Bill Ackman is the billionaire founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management.
We’ve been talking about him in some of our stories over the past couple of months because he’s been involved prominently in trying to hold Harvard and other universities responsible for their actions, first when some Harvard student organizations were involved in a letter blaming Israel for the October 7 attack and then when the three Ivy League presidents couldn’t categorically state that calling for genocide against Jews would be against their universities’ codes of conduct.
READ MORE: ‘Resign in Disgrace’: Bill Ackman Excoriates the Failed Leadership of Harvard, MIT and UPenn
Ackman continued to call out Harvard when the plagiarism then came out on Claudine Gay, and a lot of donors started pulling out money.
READ MORE: Harvard Weighs in on Claudine Gay’s Job and Plagiarism, and Their Response Is Truly Shameless
So he hasn’t made some people in higher education happy as he’s been calling out antisemitism, plagiarism, and other problems in that realm.
Over the past couple of days, Ackman’s posts on X have been going viral as he talks about how his wife has now been targeted with charges of plagiarism by Business Insider. He believes his family is now being attacked because of his calls for accountability. His wife isn’t a public figure; she isn’t a dean or even teaching now, so it’s clear this is about him. But it sounds like folks in academia are going to regret this, big time, as it’s only serving to make him more determined to go after them all.
It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews. We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.We will be using MIT’s own plagiarism standards which can be found here:
A lot of people cheered Ackman’s response, and it went viral with more than 14 million views.
He also said that he would be checking on Business Insider as well for plagiarism.
Then, the next day, Ackman went on to say the effort would not be limited but should encompass other schools.
Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.
Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp could be heard around the campus.
Why? Well, every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others.
But it wasn’t just the MIT faculty that did not sleep last night. The @Harvard faculty, its governing board members, and its administrative leadership did not sleep either. Because why would we stop at MIT?
He explained how important this all was to the health of the nation and our freedoms.
But as we all know, our higher education system (HES) is critically important as it can affect and influence the minds of our younger generations, thereby profoundly impacting the lives of all of us.
The HES can affect what’s taught to toddlers and what is taught in elementary and high schools, as ed schools train the next generation of teachers and superintendents, and design the curricula they teach.
The HES can convince a generation that some of us are oppressors, and others are the oppressed, and provide justifications for what kinds and what degree of violence and terrorism are appropriate tools to address this perceived oppression. [….]
And then, of course, the graduates of our education system over time become the judges, the Supreme Court justices, the politicians, the members of the media, and the other people that influence and determine our way of life, and help us understand the truth, but whose truth? you might ask.
Here’s the kicker lead:
In light of the power of HES, those interested in power would of course desire to take control of our most prestigious and influential universities so that they could ultimately take control of our education system, our government, and then the country at large.
This is one of the reasons we’ve seen the advancement of radical leftism in this country — because a lot of that stems from such control in the universities. It’s why so much of the anti-Israel stuff is originating on campus or with college students.
Ackman said Business Insider didn’t give his wife any real time to respond, saying that they posted their story only about an hour and a half after sending a 12-page email to his communications person (not his wife) asking for comment.
A reporter was attacking my wife yet again, a woman who is totally uninvolved in my advocacy on higher education, but they thought attacking my family would cause me more pain. Even the mafia operates with more dignity and respect for family, and I apologize to the mafia for the comparison. Business Insider gave us no time to respond, and acted with actual malice and bad faith.
He said they were now even calling her former students about his wife.
In my 36-year career, I have never had the experience of a journalist and their employer attacking the life partner of a subject of any story, even a big one…Perhaps I am just lucky or perhaps Business Insider is a disgusting and unethical journalistic operation.
He noted that media even called his children on their phones.
Last night, a reporter at Bloomberg, let’s call her Kathy, left messages on my kids’ cell phones that she was writing a story on me and asking them to call back so they could answer her questions.
But they obviously opened a Pandora’s box when they tried to take him on, because he’s now going to come full bore for them, and this is going to be worth all the popcorn. You don’t mess with a man’s family.
