(WSJ): "Bill Ackman's Clash with Harvard Over Stock Gift"

Is there still such a controversy?

Federal case is still pending with no decision on College’s motion to compel arbitration.   It is certainly possible that the parties are in discussions to resolve their differences.  

No news is good news in these situations. Cooler heads, I hope, are prevailing. 

One answer is a quote from a great sports/rom-com movie, "Show me the money!" I think the approach has to be a balance between "All gifts are final with absolutely no conditions, restrictions or claw back clauses" and selling out the College's good name. We need a savvy negotiator who knows all the fine points in agreements for mega gifts and can protect the college while giving up as little as possible of the donations that keep HC as elite as it is and to improve upon that level of quality going forward.

If a wealthy person wants to enjoy sculpting his gift, we need someone who can help him to do so while also meeting HC's needs and protecting HC while making the donor feel like everything was his/her idea and pumped to give more in the future or by the next generation of the family.

The former Admissions Director received poor reviews on the board for being too rigid. We need someone for major gifts who has so many "soft" skills they are like jelly while knowing the key words in a donation contract inside and out. Or maybe two people who can play good cop and bad cop.

The sad thing would be our professionals twisting themselves into a pretzel to get the money and protect HC and then having below market investment returns. So both elements are crucial.

Claudine Gay to resign this afternoon per report from the Boston Globe and student newspaper

Wednesday Trivia: who is the well known Crusader who is a Member, that is serves on the Board, of the Harvard Corporation?  

I'll help you out: www.harvard.edu/about/leadership-and-governance/harvard-corporation/

I welcome bringing this thread back to my original premise and repeating:

My question: what is Holy Cross' greatest asset? IMO, our great name, College of the Holy Cross.

Can we trust our BOT and rely on those individuals to make sure that our good name is and NEVER will be for sale in the fashion that selected colleges and universities have clearly sold out to individuals, organizations, industries, and foreign governments?

Has our good name ever been sold?   

Agree 100%.
You should post this on the football board.

A broader perspective on this?
the links in this did not copy

By Bret Stephens
NYT Opinion Columnist 1/2/24

I had written and filed a column about Harvard and its president, Claudine Gay, when news of her resignation broke on Tuesday afternoon after fresh allegations of plagiarism in her published work. I’d like to record what I wrote: “Cancel culture is always ugly and usually a mistake. If Gay is to go, let it be after more deliberation, with more decorum, and when pundits like me aren’t writing about her.” Oh, well.

The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.

Why did that change happen? I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.

But the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

In announcing Gay’s appointment, Harvard praised her leadership and scholarship. The work of a university president is also that of executive, fund-raiser and cheerleader for the institution, and maybe the Harvard Corporation thought she’d be good at that. But skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about hertaking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.

This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person. The weight of expectations on her must have been crushing. But dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.

It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color. But the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.

The school next to Boston will probably rebound. But Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.

That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason. People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.

Nobody should doubt that there is still a lot of excellence in today’s academia and plenty of good reasons to send your kids to college. But nobody should doubt, either, that the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.

I assume the scholarship of the other Ivy presidents was investigated, too.

What can Harvard, and all of us who are interested in higher education, learn from this debacle?

What skill set should a huge university like Harvard ($9 billion plus revenue, $5 billion plus expenses, $70 billion in assets, $11 billion in liabilties, 19,000 employees, 23000 students) be seeking in its next President? How important is scholarship as opposed to leadership and fundraising?

I am sure that someone will say, just don't make diversity hires and all will be good but that misses the point for several reasons. For one, she had been in academic leadership as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard for eight years and had shown leadership on some important issues including financial ones during Covid. The trustees knew her when they hired her. Second, to the extent that she was canned for plagarism, that isn't really a DEI issue. To the extent that she botched the student protests/antisemitism/free speech issue, I again don't think that the fact that she is a woman of color had a great deal to do with it. She failed because Harvard had failed for years to articulate a consistent message about the limits of speech. At times it had allowed pretty wide speech and at other times, speech had been shut down. Having no standard she could point to, she failed to draw a line between speech critical of Israel (pre and post 10/7/23) and antisemitic speech which approached advocacy for  genocide. Then Ackman shorted Harvard just like he shorted Herbalife except that he won this time.

Here is one suggestion for Harvard since they didn't ask: I looked at the Wikipedia pages of recent Presidents. For the most part they have been Harvard administrators before taking the top job. Maybe they ought to look outside the gates a little more carefully.

EDIT:  The 990 shows Harvard turned almost a $4  billion "profit" in 2022.  Maybe they ought to consider whether that is a good thing. 


projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/42103580