Each January, Harvard University alumni are eligible to gather enough signatures to run for the university’s Board of Overseers. Normally, this process plays out quietly. Few, if any, alumni go through the effort to get on the ballot.
But, like many things at Harvard today, this year’s board election is taking place in the national spotlight and being influenced by powerful billionaires vying to reshape a university in crisis.
Mark Zuckerberg is throwing his support behind former Facebook exec Sam Lessin, a venture capitalist calling for significant reform to Harvard.
The Facebook billionaire held a virtual event on Friday supporting Lessin, who has called for major reform at Harvard – including the resignation of Penny Pritzker, who leads the powerful Harvard Corporation.
Another billionaire, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, is stepping up his own effort to get a slate of four outsider candidates on the ballot before the deadline on Wednesday.
Ackman, who led the campaign to oust former Harvard president Claudine Gay, is drawing attention to the tedious process of gathering signatures from alumni.
“Here is @Harvard’s election interference with greater granularity,” Ackman said in a post on X, describing the many steps alumni must take online before they can back outsider candidates as a “labyrinth of complexity.”
Ackman has been among the most vocal critics of Harvard, slamming the university for its response to the anti-Israel letter signed by student organizations and amplifying plagiarism allegations against Gay.
“In the securities world, the SEC would come in an prosecute a company that made it this difficult to vote for an alternative slate,” Ackman wrote. “Now you understand why governance at Harvard is a disaster and why change is desperately needed.”
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment on Ackman’s critique.
Typically, candidates for the 30-member Harvard Board of Overseers are nominated by the university’s alumni association. In an effort to shake things up at Harvard, Ackman is backing a slate of four outsiders, all of whom are US military veterans between the ages of 36 and 38.
These write-in candidates can only appear on the ballot if they gather enough signatures – more than 3,200 – by January 31. In recent years, Harvard has significantly increased this signature requirement, effectively making it harder for outsiders to get on the ballot.
Lessin, the former Facebook exec who is not part of the Ackman-backed slate, has expressed concern for weeks about the nominating process, arguing it is in effect disenfranchising alumni.
“As with a lot of things, Bill is a loud voice. He’s right on some of the pieces but sometimes overstates the case slash puts malice or intention where there might not be any,” Lessin told CNN on Monday in a phone interview, referring to Ackman. “I don’t think there is some secret plot to disenfranchise people.”
Still, Lessin said he has hundreds of emails from Harvard alumni saying they want to vote for him but have been unable to do so because they’ve been blocked by the university’s online user credential system.
Lessin is hoping the high-profile support of Zuckerberg, as well as other business executives like Josh Kushner and Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin, will help get the more than 3,000 signatures required.
“Mark is someone I’ve known a very long time. He’s built one of the most iconic companies in the history of the world,” Lessin told CNN. “He just asked what he could do to help. It’s not more complicated than that.”
During the virtual event on Friday, Zuckerberg said Lessin is the “type of person” he’d want governing Harvard.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2005 after launching Facebook. In 2017, the university awarded Zuckerberg an honorary degree.
“I would feel a lot more confident in the future of the institution if Sam or more people like him were involved in this,” Zuckerberg said.
