Tag: Ackman, William A

Famously Obstinate, Bill Ackman Is Now Real-Life Famous. What Next?

In June 2017 — as he was reeling from the end of his marriage of more than two decades and some of the most disastrous investments of his career — Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund financier, joined Twitter. In his few posts that year and the next, Mr. Ackman, now 57, shared a picture of […]

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The Fight Over Academic Freedom

Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern American university. And lately, it seems to be coming under fire from all directions. For many scholars, the biggest danger is at public universities in Republican-controlled states like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded […]

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Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg Fail to Land Candidates on Harvard’s Board of Overseers

It’s hard to get into Harvard, even if you’ve done it before. Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, and Bill Ackman, head of the Pershing Square hedge fund, discovered as much, in their failed push to get dissident candidates onto the Harvard Board of Overseers, one of the university’s two governing bodies. The candidates — a […]

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We Need a New Word for ‘Plagiarism’

Leave it to a linguist to say this, but we need another word. In this case, we need a word for the relatively minor, “duplicative language” version of plagiarism. To present someone else’s ideas as one’s own is unquestionably wrong, in academia and elsewhere. However, to cite boilerplate statements — the assumptions basic to a […]

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Critics Protest Harvard’s Choice to Lead Antisemitism Task Force

A Harvard task force on antisemitism has gotten off to a rocky start, with complaints that the professor chosen to help lead the panel had signed a letter that was critical of Israel, describing it as “under a regime of apartheid.” Harvard’s new interim president, Alan Garber, announced the formation of two “presidential task forces” […]

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Dean Phillips Drops DEI From Campaign Website After Bill Ackman Donation

The campaign website for Representative Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Democrat mounting a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, has a policy platform that signals liberal bona fides tempered by a Midwestern businessman’s practicality. It includes headers like “Climate Action,” “Women’s Health and Economic Security” and “Immigration Reform.” Sometime on Tuesday, one header was changed. Gone […]

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The Next Battle in Higher Ed May Strike at Its Soul: Scholarship

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford, resigned in August after an investigation found serious flaws in studies he had supervised going back decades. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, resigned as the new year dawned, under mounting accusations of plagiarism going back to her graduate student days. Then Neri Oxman, a former star professor at M.I.T., was […]

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How Harvard’s Board Broke Up With Claudine Gay

​Claudine Gay was in Rome on a family vacation on Dec. 27 when Penny Pritzker, the leader of Harvard University’s governing board, called to ask: Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president? Ms. Pritzker sounded weary, and it was posed as an open question, two people with knowledge […]

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Wife of Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Is Accused of Plagiarism

Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle over the leadership and direction of elite universities. For weeks, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president amid accusations of plagiarizing other scholars and of not taking a strong […]

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Claudine Gay and the Fight Over D.E.I. in the C-suite

And on X, Elon Musk argued that the basis of D.E.I. was “literally the definition of racism.” Others are pushing back. The billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban challenged Musk in a series of posts on X, defending the three principles of D.E.I. as good for business: On diversity, “Good businesses look where others don’t, to find […]

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For Claudine Gay, Harvard’s First Black President, Race Was an Unavoidable Issue

In her late September inauguration, Claudine Gay looked out at a packed audience and spoke of her pride in making history as the first Black president of Harvard in its 387 years. “I stand before you on this stage, in this distinguished company and magnificent theater,” she intoned before continuing, “with the weight and honor […]

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Bill Ackman’s Campaign Against Harvard Followed Years of Resentment

In the two-month battle over the fate of Harvard’s president, the billionaire investor William A. Ackman has cast himself as a protector of Jewish students and the standard-bearer for people who believe colleges have fostered a hostile atmosphere for critics of liberal orthodoxy. But behind his anger are personal grievances that predate the uproar that […]

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Harvard President Apologizes for Congressional Testimony on Antisemitism

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, apologized to the university community for her testimony before Congress, where she gave evasive responses to questions about whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate campus policies. “I am sorry,” Dr. Gay said in an interview that the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, published on Friday. “Words matter.” “When […]

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Harvard Students Doxxed After Writing Anti-Israel Letter

On a campus already bitterly divided, the statement poured acid all over Harvard Yard. A coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter on the night of the Hamas attack, saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence that ended up leaving more than 1,400 dead, most of them civilians. The […]

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Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life

Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind, and it probably offers far more upside than down. Incessant, glad-handed striving has already made Ramaswamy a wealthy man. According to a report in Politico […]

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