Raging Bill: Ackman's fight against Harvard

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bill-ackman-war-harvard-mit-dei-claudine-gay.html

by chirau • 2 years ago

13 3 2 years ago

nebula8804• 2 years ago

He was among the loudest voices pushing to oust Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, after concerns about her handling of campus divisions around the Israel-Hamas war snowballed into questions about plagiarism in her academic work. By January, Ackman’s second wife, the glamorous and slightly uncategorizable scientist-architect Neri Oxman, was being accused of plagiarism, too, and Ackman was promising to not only sue Business Insider, which published the allegations, but to use artificial intelligence to audit the work of other college professors as an act of spousal vengeance.

I am reminded how much of a clown show that whole event was but I didn't know about this part with AI.

I first heard about Ackman when he was an "activist investor" against ADP.

Ackman said management complacency had turned ADP into an inefficient corporate slugabed pushing outmoded products that even a top sales force could not sell. ADP countered that Ackman brought no new ideas to the table, risked disrupting the company's steady path to growth and behaved like a "spoiled brat."

There may be some truth to the statement. ADP serves a huge load of customers and some complain of their products. But I never forgot how this affected friends who worked at the company: real people just trying to do their best at work and for their families. It really cemented an idea that is brought up in the Bernie Sanders wing of the the left: Billionaires are a policy failure.

Seriously F this guy.

97-109-107• 2 years ago

Quoting [Bill Ackman’s War on Harvard, MIT, DEI, and Everyone Else](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bill-ackman-war-harv...)

Ackman believes that our lives are often fated from birth. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told me. “Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises.” We’d been talking for nearly an hour and a half when Ackman asked me what my name was, hoping to offer a diagnosis. After he seemed momentarily stumped by my surname, I offered him my first name, which he misheard as Reed. “Read … write,” he said, before turning back to himself. “So, my name is Ackman — it’s like Activist Man.”

cafard• 2 years ago

There is or was a midwestern brewer called Wiedeman or maybe Wiedemann. But no doubt they were more discriminating drinkers at Harvard than we were out in the sticks.

Raging Bill: Ackman's fight against Harvard

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