Billionaire Bill Ackman argues his antisemitism crusade against Harvard is totally unrelated to his ‘unfortunate experience as a donor’

“To be extremely clear, my advocacy on behalf of antisemitism, free speech on campus, and my concerns with DEI at Harvard have absolutely nothing to do with my unfortunate experience as a donor to the university,” Ackman wrote in a post on X Tuesday night.

The billionaire founder of Pershing Square Capital Management was responding to a New York Times article that detailed his relationship with Harvard. It’s the latest in a series of lengthy posts to his almost 1 million followers about the school, in which he’s accused the institution of double standards over free speech, criticized its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and demanded the ousting of President Claudine Gay.

The university’s board said Tuesday that it unanimously backed Gay after weeks of escalating criticism, which intensified after her widely derided testimony in a congressional hearing last week about antisemitism at elite US universities. More than 700 faculty signed a petition objecting to external pressures on the university to force out Gay, the school’s first Black president. 

A Harvard spokesman declined to comment on Ackman or make Gay available for an interview. 

No Liquidity

Ackman, who attended Harvard as an undergraduate and also completed a degree from the business school, explained in his latest post that years ago he’d funded $25 million to recruit “the best behavioral economists in the world.” In 2017, he was told that superstar Stanford University economist Raj Chetty had been hired but Harvard needed money for the chair.

Ackman, whose fortune is now estimated at $2.4 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, said the timing was far from ideal. His fund had lost money, investors were redeeming and he…