Harvard & UPenn Presidents Are Out: Is Harvard’s Corporation Board Next?
The Harvard alum and megadonor who led the charge to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay is heralding her departure…as a good first step.
“Does Campus Anti-Semitism Start At the Top?” we wondered in these very pages on December 7, 2023.
We weren’t the only ones.
After three Ivy League presidents failed to condemn on-campus calls for Jewish genocide as against university policy at a hearing on Capitol Hill in December, plenty of people — including plenty of moneyed alums from the three schools — were left wondering the same thing.
One such was Harvard super-alum, Bill Ackman.
UPenn’s president quickly lost her post after the disastrous hearing. Another — now-former Harvard President Claudine Gay — resigned yesterday, ostensibly due to 50 accusations of plagiarism (and counting) against her.
Some of the incensed alums are seeing these prominent departures as a good sign.
Others are seeing it as a good start.
Including 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,” Ackman began on Twitter yesterday. “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,” Ackman explained. “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.”
Ackman was absolutely right: Things had already gone that far — and farther — on campuses like Harvard’s.
“Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins,” observed Ilya Shapiro for the Free Press on November 27, 2023.
“Much of what we’ve witnessed on campuses over the past few weeks is not, in fact, speech, but conduct designed specifically to harass, intimidate, and terrorize Jews,” as Shapiro noted.
“Beating someone up, as has happened at Columbia and Tulane, is assault,” Shapiro wrote. “Crowding around someone in a threatening manner, like a group of Harvard students — including an editor of the Harvard Law Review — did to an Israeli student who filmed their protest, is commonly known as the crime of ‘menacing.’”
“A pattern of actions designed to frighten and harass someone, like forcing Jewish students into the Cooper Union library while pounding on the doors and windows, is stalking,” continued Shapiro relentlessly. “Defacing someone’s property by spray-painting swastikas and slogans, as happened at American University, is vandalism. So is tearing down posters — at least on private property and in most campus settings. And masking at a protest, also a hallmark of events sponsored by the Students for Justice in Palestine organization, is illegal in many states — a remnant of the battle against KKK intimidation.”
“A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty,” Bill Ackman continued on Twitter yesterday. “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,” revealed Ackman. “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.”
Bill Ackman was only getting started.
“In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president,” Ackman stated plainly.
“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,” criticized Ackman. “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,” continued Ackman relentlessly. “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,” he stormed.
“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,” complained Ackman.
“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,” he went on. “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,” Ackman advised, noting with regret that such a strategy isn’t viable according to Harvard’s bylaws.
Still, “The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats,” he wrote. “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.”
“Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president,” complained AP education writers Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit on January 3, 2023. “A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.”
Covering for those charges may down the entire Harvard Corporation board. And conservatives aren’t the only ones fanning the outrage.
(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)
