Opinion | Harvard, Claudine Gay and the Education of Bill Ackman

Although Bill Ackman received his B.A. in 1988 and his M.B.A. in 1992, both from Harvard, you could say his education began on Oct. 8. On that morning, Mr. Ackman, founder and CEO of the Manhattan-based hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, woke up to the reality of moral rot at American universities. It was a condition of which he’d been “naively” unaware, to use his own description from a sprawling recent tweet.

The tweet runs to 3,800 words. Opponents have dismissed it as a screed, but much of it is a recitation of unexceptionable (and often boilerplate) arguments against wokeness. He started writing it at 6 p.m. Atlantic Standard Time, while on a family vacation in the Dominican Republic, and finished at 3 a.m. “I hit send without showing it to anyone, as with all my tweets,” he says in a phone interview. “This scares the hell out of my communications guy. And it was too late at night to show it to my wife.” He composed another recent tweet from his barber’s chair.