Musk comments are from The Epoch Times. Bill Ackman’s comments are from Twitter
“Diversity, equity, inclusion, these all sound like nice
words. But what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race,
sex, and sexual orientation, and it’s against merit,” Mr. Musk said. “Thus, I think, [it] is fundamentally anti-Semitic.”
During the interview, Mr. Musk noted that the solution to address this DEI problem is for universities to focus on merit.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a man, [or] woman, what race you are,
what beliefs you have. What matters is how good are you at your job or
what are your skills?” he said.
‘DEI Just Another Word For Racism’
This is not the first time the tech billionaire has raised concerns over DEI initiatives. On Jan. 11, Mr. Musk questioned
DEI hiring in the airline industry in response to a series of tweets by
author James Lindsay that detailed the various DEI policies implemented
by Boeing.
“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening,” Mr. Musk said in a post on X.
In another post, he wrote: “People will die due to DEI,” referring to the recent midair accident involving Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft.
On Jan. 4, he criticized this controversial initiative, saying, “Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Musk said, “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it,” as he agreed with hedged fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who shared his view about anti-Semitism at Harvard.
Bill Ackman’s Extremely Well-Deserved Diatribe Against DEI Generally and especially at Harvard
From Bill Ackman’s Twitter comment:
I
first became concerned about Harvard when 34 Harvard student
organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had
taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of
Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel
‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be? I wondered.
When
I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided
more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for
terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became
anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as
protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened
by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the
limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to
Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly,
antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best
universities among a subset of students.
A few weeks later, I
went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn
from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty
and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer
picture began to emerge.
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 realized 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 naively thought these words meant.
I have always
believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful
organization, 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, but 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,
program, 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 colors is deemed racist.
As a
result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams
are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other
words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which 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 which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label
which 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 [Doug here: The Marxist…]
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 world views. 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 of 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—which is absurd.
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.
You can say things about white
people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you
switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be
costly and severe.
To state what should otherwise be
self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend
upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently
represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a
lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible
as it is against groups with darker skin colors.
Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:
“I
have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the
content of their character.”
But here we are in 2024, being asked
and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in
admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business
(likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I
believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government
contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a
meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a
racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to
work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.
And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.
I
have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least
fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to
maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to
provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education,
housing, and healthcare for all.
America is a rich country and we
have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal,
but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to
socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will
reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen
this movie many times.
Having a darker skin color, a less common
sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily
oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain
on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white
people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people
generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible
for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America
doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.
An ideology
that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based
principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist
ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system
where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist
system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the
un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.
The
country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over
the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to
our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important
drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how
DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.
I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X
that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded
candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former
President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said
that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large
percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My
statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about
the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.
When
former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was
instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority
community likes to see their representatives recognized in important
leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for
celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved
by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle
leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university
as an important and significant milestone for the black community.
I
have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and
supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing
several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help
communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice
reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing,
charter schools, and more.
I have done the same at Pershing
Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the
largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of
minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior
to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for
big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in
their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell
only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1%
or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue
signal that they were helping minority communities.
In our IPO,
we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the
process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was
one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion
of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we
closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for
delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of
the stock.
Compare this approach to the traditional one where the
small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t
given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny
one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only
creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks
who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of
affirmative action.
While I don’t think our approach to working
with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it
deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build
their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers
see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a
large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored
smaller banks.
I have always believed in giving disadvantaged
groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My
life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the
favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to
do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.
All of the
above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the
opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is
another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role
when they are not qualified to serve in that role.
This appears
to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not
possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting
aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent
shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when
she was Dean of the faculty.
The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.
The
Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a
predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any
case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could
have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the
Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
One can only speculate
without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the
creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and
Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation
board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also
done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored
candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of
potential candidates available in light of the increased competition
for talent.
Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would
suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include
capable business people for the role of president, as a university
president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even
the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed
papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a
bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the
university. It therefore does not make sense that the university
president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set
unprepared for university management.
The president’s job –
managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment,
raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate
acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management –
are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing.
Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business
executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for
the office of the university president.
Furthermore, Harvard is a
massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost
structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the
fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are
below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5%
annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull
markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment
taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are
invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.
The price of the
product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of
inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and
it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at
Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford
Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t
get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it
is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you
graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend
graduate school.
The best companies in the world grow at high
rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I
graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has
grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that
has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35
years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?
In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard
than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s
next president is a critically important task, and the individuals
principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track
record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a
good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.
The
Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president
and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay
being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became
dean of the Social Studies department.
The Board failed to create
a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to
tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial
liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the
potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning
environment for all students.
And when concerns were raised about
plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were
“demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense”
liability if it published a story raising these issues.
It was
only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a
cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for
evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the
Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it
characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new
euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a
belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to
Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.
The Board’s
three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day
remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples
of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the
University and its reputation for academic integrity as the
whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems
with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.
According to
the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the
whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention
to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.
Despite
all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay
during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to
accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing
reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.
In a normal
corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would
resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders.
In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new
members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.
So what should happen?
The
Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the
unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other
members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay,
orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process
for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the
damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be
identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the
board.
The Board should not be principally comprised of
individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new
board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the
assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the
Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most
impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse
members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to
choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more
interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have
been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.
The ODEIB should
be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already
taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website
when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who
it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website
does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this
office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why
would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum
questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something
fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again
become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or
against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where
diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn
in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and
students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard
must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free
speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are
forever banished from campus. Harvard should become an environment where
all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views
and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a
great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right
tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive
administrative bureaucracy.
These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.
A
number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new
constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has
been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other
universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new
constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.
A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be
the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the
new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.
Today
was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore
Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates
well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and
good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our
democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help
save us from ourselves.
We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.
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