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 so the departments become more and more progressive, if you will, with the passage of time. And they only advance candidates that match their, that meet their political objectives. It's not a great way to build an institution which allows for- Small D diversity. Allows for, yeah, diversity. And diversity, by the way, is not just race and gender.
And that's also something I feel very strongly about.
It's in the biology department at Harvard, because biology is controversial now.
Because biology and gender, you know, there are faculty, there's a woman at Harvard who was literally canceled from the faculty as a member, I think she was at the med school. And she was, you know, she made the argument that there are basically, you know, two genders determined by biology. She wasn't allowed to stay. Okay. That's another topic for another time. That's another topic.
You should do a show on that one. That would be an interesting one.
It's hard to really know, right? It's not like a provable fact. I would say at a certain point in time, she lost the confidence of the faculty. And that was ultimately the catalyst. And whether that was, how much of that was the plagiarism issue and how much of that was some of the things that preceded it, or was it all of these issues in their entirety?
We don't really, there's no way to do a calculus. Can you explain the nature of this plagiarism from what you remember?
So Aaron Cerberium and Christopher Ruffo, one from the Free Beacon, and Chris, you know, surfaced some allegations on or identified some plagiarism issues that I would say the initial examples were, you know, use of the same words with proper attribution, some missing, you know, footnotes. And then over time...
And with, I guess, more digging, they released, I think, ultimately something like 76 examples of what they call plagiarism in, I think, 8 of 11 of her articles. And one of the other things that came forth here is, as president of the university, she had sort of the thinnest transcript academically of any previous president. You know, very small, relatively small body of work.
And then when you couple that with the amount of plagiarism that was pervasive, and then I guess some of the other examples that surfaced were not missing quotation marks, where the authors of the work felt that their ideas had been stolen. And really, plagiarism is academic fraud. One indicia of plagiarism is a missing footnote. That could also be a clerical error.
And so when a professor is accused of plagiarism, university does sort of a deep dive. They have these administrative boards and it can take six months, nine months, a year to evaluate, you know, intent matters. Was this intentional theft of another person's idea? That's academic fraud. Or was this sloppy, you know, you missed or just humanity, right? You miss a footnote here or there.
And I think once it got to a place where people felt it was theft of someone else's intellectual property, That's when it became intolerable for her to stay as president of Harvard.
Of course. The common understanding of plagiarism, if you look in the dictionary, it's about theft. Theft requires a intent. Did the person intentionally take someone else's ideas or words? Now, if you're writing a novel, words matter more. If you're taking Shakespeare and presenting it as your own words.
If you're writing about ideas, ideas matter, but you're not supposed to take someone else's words without properly acknowledging them, whether it's quotation marks or otherwise. But in the context of academics' life's work before AI... everyone's going to have missing quotation marks and footnotes. I remember writing my own thesis.
There were books you couldn't take out of Widener Library, so I'd have index cards, and I'd write stuff on index cards, and I'd put a little citation to make sure I remembered to cite it properly. And scrambling to do your thesis, get it in on time, what's the chances you forget at what point what are your words versus the author's words, and you forget to put quotation marks.
just the humanity, the human fallibility of it. So you don't get, it's not academic fraud to have human fallibility, but it's academic fraud if you take someone else's ideas that are an integral part of your work.
Again, I think it would have sent a better message if a leader fails as a leader, and that's the reason for their resignation or dismissal. then she gets, if you will, caught on a technical violation that had nothing to do with failed leadership. Because I don't know what lesson that, you know, what lesson that teaches the board about selecting the next candidate.
I mean, the future of Harvard, a lot of it's going to depend on who they pick as the next leader. Here's an interesting anecdote that I think has not surfaced publicly. So a guy named Larry Bacow was the previous president of Harvard. Larry Bacow was on the search committee, and they were looking for a new president.
And what was strange was they picked an old white guy to be president of Harvard when there was a call for a more diverse president. And what I learned was Harvard actually ran a process, had a diverse new president of Harvard, and in the due diligence on that candidate shortly before the announcement of the new president,
They found out that the president, that presidential candidate had a plagiarism problem and the search had gone on long enough. They couldn't restart a search to find another candidate. So they pick Larry Bacco off the board, off the search committee to be the next president of Harvard as kind of an interim solution.
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