In the days following the storm of congressional hearings, the flames of criticism began to grind the robes of Harvard's top executives. Among those calling for the firing of President Claudine Gay were American lawmakers, senior figures in the economy and heads of Jewish communities across the country. Gay's apology and attempt to correct her controversial answers in Congress also failed to lower the flames. Harvard's board of directors had to convene urgently to decide on its future.
"Our extensive discussions reinforce our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and address important issues we face," the board said in explaining their decision to keep Gay, who in her brief tenure brought a barrage of criticism, ridicule and condemnation to the American University for its handling of campus events following the October 7 terrorist attacks.
"I was told by two journalists that one of the considerations that made it difficult for the board to fire Gay was their fear that it would look like they had surrendered to me," businessman Bill Ackman wrote on the X account at the time. "The reporters quoted one of the board members as saying, 'If Bill had stopped tweeting, we would have made the right decision,'" he added. Less than a month later, Gay resigned, but Ackman opened another front and launched a campaign that spread by storm to other elite universities in the United States.
., Photo: AFP
Until the war, Ekman's name (57) was known mainly in the business-economic world. He is seen as an investment genius thanks to his talent and sharp business acumen, which led him to head the American hedge fund Pershing Square, which currently holds billions of dollars in investment portfolios and generates huge profits for its clients around the world. For many years before he publicly spoke out against Harvard, he was a household member in the halls of Boston's prestigious campus, graduating magna laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree and an MBA.
His first hedge fund, Gotham Partners, invested in public companies and quickly managed $500 million in assets. Using his wealth, Ackman founded Pershing Square with partners in 2004, which reportedly generated more than $10 billion for its clients within a decade. Due to his overwhelming financial success, Ackman was not afraid to get into public confrontations with leading companies, such as Herbalife, which he called a "pyramid scheme." His claims led to the company's stock being severely damaged, which also resulted in losses and expenses amounting to tens of millions of dollars for public relations.
With an estimated fortune of about $3.5 billion, Ackman promised to join the tradition of other world-rich people and donate at least 50% of his fortune to charity for the rest of his life. In 2006, he and his wife founded the Pershing Square Foundation, which aims to "support exceptional leaders and innovative organizations tackling important social issues."
Personal struggle
Immediately after October 7, some 30 pro-Palestinian Harvard student cells issued a statement blaming Israel for the Hamas terrorist campaign. The university president did not unequivocally condemn the massacres.
There was a strong feeling on campus, especially among Jewish students, that an anti-Semitic wave was sweeping the university, and many expressed fear for their safety. In the midst of this atmosphere, one tweet by Ackman managed to create a chain reaction that shook the institution where he studied. "I was asked by CEOs if Harvard would publish the names of members of the organizations behind the statement to make sure none of us accidentally hired any of them."
Pro-Palestinian demonstration at the University of Michigan | Reuters
Ackman wanted to make sure that his companies did not employ students who supported Hamas' actions, and he attracted a series of other CEOs who joined the call. For days, he seemed to abandon his business activities in favor of long tweets, letters, petitions and repeated calls to Harvard and other institutions to take action against hate speech in their fields. He also frequently tweeted videos of students tearing up abductee posters or making antisemitic remarks.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last month, Ackman said: "When I started, it was because of anti-Semitism. The bigger issue was this ideology on campus that led to the erasure of free speech." Ackman argued at the time that Harvard had a "selective" policy on freedom of expression, and that any discourse calling for violence should be thoroughly examined.
After seeing that Harvard was struggling to deal with anti-Semitism on campus, and talking to many Jews who feared for their safety, he turned directly to President Gay. In early November, he sent his first letter to Gay, in what appeared to be the beginning of a determined personal struggle to halt the decline of the university he attended and had contributed to for years.
Presidency of Harvard and Pennsylvania universities at the hearing, photo: Reuters
"When you said that Harvard 'embraces a commitment to free speech,' you sent a clear message that calls for annihilation and anti-Semitism by protesters are permissible on campus," Ackman wrote. "I am sad to say that Harvard has also become a place where Jewish students are concerned about the threat of physical violence against them, and are forced to sit alongside other students in the class who openly and conveniently post, under their real names, antisemitic statements and images." His letter received no response from Harvard officials, but came at a time when many donors of the institution decided to withdraw their donations, such as the Ofer family, Yossi Sagol (one of the owners of Keter Plastic) and the Wexner Foundation, which announced that it would stop cooperating with the Kennedy School of Government.
Ackman later invited Gay to a screening of the October 7 horror film at Harvard, as part of a joint initiative with Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Gay declined the offer, explaining that she had to attend a congressional hearing in Washington the next day. When Ekman offered to fly Gay specifically to Washington so that she could watch the film and get to Washington on time, he was met with another refusal.
The hearing shook America: The three presidents of the country's most prestigious academic institutions avoided saying emphatically that calling for the murder of Jews violated their institutions' code of conduct. Ackman called on Gay, the president of the University of Pennsylvania and the president of MIT to resign in disgrace.
Who is the silencer here
Despite criticism of her congressional appearance, Gay managed to steady herself, but a new front soon opened up against her. She was accused of plagiarism in academic articles from her past and in her doctoral thesis.
It is alleged that she used materials from other sources without giving credit to the source from which they were taken.
These are acts that are considered a serious violation of the rules of academic integrity. Harvard and Gay quickly issued a clarification that she would revise her work, but public pressure against her renewed, and the Senate Education Committee said it would look into the university's handling of the affair. Gay resigned in early January and in a letter to the Harvard community, she said, "It was alarming that my commitment to confronting hatred was questioned, as well as my commitment to maintaining scientific rigor and accuracy — two fundamental values that are fundamental to who I am. It was also scary for me to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled and motivated by racial animosity."
, Photo: Reuters
Gay's supporters blamed the tycoon. "Bill Ackman is a detrimental influence on American education. He thinks his money equals wisdom, and even if it's not like that, he thinks it gives him the right to be bullied. It's time to stand up to people like him, he's despicable," tweeted Greg Gonçalves, a professor at Yale University. Ackman didn't have to, and replied, "What did I say about Harvard about money? Gay resigned because she lost the confidence of the university because of her actions and inactions and leadership failures."
"It doesn't make sense to say she resigned because she lost the confidence of the university," another social media user commented. "She resigned because you used your money to lead a successful campaign that undermined her leadership. Responsibility is valid for both sides." Ekman rejected such claims: "How did I use my money exactly? I never threatened to withhold donations. Gay's resignation has nothing to do with money — it's about her leadership failure and questions about her academic past."
Under the auspices of tenure
After Gay's resignation, Ackman seemed to shift gears and the Twitter struggles calmed down, but it soon became clear that this was a temporary truce.
This time, the arrows were directed against Ekman's wife, Neri Oxman, an American-Israeli researcher who studied at MIT and is considered a prominent and respected figure in the world of architecture. Two days after Gay's resignation, Business Insider published an investigation alleging that Oxman allegedly copied parts of her doctoral dissertation in 2010, without citing the source.
Unlike Gay and Harvard, who quickly disavowed the accusations, Oxman chose to apologize, explaining that it was a mistake, and noted that she did not add quotation marks when citing another source within her work, even though the source itself was duly listed in the work's bibliography. "I am sorry and apologetic for these errors," she wrote, pledging to make the necessary corrections.
Li-Yam, PhD student in biology at MIT, photo: Courtesy of the subject
"For as long as I can remember, in the business and media world, the family remains off-limits unless they are directly involved in business. You can attack the boss as much as you want, but not his wife or his children," Ekman wrote after the investigation was published. "The same goes for deals – you're not chasing someone's family to reach out to a businessman. It's a sacred code that I've never seen violated."
The investigation, whose credibility was questioned by some, led to a counterattack that no one in academia had predicted. In recent days, Ekman launched his second campaign: a huge project based on artificial intelligence that will monitor, process and analyze academic work of MIT academic staff in order to check which of them committed plagiarism. As if that were not enough, he intends to perfect the project and expand it to other universities.
"Last night no one slept well at MIT after I announced that we were launching the plagiarism review project. I'm sure you could hear collective panting on campus. No written work in academia can survive the power of artificial intelligence in seeking quotation marks or not giving proper credit. Why should we only stop at MIT?" tweeted Ekman.
It can be assumed that apart from the personal interest against the university where his wife studied, there is also closure here for the shrewd businessman. MIT President Sally Kornbluth remains the only one who has not yet resigned from her position among the three presidents who participated in the congressional hearing. Moving the attack from Harvard to MIT could suggest that Ackman wants to "finish the job" and push for Kornbluth's firing as well.
Students understand
"There's a big difference between Gay's case and Neri's, partly because they both come from completely different disciplines," Li-Yam Styat, a doctoral student in biology and computers at MIT, told Israel Weekly. "Neri comes from engineering, where the articles talk about the results you produce. Gay, on the other hand, comes from the humanities, where the articles talk more about ideas. In Neri's case, there is no stealing an idea. Gay, on the other hand, actually wrote an op-ed about diversity and took someone else's idea and noted it as her own.
"On top of that, their academic status is simply not comparable. Neri is not the head of a university and she is no longer a researcher in academia. Gay is not only a professor but the president of one of the most important academic institutions. And if she copies things, the problem is not only in the quality of her work, but also in the message that is conveyed to the students."
And Neri's case doesn't send a message?
"Gay had plenty of time and lawyers threatening a silencing suit against the New York Post. When it came to Henry, they gave her just hours before publication. Why, because she is Israeli? Because she's the wife of a man who visits Harvard? Contrary to the response of Gay and Harvard, who said that there never was and never was before they even looked into the claims, Neri sat down and checked, said 'I was wrong' and pledged to correct it. She didn't lie and didn't continue with her lie. Rather, it set an example for all of us of how to respond to such a case. And I suspect that more lies will soon be discovered at MIT, too. Why? Because the reality we see today is the product of a very deep loss of values."
According to Styat, "We see a pattern of faculty members using the university's 'credibility' – along with a sense of immunity they have developed because of the tenure they have – to say what they want regardless of their field of expertise and without any basis. There is currently no mechanism in academia that deals with this. Ekman's initiative is trying to provide a solution and put the issue on the agenda."
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us