Ackman's clash reveals messy world of big donations

Prestigious universities are learning the costs of the big gifts they receive from prominent donors.

- Peter Rudegeair

The strings that fund managers Bill Ackman THE WALL ST and Ross Stevens attached to sizable donations to Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, show the degree to which wealthy benefactors expect to have an ongoing say in administrative matters.

This inevitably causes chafing at universities, which pride themselves on resisting outside pressures in their unfettered pursuit of higher learning. The delicate relationship between schools and their biggest donors has contributed to their continuing clash over addressing antisemitism.

Ackman, who has been calling for Harvard to oust its president over its handling of free speech and antisemitism on campus, took to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday night to criticize the university for not abiding by the terms of a 2017 gift he gave it to recruit star economist Raj Chetty.

As he tells it, Ackman was in the middle of a divorce and had little cash on hand, so gifted the school $10 million of shares in Coupang, a Korean e-commerce company that was privately held at the time. It came with an unusual agreement: If the value of the shares rose above $15 million when Coupang went public, Ackman could allocate the surplus to his preferred Harvard-related cause.