Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum; as Wikipedia notes:
In 1988, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard College. His thesis was titled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions”. In 1992, he received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.
But Ackman’s not a rapacious piker. Wikipedia adds this:
Ackman is a signatory of The Giving Pledge, committing himself to give away at least 50% of his wealth by the end of his life to charitable causes. He has given to charitable causes such as the Center for Jewish History, where he spearheaded a successful effort to retire $30 million in debt, personally contributing $6.8 million. The donation, along with those of Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, were the three largest individual gifts the center has ever received. Ackman’s foundation donated $1.1 million to the Innocence Project in New York City and Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey.
Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. Here’s the tweet with the slides. I’ll highlight some of them, which are pretty damning for Harvard.
Jim Grant asked me to give a talk on “@Harvard Corporation, Buy, Sell or Hold.” I complied.
The slides:https://t.co/dNWFlb2RSu
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) October 1, 2024
There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology. In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators. But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.
Here are some slides that support that thesis. First, a financial summary and the avowed mission of the College.
Here are some figures taken over the last 20 years:
Yet look at this administrative bloat! Why do they neeed so many administrators (in 20 years the administration has grown by 42% while student enrollment has grown by 0.3% and faculty by 0.5%:
And the cost of going to Schmarvard has doubled, “far outpacing inflation”. The cost of living over this period has increased only 61%. The tuition and fees this year are about $83,000 per annum, so a four-year education costs over a third of a million bucks.
Yet Harvard’s endowment has also more than doubled over this period, and is now 51 BILLION dollars. Ackman’s conclusion:
Here are three of Ackman’s plaints (he’s a registered Democrat but appears to support Trump). I can’t verify the first one (Ackman’s figures are likely accurate), but we all know about the second. As for the slide just below, Harvard is probably LESS liberal than other schools, but we know that the dearth of conservative viewpoints (just 3% of faculty) is a general issue. Whether you consider that a problem, and if so, how to remedy it—these are matters for debate.
Last year Harvard was last in FIRE’s free-speech ranking, now it’s sixth from last:
Grade inflation is something I abhor, but it seems unstoppable; it’s part of the Alice in Wonderland view that “all must have prizes,” and a sign of the devaluing of merit. It cannot be that students have gotten so much smarter in 20 years! No, grading has gotten easier.
He then shows a series of slides explaining what has happened to Harvard. This is the summary: it’s become woke and its mission has become woker, conforming to the ideology of the day rather than seeking truth and knowledge. You can find the new mission statement below:
The latest mission statement, showing the emphasis on diversity, and it doesn’t mean intellectual diversity. The emphasis is on social diversity, coming from “different walks of life,” and having “different identities.” These differences, asserts Schmarvard, will perforce YIELD “intellectual transformation.”
There follows a series of slides showing that while the “demand” of students for education in economics and computer science has grown modestly (as well as the number of faculty in these areas and the number of degrees conferred), the faculty in “studies” departments has grown much faster. But the number of degrees conferred in “studies” has decreased sharply.. Ackman concludes that Harvard is allocating its resources according to an ideological, diversity-centered platform.
He supports this by giving an analysis of the words used in Harvard’s course catalogue, presumably reflecting its curriculum:
Truth is mentioned much less often than Gender or “oppression”.
Ackman does note that the interim President (Garber will be there for three more years) has done some good things:
From all of this, and assessing Harvard as an “investment” (possibly aimed at potential donors), Ackman regards the College as a “hold”:
I largely agree with Ackman about Harvard, though the problems he singles out, like grade inflation and an ideological bent, also plague other schools. But Ackman, like me, went to Harvard, and we share a sentimentality about the place that lingers (I had a terrific time and got a terrific education in its grad school). So here’s his reply when someone questions him about why, given all these problems, Harvard is a “hold” rather than a “sell”:
So I am sentimental.
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) October 2, 2024
The slides are confusing since he refers to Harvard College as the whole enterprise, but when he refers to endowment and expenditure and faculty numbers he uses data for Harvard University as a whole. So it is misleading as financial analysis. The business of Harvard University is not comprised solely of undergraduate education as his slides say. There are other graduates of Harvard, as Jerry and Ackman both are examples of.
Why does a university of 7000 undergraduates (and some postgrads etc) need an administrative staff of 18,000?
When Elon Musk bought Twitter he sacked 4 out of 5 employees and everyone predicted that it would fall over in a heap within a week. Yet it continued running just fine. I suggest that Harvard sack 9 out of 10 administrators (yes, I mean that literally, I really do think that 1800 should be ample).
The problem is that it is the adminstrators who are in charge, and all of their decisions are always to increase their fiefdom.
As for grade inflation — which has pretty much hit the limit of everyone getting an A for everything — there is a very easy and simple fix: simply require faculty to give a ranking within the cohort (say in deciles) rather than a grade.
It’s like a cruise ship: ‘2 to 3 staff per passenger’ to take care of the luxury needs of all the boys and girls onboard. Again like a cruise, college is now an ‘experience’ rather than an education. Those who ought to be swabbing the decks are sitting with lap robes and brandies.
The total number of students at Harvard is 22,000. That is why I said Ackman’s slides are misleading. He uses 7000 as the total number of students, but compares it with expenditures for a university of 22,000.
Of course there are too many administrators, but it does not absolve the need to make valid comparisons.
Coel I think we over rely on the (horrible!) numbers at unis when it comes to admin vs teaching jobs. We over rely only on the specificity.
That said.. when you take the numbers in their aggregate, and there has been a LOT published, it is impossible to deny that administrative bloat has been a disaster.
And that “bloat” is mainly DEI. Which caters to diversity hires as beneficiaries and later administrators.
Has anybody else seen even MORE evidence of average IQ of graduates plummet in the last 30 years? I’ve seen a lot that, again, in aggregate suggest … hehehhee.. apologies to Orange Julius… “Unis aren’t sending us their best.”
So where do these aff’ve action kids go for a job with their degrees in “Encountering Whiteness” and “Systemic Hetro-cis-de-colonialization”? Back into the system. And so we’re here.
Bugger.
D.A.
NYC
“(and some postgrads etc) ”
The Fall 2023 figure for graduate and professional students at Harvard was about 19,000 students, which does not include over 12,000 executive education program students. Administrative bloat has been an issue at virtually every university in the country, so I am not sure why Harvard should be an exception. That does not excuse it, but it suggests that Ackerman has a limited view of academia.
Grade inflation is a more complicated issue than is suggested by Ackerman’s figures. For example, as the admissions standards have risen, student performance has improved. If everyone in a freshman physics class gets an average score of 98 on exams, etc during the semester, should everyone get an ‘A’ grade? If not, why not? The problem I saw at Harvard was that performance was not a bell curve, but skewed strongly toward the high end. That, combined with genuine grade inflation, resulted in a distorted view of grades.
Just a couple of thoughts.
I too was wondering if Harvard only selects top students. That could explain the high grades.
But didn’t they select top students in the past too?
As I understand it — and experienced it — the ratio of legacy/donation and athletic admissions has dropped over the years, in favor of more academically qualified admissions, so while Harvard did admit top students in the past, the percentage of those top applicants is higher now. I have no statistics to back up this impression, but we do know that the move away from legacy admits has been growing for some time.
At the same time, grade inflation has also been a growing issue for years at every college and university — I chaired my university’s ad hoc committee on grade inflation 30 years ago — so I am not sure whether Harvard’s grade inflation is any different than what we see elsewhere.
Thank you for sharing Ackman’s presentation and your comments, Jerry. A few of my observations from afar:
It did seem that there was an overabundance of associate deans, special assistants to the dean, assistant to the dean, etc in the administrative office of an engineering school that I have worked with recently when twenty or thirty years ago, there was only a dean and an assistant dean to handle matters.
When my grandson Zoom graduated (neuroscience in arts and sciences) from Va Tech during the pandemic, I counted the honor grads (gte cum laude which was 3.4 I think) and found it to be around 20% of the class…which did not seem outlandish to me.
A big quality factor I noticed in my undergrad days was the average or bulk intelligence, curiosity, knowledge of students whom I competed with and learned with day in and day out. This normalized in my general expectations of society and the world around me. I expect that Harvard arts and science undergrads would still wow me.
In my younger years as a proprietary trader I met quite a few people like him.
They were of a personality “type”, which contributed in large part to their incredible success. Plus randomness, but randomness only visits areas where it can. (In other words, you have to be in it to win it. You can’t benefit from the randomness of market success UNLESS you’re actually in the market, which require some skills in the first place).
It is important to recognize, and at least give an honest hearing to those (particularly in one’s own field where one can assess them better) peoples’ ideas.
It is why I take PCC(E) and other academics’ warnings about woke in academia seriously. Outside my degrees I know little about academia.
Of course, some are cranks, but B.Ack. isn’t a crank. He’s a narcissist, but that shouldn’t exclude his ideas from serious study.
I think he’s pretty “on the money” on his commentaries here. Particularly regards Harvard and the Ivies.
D.A.
NYC
I know grade inflation is out there, but there are complications with comparing grades between institutions. I can expect that a random sample of biology students from Haaaavaahd would blow away a random sample of biology students from my Mid-Sized-Midwestern-University, simply because Harvard students had the education and background that got them into an Ivy League school. My student average in my Evolution class is C/C+, but I expect students from Harvard would get A/A-/B+ in my class. If my class was full of Harvard students, I think the result would look like grade inflation simply because I expect they would be better students on average.
Fair enough, but grades at Harvard are supposed to be comparisons among Harvard students alone. That is, they say “This is how this person did compared to other Harvard students.” You can’t give grades based on the performance of students at other universities.
“grades at Harvard are supposed to be comparisons among Harvard students alone.”
I am unaware of any such policy when I was at Harvard. In many classes, grading was based on a simple calculation of performance against a perfect standard.. It was hypothetically possible for more than half of a calculus class to get perfect scores on all work, and those students would certainly object if their grades were based on comparisons to other students and they got “C” grades for only being average in that class when measured against that group of students.
Agree. What are grades like at extremely selective schools like MIT?
I don’t have any data or statistics on MIT grading, but I would not be surprised if a level of grade inflation could be found there as well.
In general, it might be worth remembering that Ivy League colleges and their equivalents invented the notion of the ‘gentleman’s C’ grade, when college was a kind of finishing school for well-to-do kids, part of the reproduction of social class in America. Matthew Pearl’s novel “The Technologists” is a fun story of the earliest days of MIT, which Harvard ‘gentlemen’ ridiculed as a technical school for working class kids that simply trained them to be plumbers, etc.
Thanks for your response (I’m replying to this one as your answer was too deeply nested).
I’ve heard of the gentleman’s C. I suppose that’s less common these days, although there are still “legacy admits” (they’re not a feature in Canada where the universities are mostly public and taxpayer funded).
Good point. To reinforce: I went to Princeton and majored in Biology. I then went to the Univ. of Oregon for an MS in Bio. I knew more than most of my UofO Professors in their specialties!
As for that pie chart: To which political ideology do the moderates belong? It looks as if all the other political groups mentioned were radicals or extremists. That is surely not the case, since there are both moderate conservatives and moderate liberals.
Anyway, being European (German), I always have to remind myself that the US use of “liberal(ism)” is special:
“In US popular usage, ‘liberal’ means left-liberal, and is expressly contrasted with ‘conservative’. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the under-privileged, supports the causes of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, usually in the form of welfare programmes, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the modern, and maybe those of the postmodern world-view. Although not a socialist, the American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and provided the principal victims are conservatives.”
(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. p. 394)
So, in that sense, “liberalism” means “social liberalism”; and social liberalism overlaps largely with social democracy.
However, from the perspective of classical liberals such as Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and even more from the one of radical classical liberals (libertarians) such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard (the godfather of anarcho-capitalism), social liberalism is no liberalism properly so called, but a form of socialism.
Would appreciate your take on “foreign influence “ at Harvard and curious how Ackman would respond to that issue as well.