TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @BillAckman

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

A few facts, corrections, and receipts to dispel some misinformation going around social media: The @TPUSA Hamptons event was not held at my house, but rather at a hotel in Bridgehampton. As I previously explained, I did cover the cost of the event, ie, travel, food, and lodging for the participants. This was not a secret event and no one signed an NDA. Everyone including the Turning Point representatives who attended are totally free to share whatever they want about what took place and what was discussed. This was not a ‘Chatham House rules’ event. Some have already publicly shared their experiences and perspectives on the convening. In the spirit of transparency I encourage any of the other attendees that have not already shared their thoughts on the event to do so. That said, I understand why some may not want to do so because of the fear of getting attacked by the mob who assume that something untoward took place. I am sure there are some Israel supporters of TPUSA who became upset with Charlie because he told me so. He complained to me that some pro-Israel advocates view any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and we both agreed that this is wrong. I did not complain to Charlie about @TuckerCarlson’s criticism of me at TPUSA. I did ask him why he thought Tucker attacked me and he told me that he did not know why. He told me that he thought my statement in response to Tucker was ‘a great one.’ It can be found here: https://t.co/xN4aINfSHJ I have been reluctant to post private texts, but in an effort to put this whole thing to bed I share the following brief exchange with Charlie. And when reading this text exchange, ask yourself whether Charlie sounds like someone who I threatened, blackmailed and/or was the subject of an ‘intervention’ about Israel or otherwise. Lastly, I totally understand the shock and distress that all who knew or followed @charliekirk11 are feeling after his untimely and tragic death, but let’s not let those emotions cause us to construct conspiracy theories that can cause innocent people serious and potentially deadly harm. One tragic and devastating loss is enough.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Here is the beginning of the discussion where I am following up on whether young people should buy or rent which was discussed in depth during the economic discussion I led. You will note the text exchange took place on August 15th: https://t.co/yAnn5RqySj

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

A number of people have reached out and/or posted expressing concern that Tyler Robinson’s father may collect a $1.2m reward for turning in his son, which inspires a few thoughts. First, in order for rewards to be effective in finding criminals, the rewards need to be paid even if the recipient is a crook or worse. That said, in this case, if Tyler’s father is found to have been involved or otherwise acted negligently in contributing to Charlie’s death, civil litigation or criminal prosecution will reverse any unjust compensation. I have also seen reports which suggest that Tyler’s family intends to waive its right to any reward. So yes, we will pay the reward if it is earned to whomever the FBI indicates provided the information that led to Tyler’s arrest. I always keep my word.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

This afternoon @RealCandaceO slandered me by accusing me of 'staging an intervention' with Charlie Kirk in which 'threats were made' with respect to his supposed 'evolving stance' on Israel at an event I hosted in the Hamptons. Candace also intimated that I 'blackmail[ed]' Charlie. On the show, Candace said that she 'would be very happy for me to dispute this narrative.' While it pains me to drive more traffic to her program, I am responding here to clear my name. It saddens me that we live in a society where social media influencers seek to monetize the tragic death of Charlie Kirk. For the record, at no time have I ever threatened Charlie Kirk, Turning Point or anyone associated with him. I have never blackmailed anyone, let alone Charlie Kirk. I have never offered Charlie or Turning Point any money in an attempt to influence Charlie's opinion on anything. In fact, my interactions with Charlie Kirk have been extremely cordial, albeit limited, regretfully so, as I was very impressed by him and his work and I will sadly never see him again. In an effort to clear the record, I share the following: I have followed @charliekirk11 on @X for some time and greatly admired him. While I didn't agree with Charlie on every issue, I had enormous respect for his intelligence, vast knowledge about religion, and his willingness to take on all comers in open mic sessions on campus and otherwise. Periodically, I would repost some of his posts and video clips. I connected with Charlie when he DM'd me in late May of this year and expressed interest in meeting me. In light of our respective schedules, we were unable to find a time to meet in person so we scheduled a zoom on June 11th. On the zoom, he explained to me that conservatives, in particular, young conservatives were getting tired of defending Israel, and this was very concerning to him. I asked him how I could learn more, and he suggested that it might be useful to convene a group of young conservative influencers on a host of topics that could include Israel to get a better sense of how the conservative community was thinking about Israel and other relevant issues of concern to young people. On the zoom, Charlie also said that his open mic conversations on campus were very effective in addressing issues on the minds of students, but he was only one person with limited bandwidth. He suggested that recruiting a group of junior Charlie Kirk's who could host open mic sessions on college campuses would be an effective way to encourage debate on a host of issues, an approach he believed to be worthy of consideration, and better enable students to get to the truth. I expressed interest in learning more and we thereafter scheduled a series of conference calls and zooms with Charlie, Turning Point staff and members of my team in an effort to assemble a diverse group of influencers who we could convene for a day and a half session. In addition to getting a better sense of what and where young conservatives were on various issues, Charlie thought doing so might enable him to identify potential candidates who could launch their own campus tours and carry forth his approach to dialogue. We chose the afternoon of August 4th to the afternoon of the 5th for the convening, and Charlie and members of my team worked to put together an invitation list. I offered to host the sessions in Bridgehampton (and cover the costs) so that I could attend some of the sessions as I was working from there at that time. Charlie sent out the invitations and about 35 or so influencers accepted. Charlie estimated that the influencers who attended collectively had more than 100 million followers. Charlie and Turning Point put together the agenda for the meeting and the topics were: The Economic Future of America The Cultural Landscape of Dating and Marriage The Convergence of East and West Mamdani, the New Threat to America Charlie asked me to moderate the Economic Future discussion which I did, and I thereafter hosted a Q&A session with the participants. The Convergence of East and West included a discussion of immigration, value systems, the U.S. approach to foreign policy and Israel. While I had wanted to attend the Convergence panel, I had a board meeting that conflicted with this session. Those that attended this session said that the Israel discussion was similar to the other sessions with the attendees expressing varying points of view as well as explaining the views of their followers. Some participants were critical of Israel and U.S. support for Israel, and others were supportive. The sessions were punctuated by meals. I attended one group lunch and a group dinner where I sat with Charlie and others. I found the sessions I attended interesting and I really enjoyed meeting the influencers. It gave me considerable perspective on what is on the mind of young Americans on a wide range of issues. At the end of the event, I sat with Charlie and members of my team and we discussed the events of the convening. Charlie believed that he had identified a number of potential Turning Point ambassadors who could launch open mic events on campus and that he would follow up with them. We agreed to keep in touch thereafter. We corresponded by text thereafter over the next few weeks on a range of topics that did not include Israel, and the next thing I knew, he was gone. In short, this was not an 'intervention' to 'blackmail' Charlie Kirk into adopting certain views on Israel. It was nothing of the sort.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

The least the @nytimes could do, would be to post the correction of their starving boy story on their main site with 55 million followers. That would help mitigate the damage they have caused. It speaks loudly that the original story was on the front page, top-of-the-fold right column, and the correction is on some Times PR site that no one follows. The correction of a story published to 55 million followers was sent to only 80k followers. Clearly, a purposeful obfuscation to bury the retraction. Why is the Editor in Chief Joseph Kahn @JosephKahn allowing this to happen, or worse, serving as a principal factor in the story and in the fake correction? With a story of this prominence, he has to have been involved in the editing and in the strategy around the correction. And stories like this lead lunatics to kill. It’s not just the reputational smear of a country, it’s a call to violence against Jews. Tell me why I am wrong.

@Osint613 - Open Source Intel

The New York Times published an image of a child in Gaza, claiming the child was “malnourished” due to Israel, on its main account with 55 million followers. Five days later, it quietly posted a correction, stating the child actually had a muscle condition, on its alternate account with just 89 thousand followers.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

If we allow 9.1% of registered voters determine the future of New York City, then we deserve the city that we are going to get.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

I totally agree that Zelensky was the problem today after watching the whole session. Don’t rely on media excerpts if you want to get to the truth. @ZelenskyyUa mishandled this. And I say this as someone who has supported @Ukraine from the beginning of the war. @realDonaldTrump was appropriately angry, but kept his composure. In a negotiation, you should never overplay your hand, particularly if it is a bad one, and the lives of your people are at stake. In order to be a mediator, you can’t be viewed by either side as favoring the other. Trump is carefully and patiently playing this role. It is not helpful for Zelensky to be disrespectful. That said, I expect Trump to continue to be the honest broker between Russia and Ukraine, but he will now likely increase what he wants for the U.S. unless Zelensky quickly apologizes and offers something to Trump. A very unfortunate day for Ukraine.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

This is a spot on rebuttal of the @nytimes take down of @elonmusk restructuring and turnaround of Twitter @X.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Did everyone else understand that Non Governmental Organizations, ie, NGOs, receive most if not all of their funding from the government, or was I just being ignorant? If NGOs receive most if not all of their funding from the government, what is the basis for calling them non-governmental? The answer according to Google is that an NGO is non-governmental because it operates without governmental control and oversight even though it receives government funding. Why is it beneficial for there to be non-profit organizations, that is NGOs, that receive all or substantially all of their funding from our government, but don’t have any government oversight or control? Non-profits are not known for having good governance. The combination of funding without oversight and control creates the opportunity for fraud, waste and abuse that we have seen in some of the USAID grants that have been made public in the last week or so. In the private markets, that is the real world, a majority shareholder would have control and oversight. Why do we allow our government to make majority investments without control and oversight? It makes no sense. It is time we scrutinize all NGOs and reconsider investing taxpayer money in private organizations without proper oversight and control consistent with what a majority investor would expect in a private corporation.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

.@realDonaldTrump is correct. This could be the worst violation of journalistic ethics ever during a presidential election. @60Minutes literally manipulated @KamalaHarris answer (after the public blowback of her answer from the preview release of the excerpt) by cutting, culling, and pasting her words. This violation of the public trust requires a CEO-level intervention, acknowledgment and apology. And the viewing public needs to see the unedited, unexpurgated interview in order for the public not to be misled in the last days before the election. Anything less is a whitewash and an acknowledgment that CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon orchestrated the manipulation. Who else on the CBS team would be bold enough to do the cut and paste at the risk of destroying @60Minutes? Where is Shari Redstone on this catastrophe?

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

The original post that showed the original and then manipulated answer:

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

China versus U.S. ports.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Let’s not forget that @POTUS Biden was the Democratic presidential candidate 63 days ago. We were told by the administration and the media that Biden was in perfect health and that videos of him exhibiting serious deterioration were ‘right wing propaganda.’ Then, threatened with the 25th amendment, on July 21st, he stepped aside to be replaced by @KamalaHarris who was complicit in the lie. She knew, and she told the American people otherwise. Her reward for keeping quiet was to become the presidential candidate without a primary or other transparent process for her selection. The Biden lie is perhaps the greatest lie ever told to the American people by our government. And this lie was also told to us repeatedly with a bold face by the current Democratic nominee for president. Now all of a sudden, the former most left-leaning Senator (proudly left of Bernie) and now the most left-wing politician in the country, over the last two months has become a gun-toting, shoot-the-intruder, fracking-supporting, border-wall-building candidate who began her career at @McDonalds. She almost sounds like a Republican candidate for president. How can anyone trust anything she says? Even if you carefully watch her speak or read the transcripts of the four interviews and one debate she has done, it is nearly impossible to understand what she is saying. She has yet to answer a direct question about the economy, the border, or foreign policy. In response to questions about specific policies, she simply repeats the same scripted stories about being a prosecutor, growing up middle class, and/or other non-sequiturs, and neither the media nor the moderators challenge these insipid, unresponsive answers. I voted for @JoeBiden because after @realDonaldTrump’s first term, I believed the country would benefit by a more centrist candidate. Biden promised to bring the country together. And as Biden was a supposed ‘one-term’ president, we were misled into believing he wouldn’t be beholden to the progressive wing of the party and could implement a moderate political agenda. I and the American people were misled. I apologize for casting my vote for Biden. It was a big mistake. VP Harris’s entire candidacy relies on support from an undisclosed cabal of party leaders who selected her in a private process. She didn’t get one vote in a primary. As such, she is perhaps the most beholden-to-the party candidate in history. Her campaign is a blatant attempt to say what she needs to say in order to get elected. She is keeping her appearances unprecedentedly limited compared to any other candidate in history so that she has less surface area to be understood for who she really is and what she actually believes. She has done four interviews and @Tim_Walz four during the last 63 days compared to 70 for Trump and @JDVance. [See: https://www.axios.com/2024/09/19/harris-media-strategy-hide-election] Ask yourself, what previous presidential candidate in history has run a campaign doing everything he or she could to avoid the media? You won’t find one. Then ask yourself, why? VP Harris’ evasiveness is only possible here because of a complicit media which should be screaming from the rooftops about her refusal to be interviewed, but instead repeatedly excuse and praise her and her campaign. In the nearly four years of the Biden/Harris administration, the world is up in flames with a hot war in Europe with approaching one million dead, and a growing conflagration in the Middle East. Our large and small cities are overrun with unvetted migrants with the associated impact on crime, budgets, and services, and lower income Americans cannot afford a proper meal. Our universities have become hotbeds of hate. Free speech is being squelched except for @X, one of the first likely targets, along with its proprietor @elonmusk, of a future Harris administration. Our government spending and waste are totally out of control and I could go on and on. I strongly encourage you to vote accordingly.

Exclusive: Inside the Harris-Walz strategy of hiding from the media The Harris-Walz ticket is on pace to do fewer interviews and press conferences than any major party's presidential pairing in modern U.S. history. axios.com

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

This is a fascinating analysis by a lighting expert of how @CNN used lighting techniques to present @KamalaHarris more favorably than @realDonaldTrump during the debate, and used the same approach with @Tim_Walz and @JDVance in their appearances. Even if you don’t care about the election, you will find this extremely helpful in understanding how the media can use lighting to manipulate viewers. A must watch. An alleged whistleblower has claimed that @CNN made special accommodations for @KamalaHarris in, among other things, how she would appear relative to Trump when presented on a split screen view. This analysis appears to potentially corroborate this claim.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

When my last child was born, on the first day of her life we were told that she needed a HepB vaccine. It was not presented as a choice and I foolishly did nothing to stop the nurse. My older three daughters did not receive the vaccine at birth. Those that question the growing, now 72-shot regimen for children are considered by some to be wackos and anti-vaxxers. I think the skepticism is appropriate and prudent as we are obligated as parents to make sure that we are not causing harm to our children who are not capable of providing informed consent. Our society needs to complete a careful review of vaccine protocols including the risks associated with the cumulative effect of all of the vaccines we are giving children. We have been working for more than a year to find a credible and independent group to do such an investigation but so far have not been able to do so. If you can help us do this important work, please contact us at info@persq.org.

@AaronSiriSG - Aaron Siri

Does the Hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine used in the United States stop infection and transmission of Hepatitis B in a school setting? Answer: HepB is mandated to attend school in most states and the justification for these rights-crushing mandates is to prevent transmission of Hepatitis B in the school setting. So, on behalf of @ICANdecide, we sent a Freedom of Information Act request to CDC asking for “documentation sufficient to reflect any case(s) of transmission of Hepatitis B in an elementary, middle, or high school setting.” In response, the CDC explained that: “A search of our [CDC] records failed to reveal any documents” of “transmission of Hepatitis B in an elementary, middle or high school setting.”* This is because Hepatitis B is a bloodborne illness, typically transmitted by sex workers or drug users sharing needles — not activities that occur in a classroom setting. And of course, at the risk of stating the obvious, just because someone hasn’t gotten a HepB vaccine doesn’t mean they have Hepatitis B. It is also noteworthy that, as the CDC explains, “almost all children 6 years and older and adults infected with the hepatitis B virus recover completely and do not develop chronic infection.”** And (you may need to sit down for this one), the clinical trials for HepB vaccines, injected at birth and again at 1 and 6 months, plainly did not show they were safe because: --Recombivax HB (Merck) was licensed for babies based on trials with no placebo control & 5 days of safety monitoring after injection; and --Engerix B (GSK) was licensed for babies based on trials with no placebo control & 4 days of safety monitoring after injection. Sources: *https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Final-Response-No-Records.pdf **https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-b/ ***https://www.fda.gov/media/74274/download (Recombivax HB package insert, see Section 6.1) ****https://www.fda.gov/media/119403/download (Engerix B package insert, see Section 6.1)

Page not found - ICAN - Informed Consent Action Network icandecide.org

Hepatitis B Learn more about hepatitis B, a vaccine-preventable liver infection caused by the hepatitis B virus. cdc.gov

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts. How could this be? I wondered. When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students. A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. I 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. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant. I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology. Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.” Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology. In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one. After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear. The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk. The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled. These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society. The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). 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. To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors. Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed. And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed. I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all. America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times. Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists. An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups. The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment. I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring. When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community. I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more. I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities. In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock. Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action. While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks. I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am. All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role. This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty. The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay. The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay? One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent. Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management. The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president. Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets. The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school. The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices? In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above. 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. The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students. And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues. It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility. The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter. According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies. Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board. In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them. So what should happen? The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats. 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 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. Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy. These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done. A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president. A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect. Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

We now know that the @Harvard Corporation Board sought to quash a legitimate whistleblower inquiry into President Gay’s work by threatening the media with litigation if they published the whistleblower’s allegations, which the Board said were demonstrably false, but in fact were entirely true. It also appears that the Board’s ‘investigation’ of Gay’s plagiarism was pretextual, and Harvard’s mandated procedures were not followed in conducting the investigation. Further, the Board allegedly sought to out the whistleblower and pursue damages against him or her in direct violation of Harvard’s own policies against retribution. I am sorry to say this, but in the event that any of the above is true, which looks increasingly likely, this is a scandal and a stain on the reputation of Harvard that goes far beyond President Gay. An immediate investigation must be launched of the Corporation Board by unimpeachable members of the Harvard Board of Overseers, with the assistance of independent counsel who are unaffiliated with the University and the Corporation Board members to determine if, in fact, Harvard’s own whistleblower protection policies have been violated, and the other alleged governance and investigative failures are true. This is conduct unbecoming any board of directors, let alone Harvard’s. Only sunlight will remove the stain on the University’s reputation. It is time for the sun to shine.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

New whistleblower complaint alleging 50 instances of plagiarism by @Harvard President Gay. The whistleblower raises serious issues about how the initial investigation into Gay’s work was conducted. The whistleblower levels credible accusations against the @Harvard governing board in its apparent attempt to quash the initial inquiry into her work and its summarial dismissal of the allegations, relying on a still undisclosed three-person panel of ‘experts’ who assessed Gay’s work outside of the normal process for such investigations. The coverup is often worse than the crime. The media must dig deeper here. Gaygate is in need of greater sunlight. A must read: https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf

Page not found - Washington Free Beacon freebeacon.com

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

A must watch for perspective on 10/7 vs 9/11.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Please see my letter today to @Harvard governing boards of directors: December 10, 2023 Dear Members of the Harvard Governing Boards: In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history. Because of her failure to condemn the most vile and barbaric terrorism the world has ever seen, for supporting rather than condemning 34 Harvard-branded student organizations who hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric acts, for failing to enforce Harvard’s own rules on student conduct, and for her other failures of leadership, President Gay catalyzed an explosion of antisemitism and hate on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard’s history. In light of Harvard’s leadership position, President Gay’s mishandling of October 7th and its aftermath on campus have led to the metastasis of antisemitism to other universities and institutions around the world. President Gay’s actions and inactions have gravely interfered with the ability of students to continue to learn at Harvard and for its faculty to teach and do research. Classes are continually disrupted by protesters who use bullhorns and other disruptive methods, and the offending students suffer no disciplinary action. Literally, as I write this post, highly disruptive protests are underway inside Widener Library while students are trying to study for final exams and finish their term papers during the last two weeks of the semester. As a result of President Gay’s failure to enforce Harvard’s own rules, Jewish students, faculty and others are fearful for their own safety as even the physical abuse of students remains unpunished. President Gay’s absurd explanation for the lack of disciplinary action for the October 18th HBS incident was that the University cannot discipline students until the HUPD and FBI investigations are complete. To date, I am unaware of any disciplinary actions taken for the October 18th incident nearly two months later. President Gay’s principal response to address antisemitism on campus was to set up a task force. Within a few weeks of its formation, @RabbiWolpe, the only rabbi on the task force, publicly announced his resignation from the committee. In an @X post, he explained: “The short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference that I had hoped.” He later explained on news television that: “I came to the conclusion that I was not going to be able to make the kinds of changes I thought Harvard needed,” saying the committee had “accountability without authority.” President Gay’s failures since October 7th led to a Congressional investigation of her conduct. This outcome on its own is an incredible embarrassment to Harvard. I have been unable to identify any former Harvard president being the subject of a Congressional investigation since the establishment of the Congress in 1789. President Gay’s entire testimony was abysmal. She was disrespectful and condescending to the Congress. She was a hostile witness, unwilling to answer direct questions from members. In words that will forever live in infamy, President Gay’s response to the question: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules regarding bullying or harassment?” President Gay: “It depends on the context.” My X post which shared the excerpt of the three university presidents’ testimony has been viewed more than 106 million times, and condemned in comments and reposted by more than 80,000 people from around the world. President Gay’s testimony was also slammed by Harvard Hillel: “President Gay’s failure to properly condemn this speech calls into question her ability to protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus... President Gay’s testimony fails to reassure us that the University is seriously concerned about the antisemitic rhetoric pervasive on campus.” And by her most liberal supporters: Professor Emeritus Larry Tribe @tribelaw: “[Her] hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.” President Gay’s failures have led to billions of dollars of cancelled, paused, and withdrawn donations to the university. I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni. I have been copied and blind copied on numerous letters and emails to the University from alums who have written scathing letters to Gay and/or the Board withdrawing donations. President Gay’s actions and inactions have exposed Harvard to substantial legal liability due to alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 putting at risk Harvard’s Federal funding, tax-exempt status, and creating the risk of substantial financial liability to the University from private plaintiffs. President Gay’s Failed Leadership Did Not Begin with Her Presidency During her tenure as Dean and now as president, Gay has squelched speech she disfavors while defending and thereby amplifying vile and threatening hate speech, exhibiting a remarkable double standard. In the words of Professor Steven Pinker: “Claudine was technically correct that students can’t be punished for political chants, but when Harvard et al. have no prior credible commitment to academic freedom, institutional neutrality & viewpoint diversity, the born-again appeal to principle seems incriminating.” Free speech deteriorated materially under Gay’s deanship and presidency as evaluated by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Harvard’s free speech ranking has deteriorated each year over the last four academic years to a ranking of 0.00 or last out of 254 universities this past year. According to FIRE, Harvard is the only university with an “abysmal” speech climate. In my letter to the board of December 3rd, I quoted Harvard faculty I interviewed on the lack of free speech at Harvard. I encourage you to read what they had to say. Gay has presided over discriminatory hiring practices at Harvard. The faculty have been told in no uncertain terms that candidates that do not meet DEI criteria will not be considered for certain faculty positions. As Dean, Gay showed no respect for basic American legal principles when she fired Harvard Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan as residential dean for taking on the legal defense of Harvey Weinstein. President Gay should hope that someday when she needs counsel, she will be able to obtain quality representation for herself. DEI and the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (OEDIB) In recent weeks, I have learned a lot about DEI practices at Harvard and have come to the conclusion that the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, which was formed in 2019 under Dean Gay’s oversight and vision the year after she became Dean of FAS, is none of those things. In fact, the actions of the OEDIB have led to preferences and favoritism for certain racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ groups at the expense of other groups, and made some members of the Harvard community feel included at the expense of others that are excluded. When I mentioned in my December 3rd letter to President Gay that among others, Jewish, Asian, Indian and straight white male students were excluded from the benefits of the ODEIB office, her solution to this problem, which she outlined in an email to the Harvard community, was to propose that the OEDIB include Jewish students in some manner. This is not right answer. The OEDIB is a major contributing source of discriminatory practices on campus and highly damaging to the culture and sense of community at Harvard. It is beyond repair and should be shut down. I do not mean to suggest whatsoever that the goal of a diverse university that is welcoming for all should be abandoned. Rather, the OEDIB is not the solution as it is fundamentally an organization with political objectives that are inconsistent with achieving true diversity and inclusion at Harvard. The OEDIB’s definition of equity is also inconsistent with Harvard excellence. Over its nearly 500-year history, Harvard has been a beacon for excellence based on the equality of opportunity it offers, not by promoting a system or ideology which forces or requires the equality of outcomes. On the Decision to Terminate President Gay Last Thursday, December 8th, a bipartisan coalition of 72 members of Congress issued a public letter to the Harvard governing boards demanding President Gay’s termination. It is rare that our Congress has been able to accomplish anything in recent years in a bipartisan fashion, let alone in a matter of days. Congress’ decisive action here speaks volumes. In the last 24 hours, a petition has been circulating among the Harvard community which asks the board to fire President Gay. I expect it may already have thousands of signatures. As Charlie Munger of blessed memory advised: “Invert, always invert,” i.e., turn a situation or a problem upside down to better understand and solve it. Using Mr. Munger’s rubric, let’s assume that the office of president at Harvard were vacant. Knowing what we know now, would Harvard consider Claudine Gay for the position? The answer is definitively “No.” With this simple thought experiment, the board’s decision on President Gay could not be more straightforward. The Search Process for a New President I was recently accused by several bloggers and other commentators of being a racist when I shared that the board, in the search process that led to the hiring of President Gay, would not consider a candidate for president that did not meet DEI criteria. I have confirmed now from multiple sources that the search committee that led to President Gay’s appointment excluded non-DEI eligible candidates from the process. To set the record straight, my criticism of President Gay would be unchanged if her gender, race, and/or LGBTQ+ status were different. As I am sure the board is well aware, a search process which excludes potential candidates based on their racial, gender, sexual preference or other similar criteria is inherently a discriminatory and/or racist process, which is illegal under the law. In the likely event that Harvard launches a new search process for president, to state the obvious, all candidates regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and/or political views should be considered for the position. The board also needs to also launch a detailed investigation into discriminatory hiring practices at the University, and put in place measures to ensure that these practices never again occur. The events of the last two months have taken a devastating toll on the Harvard brand and its community at large. With the right leadership and governance, Harvard can be restored to its historic stature as one of the world's leading research and educational institutions comprised of a diverse and welcoming community which fosters free speech, encourages diverse viewpoints, and provides an environment that preserves academic freedom. I am highly confident that Harvard, the governing boards, and the Harvard community at large will greatly benefit and learn from this experience. As I often say, experience is making mistakes and learning from them. The mistakes that were made that led to recent events began many years, if not decades, ago. Let’s make sure that we use this opportunity to fundamentally repair our beloved institution for it is incumbent upon us as the current stewards of Harvard. We are all collectively responsible for the currently impaired status of our historically esteemed institution. I am grateful for the role all of you serve on behalf of the entire Harvard community. Thank you for your service. I would be delighted to help the governing boards and Harvard in any way that I can. Please call upon me at any time. Sincerely, William A. Ackman, A.B. 1988, MBA 1992

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

I wouldn’t want to be a member of the board of the university who goes last in dismissing its president. They already have all of the information they need to be decisive about this decision.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

A bipartisan demand from @EliseStefanik and @RepMoskowitz for the removal of Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth. Consider the severe reputational damage the three continue to inflict on our most important American institutions of higher learning for each hour they continue to serve in their respective roles. Their brief tenures in office need to end now. Look how much damage each has done in only six to 18 months. This moment in history creates an opportunity for a complete reboot of the philosophies, ideologies, politics, bureaucracy, and restrictions on free speech that led to the current situation. This is not just about antisemitism. The problem is much deeper and more entrenched. Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine who dies as the light of democracy is at risk of being snuffed out. And it is not just about the universities. DEI and the related politics, violations of basic American principles, and the restrictions on free speech and expression have invaded our government institutions, non-profits, and Corporate America under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. These words have been weaponized to achieve power and political objectives for certain favored groups at the expense of others. There is nothing fair, inclusive, or diverse about this movement. Similar movements have succeeded in other countries many times over a long history. The United States has been a refuge for those who have fled once democratic regimes that were taken over by these movements. If we don’t work to preserve our democracy, be forewarned, there will be no other place to go.

@RepStefanik - Rep. Elise Stefanik

I am proud to lead a bipartisan letter with @RepMoskowitz and 72 of our colleagues to the members of the Governing Boards of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn demanding that their presidents be removed after this week's @EdWorkforceCmte hearing. Read the full letter here. https://t.co/IOPpNdNh34

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Listen to @Penn student Eyal Yakoby. Magill has to go now.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

The presidents of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment? The answers they gave reflect the profound moral bankruptcy of Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth. Representative @EliseStefanik was so shocked with the answers that she asked each of them the same question over and over again, and they gave the same answers over and over again. In short, they said: It ‘depends on the context’ and ‘whether the speech turns into conduct,’ that is, actually killing Jews. This could be the most extraordinary testimony ever elicited in the Congress, certainly on the topic of genocide, which to remind us all is: “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group” The presidents’ answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership. Don’t take my word for it. You must watch the following three minutes. By the end, you will be where I am. They must all resign in disgrace. If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context. To think that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest. On the bright side, our congressional leaders deserve accolades for showing tremendous leadership and moral clarity in their statements, by the questions they asked, and the respectfulness with which they conducted the hearing. It was a masterclass of how our government and democracy should operate. If you have time, please watch the entire hearing. Throughout the hearing, the three behaved like hostile witnesses, exhibiting a profound disdain for the Congress with their smiles and smirks, and their outright refusal to answer basic questions with a yes or no answer.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

The entire hearing: https://www.c-span.org/video/?532147-1/harvard-upenn-mit-presidents-combating-antisemitism

Harvard, UPenn & MIT Presidents on Combating Antisemitism, Part 1 The presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) testified on combating antisemitism on college campuses during a public hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee. They were questioned on free speech vs. inciting violence, student conduct, and university funding. During the hearing, the House voted and passed legislation condemning antisemitism. c-span.org

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

This is what you get for $73,600/year at ⁦@Harvard⁩. https://t.co/uNG0EGBdWZ

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

December 3, 2023 Dear President Gay, Since my letter to you of November 4th to which you did not reply or even acknowledge, I have received substantial feedback and input from senior members of the Harvard faculty about a number of the issues I raised in my letter concerning free speech, antisemitism, and the impact of the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (OEDIB) at Harvard. I thought to share this feedback with you now as it may inform your testimony and potential questions you may receive from the Congress on Tuesday. Free Speech at Harvard In several of your communications since October 7th, you have emphasized Harvard’s commitment to free speech as the reason why the university has continued to permit eliminationist and threatening language on campus – i.e., calls for Intifada (suicide bombings, knifings, etc. of Israeli civilians) and the elimination of the state of Israel “From the River to the Sea.” You explained your tolerance for these protests on October 13th: “[O]ur university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.” In my letter to you, however, I noted that In The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Free Speech Rankings, Harvard has consistently finished in the bottom quartile in each of the past four years. I note that Harvard’s ranking has deteriorated each year, receiving its lowest free speech ranking ever for the 2023 academic year, last out of 254 universities with a rating of 0.00, the only university with an “abysmal” speech climate. After sending my letter, I reached out to the faculty to reconcile your free speech absolutist commitment with Harvard having the lowest free speech ranking of any university. The faculty had a lot to say on this issue, as well as on antisemitism and the OEDIB. Notably, they were willing to share their views so long as I committed to keep their identities confidential. I have quoted their remarks below: On Free Speech “Years ago, Harvard stopped being a place where all perspectives were welcome.” “Harvard is a place where loud, hate-filled protests appear to be encouraged, but where faculty and students can’t share points of view that are inconsistent with the accepted narrative on campus.” “Harvard became a place where if you toed the party line, there was applause. If you disagree, you are drowned out. The gatekeepers of speech continue to further narrow what they deem acceptable speech.” “The primary problem with speech at Harvard is that if you say the wrong thing, you will be cancelled, which leads to self-censorship. The result is what you actually think is not what you say.” “Saying anything that doesn’t highlight the importance of slavery and colonialism as animating forces of history is not acceptable speech. Lived experience and ideology become the dominant forces of conversation. All of the courses follow the same playbook ideology. Ideology poses as coursework.” On Antisemitism, Support for Hamas, and the Protests Against Israel When I asked members of the faculty about the causes behind the Israeli/Gaza protests and the tolerance for antisemitism on campus, they explained: “Whiteness at Harvard is deemed fundamentally oppressive. Indigenous peoples are presented as in need of justice and reparations. Jews are presented as white people. It is therefore ok to hate Israel and Jews as they are deemed to be oppressors.” I asked: “Why are the protests only about Israel versus other conflicts in the Middle East and around the globe where Palestinians and other civilians were killed?” “Israel is the rare case where we have a hot conflict between people that are deemed ‘white’ versus people of color.” The Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (ODEIB) “The primary animating force of the ODEIB is racism-colonialism and the denial of indigenous rights. The ODEIB is a home for people who are perceived to have been victimized.” “The ODEIB was meant to include Asians, but it does not. It is focused on communities that experienced colonialism.” “Recency matters. India is not included because they got autonomy 70 years ago.” “The ODEIB is at the service of black students, to a lesser extent brown students, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ students.” “It’s about whiteness versus people of color.” “The DEI framework prioritizes people on the oppressed side of the narrative.” Hiring Practices at Harvard One topic which emerged when I spoke to the faculty was the issue of hiring at Harvard, an issue about which the faculty clearly has a lot of consternation. When I asked why Harvard’s faculty has shifted sharply leftward in recent years, they explained: “Each department decides whom they want, and the university can accept or reject the candidate. Left-leaning faculty appoint other left-wing faculty because they get to decide whom to hire and promote. It’s a bit like the Twitter algorithm which continues to feed you the points of view you want to hear. Eventually, each department reaches the tipping point.” One senior member of the faculty shared that it is made abundantly clear that they cannot hire new faculty members unless they meet ODEIB requirements. That is, the candidate has to be a woman, person of color, or have LGBTQ+ status. Straight white males are “off the table.” Asians and those of South Asian (i.e., India) heritage are similarly disadvantaged in the process as they are deemed successful, overachieving minorities. A number of the faculty bemoaned that in many cases they cannot hire the substantially more qualified person if he is a white or Asian straight male as the proposed candidate “has to be a woman or BIPOC person.” I was told that behind closed doors, it is common to hear: “I clearly don’t think this is the strongest candidate, but we can see where the train is headed. I therefore have no choice but to vote for the [lesser-qualified candidate.]” It is made clear to the faculty that Harvard’s discriminatory approach to hiring should never be acknowledged or written about in an email. One professor said that he has been continually amazed that no one has brought a lawsuit as these practices are clearly illegal. One faculty member explained that it is not just the administration that has been putting forth these requirements, but that external organizations like The Chronicle of Higher Education (TCHE) do “investigative reporting” where they do racial and gender audits of university departments. TCHE publicly scolds university departments that don’t meet their diversity requirements further reinforcing Harvard’s requirement for ODEIB-preferred candidates. On all of the above issues, I know you will not rely on my survey of the faculty. I therefore encourage you to commission a highly credible, third-party firm to do an anonymous survey of the Harvard faculty. I am confident it will confirm and reinforce all that I have outlined above. Discrimination at Harvard Is Not Limited to Antisemitism The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel. It is abundantly clear that straight white males are discriminated against in recruitment and advancement at Harvard. That is also apparently true to a somewhat lesser extent for men who are Asians or of Indian origin. The ODEIB is an important culprit in this discrimination on campus as it sees the world in a framework of oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressor class includes white males, Asians, Jews and other people perceived to be successful and powerful. While Harvard claims that it is committed to free expression, in practice free expression appears to only happen “behind closed doors” or among faculty and students speaking anonymously. Conservative voices are squelched and often outright cancelled on campus. Tyler J. VanderWeele and Carole K. Hooven are two recent examples. In March of this year, Mr. VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology, a practicing Catholic, was effectively excommunicated from Harvard (saved only by his tenure) when it was discovered he had signed an amicus brief in 2015 which affirmed his view that the definition of marriage was between a man and a woman, and when he surfaced his pro-life views. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590113323000226 Earlier this year, Ms. Hooven, an evolutionary biologist was cancelled and eventually forced to resign because she stated that one’s sex was biological and binary on Fox and Friends. See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02467-5 I am saddened that the Harvard I love has lost its way. I am embarrassed for not having been aware and previously taken the time to investigate these issues until antisemitism exploded on campus. I should have paid more attention as it did not take a forensic analysis to surface and better understand these issues. Discrimination at Harvard is not just illegal, but it is extremely damaging to our nation’s competitiveness, which is critically important in a world with growing geopolitical conflict and turmoil. Harvard should be an institution for our best and brightest, taught by our best and brightest who are in search of Veritas and excellence. Russia, China, and our other competitor nations are not selecting their scientific and educational leaders using Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion metrics. President Gay, beginning with your testimony to Congress on Tuesday, you can begin to address the antisemitism that has exploded on campus during your presidency, the seeds for which began years before you became President. But as I hope you recognize, the issues at Harvard are much more expansive than antisemitism. Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine for other discriminatory practices at Harvard. As President you have both the opportunity and the responsibility for addressing these critically important issues. It won’t be easy for you as I have been told that your recent “pivot on antisemitism” is already making the radical left wing of the faculty highly skeptical of you. When 34 Harvard student organizations came out in support of Hamas’ barbaric terrorism, it was a wake up call for me. I hope that having to face the Congress on Tuesday will be a wake-up call for you. Sincerely, William A. Ackman, A.B. 1988, MBA 1992 Cc: Ms. Penny Pritzker, Chairman, and The Harvard Corporation Board

Moral controversies and academic public health: Notes on navigating and surviving academic freedom challenges Schools of public health often serve both as public health advocacy organizations and as academic units within a university. These two roles, however,… sciencedirect.com

Academic Freedom Is Social Justice: Sex, Gender, and Cancel Culture on Campus - Archives of Sexual Behavior I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During the promotion of my recent link.springer.com

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

I thought @elonmusk’s interview with @andrewrsorkin was one of the great interviews ever. Musk is a free speech absolutist which I respect. I think he is entirely correct that he and @X are treated unfairly and inconsistently by advertisers. @tiktok_us @instagram @facebook and others have enormous amounts of problematic content, antisemitic and otherwise, but the advertisers don’t boycott those platforms. Musk is targeted because the other media organizations view @X as a competitor and any time his name is in an article about controversies, it draws clicks. MSM is incentivized to attack him as it actually drives attention to their sites and therefore more revenues. It is these attack articles by other media organizations that put pressure on the @Disney’s of the world to stop advertising on X. If Bob Iger would carefully examine the facts, he would likely continue to advertise on X, but Disney caves to public pressure rather than do the right thing. Meanwhile Disney invests heavily on TikTok, likely alongside videos of kids teaching other teenagers to be anorexic and worse. I am sure Nelson Peltz can fix this when he joins the Disney board. X presents the opportunity for advertisers to access an incredible global audience that is not available elsewhere. And it is cheap compared to other alternatives because of current circumstances. On Musk and antisemitism: After examining the facts, it was clear to me that Musk did not have antisemitic intent when he responded with the ‘actual truth’ tweet, and further clarified thereafter. I thought he made what he meant extremely clear in the @andrewrsorkin interview, namely, that Jews are drawn to support ‘oppressed’ groups and causes through various non-profits due to our history of being an oppressed minority. Musk points out correctly that a number of these organizations and their members support Hamas. And he is correct in saying that Jews should rethink support for organizations that seek their elimination. Many Jews are doing that right now. To use a Muskism, Earth is fortunate that @X is owned by an individual that is largely insulated from financial and other influence. That said, perhaps some form of very carefully governed trust would be a better forever owner than any individual. @PershingSqFdn invested in the Twitter privatization in support of free speech. Whether we make a profit on our investment is not important to us as we never intend to sell our interest. I am more inclined to like and support companies that advertise on the platform because I appreciate their support for free speech. I have actually bought products I learned about from ads on @X. I can’t think of another example of my responding to direct advertising other than on X. Unfortunately, recent (and society’s long-term experience) with non-profit governance, see @OpenAI, certain private universities etc. should not give anyone confidence that a traditional non-profit would be a better owner of X than Musk. Perhaps some day the ownership of X should be distributed to each American, one share for each American during their lives and one for each person born, with a charter which permanently vests the free speech principles by which it operates. Until then, we all should be grateful that X is owned by Musk.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Rabbi Hirschy of @HarvardChabad sent a personal email to @Harvard President Gay on Nov. 28th inviting her to attend the Hamas atrocities documentary and to meet the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations. President Gay did not respond, but her chief of staff did: “Dear Hirschy,   Thank you for reaching out. As you may have seen, Claudine has been asked to testify in front of congress next week, so she will be out of town.   Best,   Katie” I note that the President’s congressional testimony is the day after the December 4th showing of the film, i.e.,Tuesday, December 5th at 10:15am. I reached out to Pres. Gay an hour or so after her chief of staff’s email, and strongly encouraged her to see the film because, among other reasons, I believe it would be very helpful to her and to Harvard to tell the Congress that she had seen it with her own eyes. What better way for her to show the seriousness with which she is taking the issues around October 7th and antisemitism? To make the logistics easier, I offered to fly her and her staff immediately after the viewing to D.C, with dinner on the plane so we could meet and talk. I wanted, among other things, to help prepare her with the likely questions she would receive. She turned me down. She was succinct in her email: “Thank you for the offer. While I appreciate the invitation, I will be out of town at that time.” I can’t imagine anything more important for the Harvard President to do now than to bear witness to the atrocities before testifying about the Hamas protests and antisemitism on campus. It may be true that she is ‘out of town’ as I am sure she is flying to DC that day, but it sure sends a bad message to the students, the faculty, and the alumni community about the seriousness with which she is taking the issue of antisemitism on campus. And it is an insult to the Israeli Ambassador who is flying to Boston just to present the documentary at Harvard. President Gay’s failed leadership in managing the impact of October 7th on campus in large part explains why antisemitism has exploded at Harvard. And she is also setting a bad example for other universities and institutions. We are sadly witnessing a grave failure of leadership at Harvard, one of the most important American institutions, at a critical time in its history. You could say that President Gay has only been on the job since July 1st, but then you might compare how deftly @dartmouth president Sian Beilock has handled the Israel-Palestinian issues on her campus. And she started two weeks before President Gay on June 12, 2023. I forgot to mention that President Gay never replied or even acknowledged my letter of November 4th https://pershingsquarefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Letter-to-Harvard-President.pdf Nearly a month has passed since I emailed it to her and the full board. Crickets…

Page not found - Pershing Square Foundation pershingsquarefoundation.org

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

.@HarvardChabad and the Israeli Ambassador to the UN are hosting a showing of the Hamas GoPro documentation of the atrocities of October 7th on the @Harvard campus, Monday, December 4th at 6pm. I encourage the Harvard President, the Harvard administration, the faculty, and students to attend. In life, there are moments where we are called upon to bear witness and deeply contemplate our history, our humanity, and the implications for our future. This is one of them. I will be there.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

For those students and protesters supporting Hamas, please see this promotional Hamas site for further details and membership opportunities: https://www.hamas.com/

Home | Hamas freedom fighters | Free Palestine ​From the river to the sea Palestine will be free | ​support the freedom of Palestine | Hamas Gaza | We need your support to continue Jihad hamas.com

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Please see my below letter to the President of Harvard University sent today: November 4, 2023 Dear President Gay, I am writing this letter to you regretfully. Never did I think I would have to write a letter to the president of my alma mater about the impact of her actions and inactions on the health and safety of its student body in order to help catalyze necessary change. For the past four weeks since the horrors of October 7th, I have been in dialogue with members of the corporation board, other alumni, as well as students and faculty sharing and comparing our concerns about the growing number of antisemitic incidents on campus, as we wait for you and the University to act. Four weeks after the barbaric terrorist acts of October 7th, I have lost confidence that you and the University will do what is required. Last Wednesday, I spent seven hours on campus meeting with Jewish, Israeli, and non-Jewish students and faculty at the Law School, at HBS and in a 90-minute town hall in Aldrich 112 with 230 Jewish college students (coincidentally, one for each hostage held by Hamas), research staff, and faculty from the University at large, organized by Harvard Chabad. Over the course of the day, it became clear that the situation at Harvard is dire and getting worse, much worse than I had realized. Jewish students are being bullied, physically intimidated, spat on, and in several widely-disseminated videos of one such incident, physically assaulted. Student Slack message boards are replete with antisemitic statements, memes, and images. On-campus protesters on the Widener Library steps and elsewhere shout “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada! From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free!” as they knowingly call for violent insurrection and use eliminationist language seeking the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. When you explained in your October 12th video address that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression,” you sent a clear message that the eliminationist and antisemitic statements of the protesters are permissible on campus. Putting aside the legal limitations on free speech that include restrictions on fighting words and true threats, “where speakers direct a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death,” if Harvard indeed had a strong track record of protecting free speech, many would have taken your support for free speech more seriously. Unfortunately, Harvard has not embraced a serious commitment to free speech, particularly so in recent years. In The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Annual College Free Speech Rankings, Harvard has consistently finished in the bottom quartile in each of the past four years, with its ranking deteriorating each year. On September 23rd, just two weeks prior to October 7th, FIRE announced that Harvard achieved its lowest free speech ranking ever for the 2023 academic year, ranking last out of 254 universities, with a rating of 0.00, the only university with an “abysmal” speech climate. See: https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-fires-college-free-speech-rankingsfor the results of the survey where FIRE cites multiple examples of incidents on the Harvard campus where students and faculty were denied their First Amendment rights. Therefore, when you cite Harvard’s “commitment to free expression,” in supporting the protesters, it rings false and hypocritical to the university at large and the Jewish community in particular. Many Jewish students have also recently become afraid to express their concerns. Many have also felt the need to remove their mezuzahs, yarmulkes, Stars of David, and other overt evidence of their religion and heritage on campus and in Cambridge to avoid being exposed to discrimination, bullying or worse. I am incredibly saddened to say that Harvard has also become a place where Jewish students are concerned about the threat of physical violence (which likely has a corresponding impact on their mental health) while among other insults, they are forced to sit next to classmates who openly and comfortably post, under their actual names, antisemitic statements and imagery on the student-wide Slack message system with no consequences for their actions. And it is not just the Jewish students and faculty that are up in arms. While on campus, I heard a constant refrain from non-Jewish members of the Harvard community: Why are Claudine and the administration doing nothing about this? Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging I have heard from many members of the Harvard community that Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (“OEDIB”) is an important contributing factor to the problem. I was surprised to learn from students and faculty that the OEDIB does not support Jewish, Asian and non-LGBTQIA White students. I had never read the OEDIB DEI statement until today when I wrote this letter. The DEI statement makes clear that Harvard’s conception of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging does not include Jews (at least those that are not in one of the other welcomed DEI groups). According to Harvard’s DEI statement: "We actively seek and welcome people of color, women, persons with disabilities, people who identify as LGBTQIA, and those who are at the intersections of these identities, from across the spectrum of disciplines and methods to join us." In other words, Jews and others who are not on the above list are not welcome to join. When antisemitism is widely prevalent on campus, and the DEI office – which “views diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as the pathway to achieving inclusive excellence and fostering a campus culture where everyone can thrive” – does not welcome Jewish students, we have a serious problem. It is abundantly clear that the campus culture that is being fostered at Harvard today is not one where everyone is included, feels a sense of belonging, welcomes diversity, or is a place where “everyone can thrive.” Equity on Campus The issue of equity, or the lack thereof, was another issue about which I heard constant complaints, i.e., the so-called “double standard.” One member of the faculty rhetorically asked: "What would Claudine do if 34 Harvard student organizations put out a statement on May 25th, 2020 that ‘George Floyd had it coming,’" noting that you have yet to condemn the student organization letter which holds Israel “solely responsible” for the heinous and barbaric acts of a terrorist organization. Other faculty, alumni and students asked other rhetorical questions including: "How would Harvard respond if a trans student attempted to walk by an anti-LGBTQIA demonstration on the HBS campus and was subject to the same abuse that the Jewish HBS student experienced at the Free Palestine demonstration on October 18th?" "How would you respond to a Harvard white supremacist protest where students shouted 'Tulsa! Tulsa! Tulsa! From the Atlantic to the Pacific, America should be free of Black people.'" Would Harvard even permit the above demonstrations to take place on campus? Despite the outburst of antisemitic activities and protests on campus, the first initiative that Harvard took to protect students was the establishment on October 24th of a task force to “support students experiencing doxxing, harassment, and online security issues following backlash against students allegedly affiliated with a statement that held Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for violence in the Israel-Hamas conflict.” The creation of this task force sent a very strong message that the University was not just ignoring the antisemitic incidents and threats to Jewish student safety on campus, but rather it was taking sides in the conflict by only supporting students who held Israel responsible for Hamas’ vile acts. In summary, your failure to condemn the barbaric acts of October 7th opened the door for a wave of anti-Israel attacks on campus that have led to a growing number of antisemitic protests and actions. Your subsequent two statements about October 7th to the University attempting to address the failings of your first letter were not taken seriously as many perceived those statements as being driven by pressure from the alumni community rather than reflecting a sincere and authentic understanding of the issues, and real empathy for Israel and the Jewish community. The failure of your communications to the public and the University coupled with the fact that the first tangible action by the University was to protect those who blamed Israel has created a belief among the Jewish and Israeli community at Harvard that they are not deemed welcome nor worthy of protection by the University. “Narrow Casting” Finally, your announcement on Friday October 27th about launching a task force to address antisemitism and your statement that “Antisemitism has no place at Harvard” was welcomed by members of the Jewish community in attendance, but students who participated in my Thursday town hall were either unaware of that announcement or alternatively questioned your commitment to address antisemitism. At my town hall, it was noted that your antisemitism speech was made only to Jewish students and parents at a Hillel Shabbat dinner, and a transcript of your remarks was only given to and published in the Forward, a niche Jewish publication with a tiny subscriber base. Two members of the Harvard faculty described this as “narrow casting” to an affinity group rather than you making a serious public commitment to address antisemitism. One research fellow stated, and many in the room agreed, that they would only believe that you were committed to stamp out antisemitism at Harvard if you stood up in front of the entire Harvard community and made that commitment, and you then implemented tangible and decisive actions consistent with that commitment. While the members of the Jewish community I met with at Harvard were happy to hear from an alum who was willing to listen, many students questioned why you have not sat down with students so that you can hear their concerns first-hand. Antisemitism at Harvard Prior to October 7th In the transcript of your speech published in the Forward, you said about antisemitism at Harvard: “For years, this university has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.” Your remarks imply that antisemitism has been a serious issue at Harvard that has gone unaddressed for years. I have been an active alum for 35 years having attended the college and HBS, taught numerous classes on campus each year, have participated in many fireside chats with large student audiences, mentor current students and recent graduates on a regular basis, and have been a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the business school for many years. During this period, I have neither experienced nor have I become aware of any antisemitic incidents at Harvard until beginning four weeks ago. When I asked my daughter today about her experience with antisemitism at Harvard (she graduated in 2020), she described antisemitism when she was at Harvard as “non-existent.” While I am sure it is possible if not likely that there have been some antisemitic incidents at Harvard over the last 35 years, the reality is that Harvard has been an extremely comfortable place to be Jewish and/or Israeli, up until the last four weeks. In truth, the outburst at antisemitism at Harvard is a recent one and is largely due to your actions and inactions and that of the administration and the University at large in failing to appropriately address blatant antisemitism on campus. How Can You Solve the Problem? What I find particularly upsetting about recent events on campus is that the problem is not so difficult to address. I do not believe that antisemitism is widespread among the student body and faculty at Harvard. Rather, I believe that a small minority of students, faculty, and staff are antisemitic and the administration’s inaction in confronting the problem head on have emboldened this antisemitic subset of the community to escalate their antisemitic actions because there have been no consequences for doing so. Actions speak much louder than words. Members of the Harvard community have heard some words, but experienced no actions of substance to address antisemitism on campus. I would therefore recommend the following steps which I believe will dramatically reduce if not eliminate antisemitic acts at Harvard immediately. First, the students involved in harassing and allegedly physically assaulting the HBS student on October 18th should be immediately suspended. I understand that the University is waiting for the outcome of a police department review of the situation to take action, but this makes no sense. It is clear from the multiple videos available of the incident that the conduct of the protesters involved does not meet the standards for student conduct outlined in the Harvard College Student Handbook, in particular Harvard’s anti-bullying policies outlined in the Report & Recommendation from the Anti-Bullying Working Group adopted on September 1, 2023. https://communitymisconductpolicies.harvard.edu/reports-and-draft-policies These standards alone are enough to invoke Disciplinary Probation until such time as the police department investigation is completed. Harvard student disciplinary actions should not be outsourced to the police department. Taking decisive action now will put all Harvard students, faculty and staff on notice that the University takes violations of Harvard’s code of conduct seriously, and will bring great comfort to the Jewish community at Harvard that appropriate actions to reduce threats to their safety are being implemented. Second, the protesters who have been chanting Intifada and other eliminationist statements should be subject to disciplinary action. There are multiple videos available of the various protests that would enable the University to identify the individuals involved who can then be referred to the Administrative Board where appropriate disciplinary action can be determined and acted upon. Third, the University should review the student Slack message boards to identify those students who have made antisemitic statements or shared antisemitic imagery. These students should also be referred to the Administration Board for appropriate disciplinary action. Fourth, the University should publicly reach out to students in an effort to obtain other examples of antisemitic acts that should also be carefully investigated, and for which appropriate disciplinary steps should be taken. Because Harvard students are notoriously focused on their job and career prospects post-graduation, disciplinary actions by the administration for failure to meet the University’s standards for appropriate conduct that become part of a student’s permanent record should serve as an effective deterrent to overt antisemitic acts on campus. No law firm, corporation or graduate program will hire or admit an antisemitic or racist student. I note that the recent letter to the deans of law schools around the country signed by many of the top law firms in the U.S. has, I am told, already begun to have an effect in reducing antisemitic acts at the Law School. Fifth, the University should form a task force to review the appropriateness of the activities of the OEDIB and whether its practice of excluding certain minority communities on campus, including Asian and Jewish students, is appropriate, which in fact may be contributing to discrimination against these groups on campus. Sixth, the results of the antisemitism task force should be made public as promptly as possible so that we can better understand the sources of antisemitism at Harvard. Harvard’s admissions practices should be reassessed to ascertain why the university is admitting racist students, and should consider revisions to the application process to enable the University to better screen the character of candidates for admission. Seventh, as Harvard president, you should make clear that Harvard supports free speech on campus, but that certain kinds of hate speech as well as fighting words and incitement to violence are not consistent with Harvard’s values or considered appropriate conduct for members of the Harvard community. In connection with your commitment to free speech, Harvard should form a task force to understand the constraints on free speech at Harvard that have led to it ranking last on FIRE’s annual college survey, so the issues that have led to Harvard’s last-place ranking can be addressed. Violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 On September 28, 2023, the Biden Administration issued a clarifying release stating that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits certain forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia and related discrimination as part of its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism released in May 2023 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/U.S.-National-Strategy-to-Counter-Antisemitism.pdf Title VI of the Civil Rights Act requires universities to provide all students, including students who are or are perceived to be Jewish, a school environment free from discrimination. The consequences for a university’s failure to meet the requirements of Title VI include the cancellation of federal funding. Harvard has failed in recent weeks to meet its Title VI obligations which threatens a major source of the University’s funding. When coupled with numerous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni that have publicly and privately shared these same concerns, important sources of Harvard’s revenues are at risk. While the University should not need a financial incentive to eliminate discrimination on campus, Harvard’s recent failure to create a safe and non-discriminatory environment for Jewish students threatens the University’s funding for research, scholarships, and more. Your Historic Opportunity You have been president of Harvard, one of the most important institutions in the world, for four months at one of the most challenging times in its history. As Harvard’s leader, your words and actions are followed closely. As a result, the steps you take to address antisemitism at Harvard will be recognized around the world, and can contribute greatly as an example to other institutions seeking to eliminate antisemitism in all of its forms. History has taught us that when the sparks and initial flames of antisemitism emerge, we must promptly put out the flames before a conflagration begins. It is therefore critically important you act with alacrity in addressing these issues. I encourage you to act boldly and promptly to eliminate this scourge at Harvard. I also call upon you to complete the commitment you made at inauguration when you stated that “Knowledge is our purpose. We serve that purpose best when we commit to open inquiry and freedom of expression as foundational values of the academic community.” Harvard must create an environment where free speech is encouraged and accepted. At the same time, the Harvard community at large must understand the difference between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that incites violence or seeks the elimination of any group. Such speech does not advance knowledge nor does it belong on campus regardless of whether or not it is protected by the First Amendment. Successfully addressing antisemitism at Harvard and creating an environment with true freedom of expression will become a critically important part of your legacy as the Harvard community works together to address these challenges at a difficult time in world history. I would be delighted to help in any way that I can to enable you to succeed in this mission and as Harvard’s president. Please let me know what more I can do to help. Sincerely, William A. Ackman A.B. 1988, MBA 1992 cc: The Harvard Corporation Board; Penny Pritzker, Chairman

404 Page not found. This page may have moved or is no longer available. thefire.org

Reports and Draft Policies Final Working Group and Steering Committee Reports: communitymisconductpolicies.harvard.edu

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

For context on what is to come, ask yourself how the U.S. would respond if 2,500 Mexican terrorists invaded Texas, brutally killed 1,200 of our citizens including women, children and babies — raping decapitating and burning them alive — and kidnapped 150 more, including infants.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

This is an incredible speech and a must listen. @NYCMayor is a great man. I have gotten to know him over the past year. He is the real deal. NYC is lucky to have him.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members. If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known. One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.

@ianbremmer - ian bremmer

large number of harvard student organizations blaming israel solely for hamas terrorist attacks killing 700 civilians. can’t imagine who would want to identify with such a group. harvard parents—talk to your educated kids about this.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

In 2012, @BarackObama set a red line with Syria on the use of chemical weapons. A year later, Assad gassed and killed 1,400 non-combatants. We did nothing. In 2014, Putin invaded Crimea. We did nothing. In September 2021, we abandoned Afghanistan in a sloppy withdrawal leading to the collapse of the country, handing our weapons and control to the Taliban. In Feb. 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine. Since that time, we have slow-walked our military support for @Ukraine, failing to give them the armaments they need to win the war. In our most recent budget debt crisis, we took @Ukraine out of the budget to keep the government temporarily open. If Russia wins the war, we are handing control of the world’s bread basket to Russia, and Putin’s power and aspirations will only grow. On September 18th, we agreed to release $6 billion to Iran, but ‘only for humanitarian purposes’ in exchange for five Americans. I remind us all that money is fungible. $6 billion for food and medical supplies frees up $6 billion Iran can use for terrorism and war. And I thought we had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists. Why did Hamas invade Israel last night? Because the United States has consistently not kept its word on its foreign policy commitments and we look very weak. Terrorism loves a leadership vacuum and we have created one. We are politically divided. Our president is physically and cognitively challenged. And we are wavering on the commitment we made to @Ukraine to give them the weapons they need to win the war. The world has become a much more dangerous place because we have not kept our word. This needs to stop now or, dare I say, hell is coming. The world is a much safer place when the US leads, and it quickly can become a living hell when we fail to do so. Now is the time for our government and Congress to show strength, solidarity and leadership and to follow through on our commitments to our allies and the world order. We owe nothing less to our children.

@BillAckman - Bill Ackman

Call me crazy, but I think @sbf is telling the truth.