Billionaire Bill Ackman blasted out a 4,000-word essay on X at 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, saying DEI was the “root cause of antisemitism” at Harvard University following president Claudine Gay’s resignation.
Gay, the first Black president of the university, left the job on Tuesday amid controversy over on-campus antisemitism and plagiarism allegations. Ackman, a big-money donor to the school and an alumnus, had led calls for her ouster.
“Under DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], 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 wrote.
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“The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity,” he added, and “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).”
The hedge fund manager then called for members of the Harvard Corporation who fought to keep Gay in office to resign as well, arguing that the board “should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views.”
Less than an hour after Harvard’s student newspaper The Crimson broke the news of Gay’s resignation on Tuesday, Ackman ominously wrote on X, “Et tu Sally?” referring to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who received backlash from her testimony to Congress last month on antisemitic hate speech along with Gay and UPenn President Liz Magill. Magill resigned in early December.
Read it at New York Post
