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 that infiltrated college campuses. So basically what Rufo argues is that the black power movement of the 60s really failed. It was a very violent movement and many of the protagonists ended up in jail. And out of that movement, a number of kind of thought leaders died. this guy named Marcuse and others, built this framework, kind of an approach.
He said, look, if we're going to be successful, it can't be a violent movement, number one. And number two, we need to infiltrate, if you will, the universities. And we need to become part of the faculty. And we need to teach the students.
And then once we take over the universities with this ideology, then we can go into government, and then we can go into corporations, and we can change the world. So I thought important book. And the more I dug in, the more I felt there was credibility to this, not just the kind of sociological backdrop, but to what it meant on campus.
And faculty, Harvard faculty were telling me that, you know, there's really is no such thing as free speech on campus. And that, you know, there was a survey done. I don't know, a year or so ago, the Harvard faculty and only 2% of the faculty admitted, even in an anonymous survey, admitted to having a conservative point of view.
So we have a campus that's 98% non-conservative, liberal, progressive. uh, that's adopted this DEI construct. Um, and this, and then I learned from a member of the search committee for the Harvard president, uh, that they were restricted in looking at candidates, only those who met the DEI offices criteria. And I shared this in one of my postings and I was accused of being a racist. Um,
But, and that's someone who believes in that diversity is a very good thing for organizations and that equity and fairness is really important. And having an inclusive culture is critical, you know, for a functioning of our organization.
You know, so here I was, someone who was like, okay, DEI sounds good to me, you know, at least in the small d, small e, i version of events, but this DEI ideology is really problematic. So what's the way to fix this?
The things you saw at Harvard and elsewhere. In the same way this was an eye-opening event for me, it has been for a very broad range of other people. I've never gotten, you know, I mentioned general growth. I got a lot of nice letters from people for making money on a stock that went up 100 times.
But I literally get hundreds of emails, letters, texts, handwritten letters, type letters from people the ages of 25 to 85 saying, Bill, this is so important. Thanks for speaking out in this. You were saying what so many of us believe but have been afraid to say. I described it as almost a McCarthy-esque kind of movement and that if you challenge the DEI construct,
people accuse you of being a racist. It's happened to me already. Uh, you know, I'm perhaps, uh, you know, I'm much less vulnerable than a university professor who can get shouted off campus and canceled. I'm, I'm sort of difficult to cancel. Uh, but that doesn't mean people aren't going to try. And, uh, you know, I've been the victim of a couple of, uh,
interesting articles in the last few days, or at least one in particular in the Washington Post, written by what I thought was a well-meaning reporter. But it's just clear that I've taken on some big parts of at least the progressive establishment, DEI. I'm also a believer that Biden should have stepped aside a long time ago, and it's only getting worse. So I'm attacking the president.
DEI, elite universities, and you make some enemies doing that.
Let me ask, okay, how can you explore how to think when you're only shared a certain point of view, right? How can you learn about leadership when the governance and leadership of the institution is broken? and exposure to ideas, if you're limited in the ideas that you're exposed to. So I think university is at risk.
I mean, the concerning thing, right, is if 34 student organizations that each have, I don't know, 30 members or maybe more, right, that's a thousand. Okay, that's a meaningful percentage of the campus, perhaps, that ultimately respond. Now, 10 or so of the 30 withdrew the statement once many of the members realized what they had written.
So I don't think it seems like the statement was signed by the leadership and not necessarily supported by all the various students that were members. But if the university teaches people these precepts, this is the next generation of leadership.
Normally, if you think about, I wrote my college thesis on university admissions, the reason why controlling, you know, the gates of the Harvard institution, the admissions office is important, isn't that many of these people who graduate end up with, you know, the top jobs in government and ultimately become judges. They're, you know, permeate through society.
And so it really matters what they learn. And if they're limited students, to one side of the political aisle. And they're not open to a broad array of views. And this represents some of the most elite institutions in our country. I think it's very problematic for the country long term.
Well, it's two things. I think it's governance structure. I also think universities are selecting, they're not selecting leaders. Yeah. You know, it's not clear to me that... universities should necessarily be run by academics, right? You know, the dean of a university, you know, the person who helps, sort of the business of the university, right?
And then there's the academics of the university and having a, I would argue having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that's involved, a board that has itself diverse viewpoints and by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints, is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports.
Because one of the things I learned about how faculty get hired at universities, ultimately it's signed off by the board, but the new faculty are chosen by each of the various departments. And once the departments tip, there's sort of a tipping point politically where once they tip in one direction, the faculty... recruit more people like themselves.
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