Billionaire Harvard donor Bill Ackman, who was behind the ousting of Claudine Gay as Harvard President over plagiarism and antisemitism allegations, explains in the Free Press how he finally came to realise the ‘anti-racist’ DEI agenda at universities and elsewhere was malign. Here’s an excerpt.
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign — it was the ‘canary in the coal mine’ — despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor-oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realised I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large. I came to understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion was not what I had naïvely thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organisation, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
Under DEI, 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. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being ‘not racist’.
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, programme, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy (and even climate change, due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc., that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colours is deemed racist.
As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist — in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organisation that has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local, and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.
After the death of George Floyd, the already-burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question that challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label that could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.
The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, ‘justice’ will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.
The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called ‘microaggressions’ are treated like hate speech. ‘Trigger warnings’ are required to protect students. ‘Safe spaces’ are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly acquired worldviews. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.
These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country, since its founding, has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.
The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
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). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.
It’s interesting to see that despite turning full against DEI, Ackman still wants to hold fast to the promotion of ‘diversity’ and the prohibition of ‘hate speech’. It’s like he doesn’t realise those concepts are intrinsically tied up with one another. One step at a time.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman has been forced to apologise for plagiarism in her 2010 dissertation. Awkward. Is everybody at it?
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“…diversity, equity, and inclusion…” = monoculture, exclusion, compliance, discrimination.
And if anyone says it’s a minor issue or you are making it up, show this this chart and the argument is won on the spot.
From a Charlie Kirk tweet:
In the year after the George Floyd riots, S&P100 companies added more than 300,000 jobs. White Americans, more than half the adult population, got just 6% of them. Thousands of young white graduates entering the workforce found their path blocked, not because of ability or qualifications, but because of skin color.
It’s time for white people to reject the “white supremacy” lie. White people are not the perpetrators of “systemic racism.” They are the victims of it.
https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1742622835250729024?s=20
I’m starting to think that if Tik Tok could just be banned people’s mental health would improve no end, because it just gives validation to these and similar lunatics. Or would off-the-charts nutjobbery like this still exist but they’d just find another platform from which to project their mental illness to the world? Not sure…
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1743293215912984753
Someone really urgently needs to tell these … ahem … somewhat human-looking entities that “white people” don’t exist as ethnic group outside of the USA. Maybe, they’ll finally take note of that (seems extremly unlikely, though). No one will ever ask a black guy living in England and speaking with an obviously English accent if he’s perhaps “Polish”. And the poor opressed black guy was even allowed to vote on the future of the “Polishes” not that long ago. They weren’t.
The three most heavily abused words in the entire Newspeak language.
Discrimination, Exclusion, Inequity.
“I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organisation…”
I have always believed it was talent and skill – ‘diversity’ whatever meaning is attached doesn’t guarantee or produce that.
“The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.”
Equity is NOT equality… they are two separate words with distinct meaning. Equality = all treated to the same standards. Equity = all treated fairly. Hence equality and equity before the Law.
In other words make it gay and put an effing chicken in it.
This guy is such a weasel.
He only “woke up” to DEI when he realised he would have to fight it to get the heads of the Ivy League schools kicked out for allowing criticism of Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
The guy lied and BSed his way to millions in his trades and is no free speech saint.
Have no idea of his motives, if any, behind his current move, but neither do you.
I knew Bill somewhat 15yrs ago – dealt with him in business at a time when he had done well, but no more than that. He was ferociously bright, hardworking and honest, with great integrity and an enormous sense of fun. Nothing in his recent actions suggest anything has changed.
Your sound and fury belittle you.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organisation, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing and more … but nobody must offer anything but unconditional support to whatever policies the government of Israel wants to implement. If not, he’s ANTISYMMETRIC!!
Thank you for this highly enlightening standpoint, Mr Billionaire. It is – to me at least – entirely unclear why a successful organization other than a nation-wide swinger club should be concerened with the so-called sex lives of its members. Likewise, there’s no reason to assume that a successful organization must necessarily include black people or people whose ancestors came from different nations. That’s nicely exemplified by the fact that that the military record of the US army isn’t exactly stellar when overwhelming numerical superiority didn’t come into play.
I hope he stops funding (DEI) hate…
I don’t suggest he should stop funding education – but he might be more selective about which organisations, and with attached conditions on what it can be spent on. (Ha! More selective than Harvard).
I’m sure Harvard won’t miss him as a donor but when a few other rich folk begin to question what they’re funding, maybe they’ll have to take notice.
Man, they do like to close ranks don’t they? I mean, do we have many examples of black people calling out other black people who have behaved inappropriately? But if you’re not black and call them out you’re a ‘you know what’, and what the hell is an ”anti-racist” anyway? Is this a new nonsensical term such as ”Islamophobe” or ”far-right”, to be misapplied and over-used at will? More on the fraudulent windbag antisemite ( who can’t possibly be a racist because she’s black ) here;
”Christopher Brunet and Christopher Rufo did much to uncover and publicize examples of Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism, and had criticized her when, as Dean of the FAS, she had defended Professor Ryan Enos from charges of using fabricated datasets. Some have suggested that her investigation of sexual misconduct charges brought against Lawrence Fryer, a black professor of economics, and the punishment he endured — two years of unpaid leave — were motivated in part by personal animus, for Fryer’s work directly contradicted her own. Brunet wrote in October 2022:
”I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this mustn’t be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard. She’s an intellectual lightweight (her entire body of critical race theory “research” is flawed and/or fake), a far-far-far-left DEI activist, and corrupt as hell.”
She became president of Harvard, in what many believe was a clear example of race-conscious hiring by the Harvard Corporation, and during the six months of her tenure she has brought the university to a state of disarray that will continue even after she packs up at Massachusetts Hall and returns to her job as a Professor of Government and of African and African-American studies, as the faculty, and students, will continue to be split on Gay’s resignation. Meanwhile, those who believe Gay did nothing wrong, but was a victim of “white racism,” have predictably declared themselves outraged at the injustice.
Here, for example, is that inimitable race-baiter and flim-flam man Al Sharpton, who expressed outrage at Claudine Gay’s resignation in a statement on Tuesday, January 2: “President Gay’s resignation is about more than a person or a single incident. This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” he said.”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/jamaal-bowman-claudine-gay-is-a-brilliant-historic-black-woman-who-was-bullied-by-fascists
DEI = Discrimination, Exclusion and Inequality.
totally agree.
I have absolutely no idea what this man is talking about.
Racism is instinctive. All primates, indeed most mammals, are intrinsically instinctively racist.
The only route towards true DEI is DIE, all of us, by our own hand.
What a load of complete nonsense on stilts.
The United States and this country, most of Europe, are in grave danger of disappearing up their own fundaments, where the sun don’t shine…..
Some people love a cosmopolitan environment and some don’t. This goes largely unacknowledged and it is generally about two thirds to four fifths that prefer to be among their own kind. You have students who go to study in Germany or Russia because upon exposure to the language and literature they feel that they have found a spiritual home. I have lived all over the place and in England cosmopolitanism isn’t common at all even among those who claim to be that way. Orwell talked about how Dickens isn’t really intelligible outside of England. There is an immense concentration of idiom and Dickens Londoners were dodgy at best but it did reflect a set of allusions that didn’t travel well. In polls of the country’s favourite books you get very few novels in translation. I am not knocking it I am pointing out what should be obvious – that what they call diversity is especially repugnant in a country like England.
Well I definitely find this example of diversity particularly repugnant. But whatever, I’m sure I’m just a racist cherry-picker… 😮
https://twitter.com/RadioGenoa/status/1743704963023355915
He didn’t give a fig about the lack of free speech at universities as long as it extended to criticizing Israel.
When that taboo was broken, he started to get active.
His DEI sermon is just a fig leaf story made up on the fly to deflect from his hypocrisy and from what he really cares about.
You’re welcome.
They are clearly fighting a losing battle. Don’t interrupt your enemy when they are busy destroying themselves. It is utterly brazen and blatant and soon there will be few who can’t see it. The parasites in charge will stick to their guns but they are riding a vanishing horse. Our time is the time of stark relief. Where it can’t help its nakedness. On every level, every political persuasion will soon see. I that there will be a nuclear conflict at some point and perhaps this has already started but I think it will fall short of a full nuclear exchange and there will be a rebuilding. The mystery schools said Russia and Brazil are the next centres of spiritual power and that there will be a vicious fight between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians. But if you are used to a sedentary lifestyle then the best thing to do is gradually wean yourself off it.
Let them bleed out. They are like sharks in the final stages of the feeding frenzy (accoiding to Orson Welles in The Lady Of Shanghai). First they find the blood and then they start attacking the fish and the meat. They become so frenzied that they start attacking each other. In the final stage they are so ravenous that they start biting at their own stomachs tearing themselves apart and canniblizing themselves.
Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred, but in recent decades it SEEMED to have waned and been largely confined to a few pockets of extremists here and there, at least in Western countries. But apparently it was simmering just below the surface all along. The events of October 7th seem to have brought it out of the shadows into the open, but what I think really led to its recent resurgence (especially the fashionable hipster variant of antisemitism) was the pervasive anti-white reverse racism that became in vogue in recent years. You can draw a straight line between “Kill Whitey!” being OK to casually say, and “Kill the Jews!” also being OK to casually say, since Jews can often “pass” for white (both a blessing and a curse).
“DEI” should really be spelled “DIE”.
DEI=Entryism
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/12/communist-entryism/