Sensemaker Daily
The hedge fund manager who toppled Harvard’s first black leader could be turning his attention to the US presidential race.
The billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has become the public face of a backlash against “woke” politics in America.
So what? The murder of George Floyd in 2020 accelerated a racial reckoning in the US. Ackman’s campaigning is the latest sign of a growing pushback.
After Floyd’s murder by a white police officer, politicians said they would transform policing while companies pledged billions to fight racial injustice. Big businesses hired heads of diversity.
But since then:
- Many high-profile corporate heads of diversity have quit, frustrated at the lack of change.
- The Supreme Court ruled last summer that affirmative action — the race-based admissions programmes used by elite universities including Harvard — is unlawful.
- This ruling has emboldened critics of diversity initiatives in business.
Ackman is an activist investor — the kind who takes a stake in a company in an effort to force change — and the subject of this week’s Slow Newscast. He’s also a Harvard alumnus and one of the university’s biggest donors, giving them over $50 million.
After the Hamas attacks on 7 October – when a coalition of Harvard student groups published a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for unfolding violence – he highlighted what he saw as rabid antisemitism on campus.
When Harvard’s president Claudine Gay failed to take his calls, and then bungled testimony to a Congressional committee, he led a successful push to oust her.
Stepping down, Gay wrote that the campaign against her was a “skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society”.
Excluding DEI. Ackman has now taken aim at DEI, short for “diversity, equity, inclusion”, describing it as “reverse racism”. He’s backed Dean Phillips, a long-shot challenger to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. After public nudging from Ackman, Phillips scrubbed a reference to DEI from his campaign website.
For Brian Klaas, associate professor in global politics at UCL, Ackman’s intervention offers a “window into the ways in which extremely rich people have the ability to influence politics disproportionately to other democracies”.
But Ackman has also made himself and his family subject to greater scrutiny.
- Allegations of plagiarism – which helped topple Claudine Gay as Harvard’s president – have also been made against his wife Neri Oxman (who has apologised for some minor slips).
- Members of Congress have asked for his firm Pershing Square’s diversity data. (For the first 17 years of its existence, the firm had no women on its investment team.)
- Ackman told New York Magazine that his daughter, who followed him to Harvard and graduated in 2020, became an anti-capitalist, “practically a Marxist”, while there, suggesting an element of personal animus.
Interviews with Harvard alumni suggest that elements of student zeal to transform society may have hardened into orthodoxy. Some faculty say that DEI on campus has become a stifling force. Stephen Pinker, the cognitive scientist and Harvard professor, said that the “DEI bureaucracy… promotes absolute uniformity”. Zoe Bedell, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2016, said that in her time, free exchange of ideas had begun to dry up. “Any one side claims to be an advocate for free speech, as long as it’s their speech,” Bedell said.
About Harvard, at least, Ackman may have a point. His next scalp after Claudine Gay? Ackman’s posts on X — “We need to end this nightmare now” — suggests Biden is his target.
One last thought. Ackman believes that people become their names, according to a profile of him in which he mused that his surname fated him to be an “Activist Man”. The question is, is he ready to take the flak, man?
