Bill Ackman is accusing Harvard University of engaging in “election interference” after the billionaire hedge fund manager threw his support behind four alums in hopes of revamping the Ivy League school’s powerful Board of Overseers.
Ackman said voting for who appears on the Harvard Board of Overseers ballot “has become a labyrinth of complexity” since polling opened earlier this month for all of the school’s degree holders — when voters simply “clicked a link and arrived at a landing page which explained how to vote for petitioning candidates.”
Now, there are four steps, with the “actual voting page” buried under “descriptions and bios of Harvard’s preferred candidates,” Ackman shared to X on Sunday.
Harvard has since also implemented a rule that makes voters “have to find your email and password and the sign the petition for each new candidate separately.”
“In the securities world, the SEC would come in and prosecute a company that made it this difficult to vote for an alternative slate,” added Ackman, the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, which was recently named among the top 20 performing hedge funds in the world.
“The harder Harvard makes it for alumni to effectuate change, the greater clarity we all have on how much change is needed,” Ackman concluded the lengthy post.
Ackman’s preferred candidates — Zoe Bedell, Logan Leslie, Julia Pollak and Alec Williams — are vying for a board spot under a campaign dubbed “Renew Harvard.”
Because the Renew Harvard members are not being nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association, they must gather at least 3,300 signatures from the Ivy League school’s graduates — equivalent to 1% of those entitled to vote — by the end of January to run for election to the board in the spring.
Turnout among Harvard graduates in such votes has been low, with the participation rate last year coming in at less than 8.1%, according to the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
To further emphasize Harvard’s election interference efforts, Ackman pointed out in a separate X post that “two years ago, Harvard raised the requirement from 600 to 3,300+ signatures to make it more than five times more difficult for alumni to participate in Harvard’s governance.”
“I have no affiliation with the four candidates running other than I support their platform and think they are excellent candidates,” Ackman, who’s worth an estimated $4.1 billion, assured.
All four Renew Harvard members have said they are driven to join the board by their love for Harvard, which has educated eight US presidents, from John Adams to Barack Obama.
Bedell, who’s among Ackman’s endorsees, is an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Leslie, a fellow dissident alumni being supported by Ackman, is the CEO and founder of Northern Rock, an infrastructure and construction services company based out of Atlanta.
Pollak, the chief economist at online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter, was already running as a write-in candidate and then joined the group.
And Williams, Ackman’s fourth candidate of choice, is a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Reserves with more than a decade of service, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, on his resume.
Should any of the Renew Harvard members be successful in their campaign, they would serve a six-year term on the Board of Overseers, which is not as powerful as the Harvard Corporation, a smaller governing body with direct oversight over the university’s operations, but still exercises influence.
The primary tool of the overseers is the so-called visitation process, which lets them ask questions of Harvard’s faculty and departments and carry out assessments.
Representatives for Ackman at Pershing Square declined to comment. Harvard did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Ackman has been pushing to overhaul Harvard’s board ever since former Harvard President Claudine Gay stepped down earlier this month.
Ackman, a fierce adversary of Gay’s during her six-month tenure, which ended in weeks of controversy over campus politics and her own academic record.
During that time, Ackman penned three open letters to his alma mater — on Nov. 4, Dec. 3 and Dec. 10 — since Gay stood by the 30-plus student groups behind the controversial letter that ultimately led to the school losing a reported $1 billion in donations.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
