Al Sharpton has pledged to picket the Manhattan offices of Bill Ackman after the billionaire hedge fund manager’s successful campaign against Claudine Gay.
Ackman, a Harvard graduate who has donated tens of millions to his alma mater, became a loud voice calling for her to resign.
Ackman, who is Jewish and married to an Israeli, the celebrity architect Neri Oxman, was outraged at Gay’s response to students justifying the Hamas attacks of October 7.
Her testimony before Congress on December 5, when she could not give a straight answer to the question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews was hate speech, enraged him and much of the country.
On December 12, the first reports emerged alleging that Gay had plagiarized sections of her academic work, which fueled calls for her to resign.
But Sharpton, the famed civil rights leader, on Tuesday said Gay was pushed out because she was black.
Reverend Al Sharpton, pictured on December 19, has called for a picket of Bill Ackman’s office on Thursday in protest at Ackman’s campaign to oust Harvard’s first black president
Bill Ackman, 57 (left), founded Pershing Square Capital Management and is now worth $4.1 billion. He has campaigned for the ouster of Claudine Gay (right)
‘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.
Sharpton accused Ackman, 57, of a ‘relentless campaign against President Gay, not because of her leadership or credentials but because he felt she was a DEI hire.’
Sharpton said his civil rights organization, the National Action Network (NAN), will protest outside Ackman’s Manhattan office on Thursday.
‘If he doesn’t think Black Americans belong in the C-Suite, the Ivy League, or any other hallowed halls, we’ll make ourselves at home outside his office,’ Sharpton wrote in a statement.
Ackman has spent the day celebrating the resignation of Gay – the second of three Ivy League presidents to resign following the disastrous Congressional testimony.
Liz Magill, the president of University of Pennsylvania, resigned on December 9, after a similar outcry against her legalistic and equivocal responses.
Ackman has defended his move to force Gay out, insisting it had nothing to do with money
The third president, Sally Kornbluth, head of MIT, is the last of the three to hold onto her job: Ackman tweeted ‘Et tu Sally?’
When one critic, Gregg Gonsalves, a professor at Yale, called Ackman a ‘pernicious influence on American education’ and an ‘odious’ person who ‘thinks his money equals wisdom’ and ‘gives him the right to bully at will’, Ackman hit back.
‘What did I say about @Harvard President Gay that has to do with money?’ replied Ackman.
‘President Gay resigned because she lost the confidence of the University at large due to her actions and inactions and other failures of leadership.
‘Other than elevating concerns about Gay that were held by thousands of Harvard students, faculty and alumni, what is ‘pernicious’ about my so-called influence on American education?
‘Gay resigned because it was untenable for her to remain President of Harvard due to her failings of leadership.
‘Would you want Gay to be president of Yale where you apparently serve on the faculty?’
When one person said Ackman was being ‘disingenuous’ about money, Ackman replied: ‘How did I use money? I don’t understand. I never threatened to withhold donations etc.
‘President Gay’s resignation is not about money. It is about her failures of leadership and questions about her academic record.’