Billionaire Bill Ackman Warns Harvard Endowment Faces Financial Reckoning

Harvard University’s endowment is heading for rough waters unless it changes course, direction and speed as the Ivy League exemplar deliberates as to whether to offload private equity holdings while battling the Trump administration over federal research funding.

That is the forecast of billionaire hedge fund titan Bill Ackman who has warned the institution it faces a financial reckoning sooner rather than later.

Ackman sees Harvard’s battle with President Donald Trump over its failure to address anti-Israel protests on campus as a losing move which has already resulted in $2.2 billion in federal grants to the school being frozen.

As Joel Pollak of Breitbart News noted, Harvard is one of ten universities targeted for investigation by Trump’s antisemitism task force, after radical anti-Israel protests intimidated, targeted, and assaulted Jewish Harvard students.

Harvard has received about $9 billion in federal grants. It has an endowment worth about $53 billion.

Harvard is suing the Trump administration in an effort to get its federal funding restored while Ackman argues it should not be entitled to taxpayer funds when the school wastes money on what he calls “administrative bloat.”

“They have lost all future grants, their tax exemptions are at risk,” Ackman said on a panel Tuesday at the Milken Institute Global Conference where 5,000 financiers, educators and scientists gather to discuss critical issues of the day.

“It is all self-induced gross mismanagement and I think that the [Trump] administration is doing precisely the right thing now,” Ackman explained.

Ackman shone a spotlight on the school’s governing board, saying it has become insular and that there is no mechanism to remove members the way there is in corporate America where investors can run board challenges.

“What happens when you have a board that can self-appoint itself, and it becomes insular, and with a $53 billion endowment, they think, okay, we can just do whatever is on our mind,” Ackman argued.

Ackman’s multiple warnings came came shortly after Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a scathing letter to Harvard President Garber saying “Harvard is not eligible for any new grants from the federal government until they demonstrate responsible management at the university.”

RELATED: Harvard Yard Invaded by Anti-Israel Encampment, “Intifada Revolution”

Research grants would be the ones impacted – not federal student aid, which funnels through universities before providing students with financial relief.

For these grants to be re-issued, a senior Education Department official said Harvard “would have to enter into a negotiation with the government to satisfy what the government says is in compliance with all federal laws.”

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