Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman who studied at Harvard blamed the university for its indirect influence over incidents like the Capital Jewish Museum killing last week — in a long post on X where he slammed the university for turning into a hub of antisemitism. The X post came as Harvard has locked horns with the Donald Trump administration without complying the administration’s demands. President Donald Trump announced that Harvard will not be able to enroll international students unless it provides the administration with a record of global students involved in protests, crime or violence in the past five years. Harvard went to court against the administration and got a temporary stay on the administration’s order. “This past week’s brutal executions of a Christian and a Jewish staffer of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. by a man who shouted “Free Free Palestine” after finishing off his victims as they attempted to crawl away are but a recent stark and egregious example of the consequences of the same intonated calls for violence against Jews by Harvard students and faculty who have encamped on Harvard Yard and barged into classrooms bullhorns in hand,” Bill Ackman wrote.“Harvard has been on notice for nearly 18 months by the Congress that its failure to address antisemitism threatened the University’s federal funding. The University now appears to be shocked – despite the many previous warnings made by the Trump administration – that its Federal funding has been paused, that future Federal grants will not be considered, and that its refusal to provide requested documentation about its foreign students has led to the cancellation of Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visa Program certification,” Ackman wrote. US Congressman Ro Khanna who had already criticized Trump’s move against Harvard challenged Bill Ackman and sought the evidence in support of the allegations that he raised. The Indian-orogon Congressman earlier challenged tech figures including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, Vinod Khosla, and Reid Hoffman to defend the ban, stating that it cannot be justified on merit.“Anyone from Silicon Valley willing to speak out against the Trump @JDVance ban on current and future international students at Harvard? I know @elonmusk, @DavidSacks, @pmarca, @chamath, @vkhosla, @reidhoffman that there is not a single tech leader who can defend this on the merits.”As Ackman wrote in his post that Harvard should comply with the record requests from the administration, as there is credible evidence that certain foreign students at Harvard have received funding from foreign actors, Ro Khanna asked for the evidence.
