Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman went on a racist tirade against Harvard’s first Black President, Claudine Gay, on Thursday, claiming she was a diversity hire. Ackman said she would likely not have gotten the role if “not for a fat finger on the scale.”
In his post on X, Ackman claimed to have inside knowledge of the search process, stating, “the @Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.”
Ackman went on to feign sympathy for Gay, saying that “it is also not good for those awarded the office of president who find themselves in a role that they would likely not have obtained were it not for a fat finger on the scale.”
If Ackman sounds familiar, it’s probably because of his ardent support of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. During Rittenhouse’s homicide trial, in which he was ultimately acquitted, Ackman called him a “patriot.” Sure, if having someone straw-purchase an AR-15 for you, carrying it across state lines and using it to kill two people is patriotism.
The wealthy hedge fund manager made his comments about Gay after a hearing where Republicans berated the university president for not quelling pro-Palestinian—not to be conflated with pro-Hamas—protests, which are entirely protected by the First Amendment, on campus.
Circumstances aside, the attacks on Gay are nothing new to any Black person who’s achieved even an ounce of success, especially when that success triggers insecurity in the privileged and mediocre. Conservatives have long argued that Black students don’t really belong at elite colleges and that Affirmative Action puts them in a position they’re not prepared for. However, the data says the opposite. Forbes analyzed the Department of Education database and found that Black students at Harvard and Princeton actually graduate at higher rates than the overall student body.
When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated to the Supreme Court, conservatives similarly claimed that she was unqualified. Fun fact: Justice Jackson has more trial court experience than any sitting Supreme Court Justice since 1923. She previously served as a federal judge at both the district and circuit court levels, and had more years of experience as a judge than four of the other Supreme Court justices combined. Put another way, the only folks who thought she was unqualified were those for whom her resume is a reminder of their inadequacy.
The same is true of Gay, who holds a Stanford degree in economics and a Ph.D. from Harvard. She also served as a professor at both institutions for more than 20 years. She’s a bona fide heavyweight of academia, not some random off the street whose only qualification is that she’s Black. That seems to unsettle some folks who couldn’t wait to use the occasion of a Congressional hearing at the intersection of freedom of expression, hate speech and an international humanitarian crisis to focus on why a Black woman got her job.
You don’t have to agree with how Gay has handled on-campus protests at Harvard to feel a bit weird about a man born into privilege and wealth calling her a diversity hire.