Editorial

Bill Ackman Thinks $10,000 Is Good Enough To Paper Over His $25 Million Harvard Mistake

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Activist investor Bill Ackman, chief executive of Pershing Square walks on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Robert McGreevy Contributor
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Billionaire Democratic donor Bill Ackman cut a $10,000 check to frat bros at UNC after they defended the American flag during anti-Israel protests. If he thinks that’s enough to make the world forget he donated $25 million to Harvard to help fund their Marxist lunacy, he is sorely mistaken

Ackman pledged $10,000 to a GoFundMe set up to throw the fraternity a party Wednesday as a result of their defense of the flag.

But Ackman’s gift does not absolve him of his past sins. The Harvard graduate pledged over $25 million to the school in 2014. $17 would fund a research initiative for human behavior, the university said, Harvard Magazine reported. The remainder was to fund a new global health chair at the university as well as a school crew team, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Foundations for Human Behavior Initiative, which Ackman’s donation funded, is an offshoot of Harvard’s economics department. This is the same department whose Claudia Goldin just won a Nobel Prize in economics for her work on the gender pay gap. (RELATED: Media Outlets Label Major Dem Donor Who Pushed For Claudine Gay’s Ousting A ‘Far-Right’ Conservative)

“The solution isn’t a simple one, but part of it is reducing the value of these ‘greedy jobs,’ getting jobs in which individuals are very good substitutes for each other and can trade off,” Goldin told NPR in 2021. “And I know there are people who will tell me this is impossible. But in fact, it’s done in obstetrics. It’s done in anesthesiology. It’s done in pediatrics. It’s done in veterinary medicine. It’s done in various banking decisions. And if it can be done in all of that with all the amazing IT that we have, we could probably do it elsewhere as well.”

So while Ackman rails against DEI, his money goes to work funding studies on gender equity and eliminating valuable jobs.

Ackman went on a crusade against Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay in 2023. He implored the university to fire her and the school’s whole board, all while his money flowed into the declining institution.

The issues Ackman highlighted are not new problems. The cultural Marxism that’s infected college campuses has run rampant since at least 2017 (and frankly, long before that) when students at Evergreen State College in Washington demanded that white professors not come to campus and allegedly threatened them with baseball bats. Ackman and his cohort hardly made the same fuss about the anti-white racism or the growing tide of Marxism then, despite the fact that many have been ringing alarm bells for years.

Ackman, while perhaps the most glaring example, is not the only billionaire who’s held his eyes wide shut for too long. Billionaires Les Wexner, Ken Griffin, Robert Kraft and others have all publicly pulled funding from various ivy league schools in recent months over the schools’ responses to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and ongoing pro-Palestine protests on campuses. But the fat wallets are way late to the game. Republicans have long noted the toxic effect that ivy league schools’ new direction has had on our culture. I supposed it’s better late than never, but it’s nonetheless alarming that these powerful people only seem to care about institutions that destroy our country when it specifically affects their cultural group.

Ackman is a corporate raider. He uses his massively powerful position as the head of Pershing Square, a hedge fund with nearly $16 billion in working capital, and his stature as a popular political commentator, to drive up and down the stock prices of American companies.

Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson once called him an “amoral greedhead” for his cynical takedown of Hilton hotel chains. Ackman warned the world the end may be near for the chain and then, once the stock price plummeted, he bought a ton more of the stock which he had just warned Americans would go to zero, Carlson said. That strategy netted him over $2 billion in profit during the pandemic.

“But that’s not even the worst part,” Carlson said in 2020. “After all this, Ackman is still considered a sage by his peers and fawned over relentlessly by toadies in the business press. What kind of society thinks that Bill Ackman is a role model? We should ask ourselves that.”

We should ask ourselves that indeed. Why are we heralding Ackman as a hero for tossing the frat boys some dough? He’s a hypocrite and a grifter. Does he make some good points sometimes? Sure. Broken clock’s right twice a day. But often he speaks confidently on matters he’s later blatantly wrong about and takes no accountability. He’s offered no apology for funding Harvard but has continued to criticize his alma mater anyway.

We should stop taking Ackman seriously. He’s a blowhard whose frequent musings serve more to bolster his own portfolio than they do to affect substantive change. Find a better idol.