Claudine Gay’s resignation won’t fix Harvard’s reputation: Bill Ackman

Billionaire Bill Ackman said Saturday that even if embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigns over her plagiarism and antisemitism controversies, the Ivy League school’s damaged reputation will not be restored.

Ackman, an alumnus, said that Harvard can only restore its reputation as one of the world’s premier universities “when the Corporation board members acknowledge that they made a bad choice of leader, which they have been unwilling to do,” he wrote in a lengthy X post.

Gay is facing increasing calls to step down over mounting evidence that she plagiarized several dozen times in her academic work — and as Harvard faces criticism over its handling of a wave of on-campus antisemitism after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

To date, the Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing body, has staunchly defended its president with unanimous support.

“By waiting for President Gay to resign, the board members can temporarily disclaim responsibility and avoid the inevitable racism accusation, but they are digging a deeper whole [sic] for themselves,” the hedge fund manager continued.

“When your CEO has done the indefensible, you must take immediate action to replace her. If you don’t, you become culpable in what was initially only her failures,” Ackman wrote.

“They need to act now.”

The Post has reached out to Gay’s office for comment.

Ackman, who is of Jewish descent, called for Gay to be fired earlier this month — along with former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth — after they testified before Congress about antisemitic protests on their campuses.

Magill and UPenn Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok resigned on Dec. 9 after donors revolted over her testimony.

He later said Harvard refused to remove Gay as president because firing her “would look like they were kowtowing to me.”

This week, an internal investigation into Gay revealed more than 40 allegations of her plagiarizing others’ works in her 1997 doctoral thesis and four other papers published between 1993 and 2017.

Harvard is being investigated by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce over its handling of antisemitism by the Department of Education under Title VI, a law that bans discrimination based on race, religion or national origin in an institution that receives federal funding.

The committee on Wednesday announced an inquiry into how the school handled the allegations of plagiarism against Gay — and the university has stood beside her.

Harvard early admissions applications have plummeted 17% amid the controversies.

“Each hour of inaction further damages the institution for whom they have a fiduciary responsibility,” Ackman wrote Saturday. “The board’s actions and inactions to date are indefensible in light of their fiduciary responsibilities to Harvard, the faculty, the student body, the alumni community and other societal stakeholders.”

Ackman has been a prominent figure in the fight against antisemitism in the US since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, calling for the release of the names of Harvard students who blamed Israel for the attack and the suspension of a Harvard student newspaper editor.

In November, he called for the editor of the Harvard Law Review to be disciplined after he was caught on video blocking the way of an individual purported to be a supporter of Israel during a demonstration.