This whole Harvard President kerfuffle is populated with people for whom sympathy is in short supply. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, now-former Harvard President Claudine Gay, the Business Insider writers who gave Ackman 90 minutes notice that they were publishing an article about his wife and her plagiarism, and the wife Neri Oxman. Despite the fact that I suspect that Neri Oxman is as snooty and tedious as her husband, Ackman, the smidgen of sympathy goes to Miss Oxman.

I wrote about Ackman and his slippery ethics during the initial Covid scare. “Slippery” is being kind. The “greedhead” made a fortune on fear and was a Biden supporter. He also thought Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was fruit loop city until he started studying how he could make money on the childhood vaccination issue. Here is his “red pill” moment from “X”. Well, maybe more “green pill”:

Bill Ackman’s red pill moment from last September is worth the watch. pic.twitter.com/T8ZjMmtk3p

— TeasLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) January 8, 2024

It’s all about the green, making money. Not that there is anything wrong with making money. Great music halls, libraries, universities and great parks have been funded by those who make money. Bless them. Remember the Golden Rule from the Wizard of Id:

And Bill Ackman didn’t like Claudine Gray’s work product and CV from the beginning. From The Nation:

Most visible of all has been William Ackman. The hedge-fund executive campaigned tirelessly against all three of the university presidents who testified before Congress on December 5, but none more so than Gay. A graduate of both Harvard College and the Harvard Business School who has donated more than $25 million to the university, Ackman repeatedly blasted the Corporation for considering for president only candidates like Gay who met the university’s diversity and equity criteria; demanded that the university release the names of the members of student groups who signed a letter holding Israel solely responsible for the Hamas attack so that they could be denied jobs on Wall Street; and posted a three-and-a-half-minute edited clip of the exchange between Representative Elise Stefanik and the university presidents that garnered more than 100 million views, helping fuel the outrage against them.

The brazenness of these efforts has gotten much comment. But there’s another aspect of donor influence that has escaped notice, and that’s the immunity from scrutiny their philanthropy helps secure.

Author Michael Massing forgot the Golden Rule. For Bill Ackman, the plagiarism wasn’t as egregious at the devotion to DEI and thin resume for Claudine Gay. The Jewish Ackman woke up to the evils of DEI on October 8 after the attack on Israel. He sure was asleep for a long time. From the New York Post:

Hours after celebrating Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation, Ackman shared to X at 2:03 a.m. Wednesday that it wasn’t just the nearly 50 allegations of plagiarism against the embattled administrator that concerned him, but concerns that “DEI is racist.”

“The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity,” wrote Ackman, the 57-year-old founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management.

“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),” Ackman added in the lengthy post.
He continued: “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.”

Ackman bashed this ideology as one in which “there is no such thing as being ‘non racist.’”

Bill Ackman wrote an essay on X in the early hours of Wednesday about why diversity, equity and inclusion “is racist.” Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
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…

Bless his heart. Is he slow? Until Israel got attacked Ackman didn’t notice DEI? Didn’t he notice the BDS Movement? Boycott, Divest and Sanctions against Israel movement. Boy sure is slow. Some of us got the drift a long time ago. Now, the sharks in the media are after Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman for … plagiarism.

My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.

Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 5, 2024

So, I was kind, sorta, somewhat feeling sorry for Neri Oxman getting caught up in this when she just wants to do her “Material Ecology” art stuff. Then, I came across the wedding/pregnancy announcement for the Ackman/Oxman’s in the New York Times from four years ago:

Mr. Ackman eventually reached out that summer, and they began a conversation that led to a first date in September 2017, at a restaurant in Cambridge, Mass.

“She was everything they had described her to be,” Mr. Ackman said. “I knew in about five seconds that she was perfect for me.”

They began dating immediately, and it wasn’t long before she was feeling much the same about him.

“Bill inspires me to assume a bigger identity, to grow while being grounded, but not without asking me the hard questions,” said Ms. Oxman, who cited their many things in common.

“We both appreciate the expansiveness of life, love and living associated with cultivating, building, sharing and inspiring a creative life,” she said, “one that transcends the often-prescribed categories of family and work and unites them into synergy.

“We both believe in the notion that what we do is not a job or a career, it is a calling. We both believe that gratitude is a skill. We believe in human expression. We work hard. We love to laugh.”

I like what Ackman has done/is doing, but I distrust his motives or where this will end. Bon Chance to Gay, Ackman and Oxman.

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