitting on Jewish students or, you know, kind of roughing them up a bit seemed like, you know, or calling for their elimination didn't seem to violate the policy. So it's, you know, look, I think a university should be a place where you have broad views and open viewpoints and broad discussion.
But it should also be a place where students don't feel threatened going to class, where their learning is not interrupted. when final exams are not interrupted by people coming in with loud protest. Students asked me when I went up there, what would you do if you were Harvard president? I said, and this was before I knew what was happening on the Dartmouth campus.
I said, I convene everyone together. This is Harvard. We have access to the best minds in the world. Let's have a better understanding of the history. Let's understand the backdrop. Let's focus on solutions. Let's bring Arab and Jewish and Israeli students together. Let's form groups to create communication. That's how you solve this kind of problem. And none of that stuff has been done.
It's not that hard.
Yes. So on governance, the governance structure is a disaster. So the way it works today is Harvard has two principal boards. There's the board of the corporation, the so-called fellows of Harvard. It's a board of, I think, 12 independent directors and the president. There's no shareholder vote. There's no proxy system.
It's really a self-perpetuating board that effectively elects its own members. Once the balance tips politically one way or another, it can be kept that way forever. There's no rebalancing system. If a US corporation goes off the rails, so to speak, The shareholders can get together and vote off the directors. There's no ability to vote off the directors.
Then there's the board of overseers, which is I think 32 directors. And there a few years ago, if you could put together 600 signatures, you could run for that board and put up a bunch of candidates and about five or six get elected each year. And a group did exactly that. And it was an oil and gas kind of disinvestment group. They got the signatures. A couple of them got elected.
And Harvard then changed the rules. And they said, now we need 3,200 signatures. And, uh, and by the way, if, if there are these dissident directors on the board, we're only going to allow, we're going to cap them at five. So if three were elected in the oil and gas thing, now there are only two seats available.
And then a group of former students, kind of younger alums, one of whom I knew approached me and said, look, Bill, we should, we should run for the board. And they decided this pretty late, uh, only a few weeks before the signatures were due and love your support. You know, I took a look at their platform. I thought it looked great. I said, look, happy to support.
And I posted about them, did a Zoom with them, and they got thousands of signatures. Collectively, the four got, whatever, 12,000 signatures or something like this. And they missed by about 10% of the threshold. And what did Harvard do in the middle of the election? They made it very, very difficult to sign up for a vote. And it just makes them look terrible.
And they've got now thousands of alums upset that, and again, this wasn't an election. This was just to put the names on the slate. So the only candidates on the slate are the ones selected by the existing members. And so businesses fail because of governance failures. Universities fail because of governance failures.
It's not really the president's fault because the job of the board is to hire and fire the president and help guide the institution academically and otherwise. So that's governance. An ideology, I was like, how can this be? October 7th, the event that woke me up was 30 student organizations came out with a public letter on October 8th.
literally the morning after this letter was created and said, Israel is solely responsible for Hamas's violent acts. Again, Israel had not even mounted a defense at this point, and there were still terrorists running around in the southern part of Israel. Um, and I'm like, Harvard students, you know, 34 Harvard student organizations signed this letter and I'm like, what is going on?
You know, WTF. Right. And, uh, that's when I went up on campus and I started talking to the faculty and that's where I started hearing about actually builds. It's this DEI ideology. I'm like, what? Like diversity, equity, inclusion. You know, obviously I'm familiar with these words and, you know, I see this in the corporate context. And they say, yeah.
And they started talking to me about this oppressor-oppressed framework, which is effectively taught on campus and represents the backdrop for many of the courses that are offered and the various, some of the studies and other degree offerings. I'm like, yeah. I had not even heard of this and I'm a pretty aware person, but I was completely unaware.
And basically they're like, look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed. And you take the side of the oppressed and any acts of the oppressed to dislodge the oppressor, regardless of how vile or barbaric, okay. I'm like, okay, this is a super dangerous ideology. And so I wrote a like questioning post about this. Like, here's what I'm hearing.
You know, is this right? Then I had someone, a friend of mine sent me a Christopher Rufo's book, America's Cultural Revolution, which is sort of a sociological study of the origins of the DEI movement and critical race theory. And I found it actually one of the more important books I've read. And also I found it quite concerning. Yeah.
And really, it's sort of a – ultimately, DEI comes out of a kind of a Marxist socialist backdrop way to look at the world. And so I think there are a lot of issues with it. But unfortunately, it's advancing, I ultimately concluded. Racism as opposed to fighting it, which is what I thought it was ultimately about.
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