Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg fail to find candidates for Harvard Board of Overseers

It’s hard to get into Harvard, even if you’ve done it before.

Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, and Bill Ackman, head of the Pershing Square hedge fund, discovered this in their failed attempt to add dissident candidates to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, one of the university’s two governing bodies.

The candidates, a slate of four endorsed by Ackman and one candidate endorsed by Zuckerberg, said Friday that they had not gathered enough signatures on the petition to appear on the April ballot for the board elections.

“We are disappointed, but we greatly appreciate all the support,” Zoe Bedell, an assistant U.S. attorney who ran on Ackman’s ticket, said in a statement Friday. “We hope to try again next year.”

Its failure raised the question of how much support existed for Ackman’s persistent campaign against Harvard’s leadership over the past few months.

Ackman touted the candidates’ military experience, and Zuckerberg’s candidate, Sam Lessin, is a venture capitalist and former Facebook employee (as Meta was formerly known).

But they couldn’t overcome the first hurdle: collecting 3,238 signatures from Harvard alumni to get their names on the April election ballot.

On Friday night, Lessin posted on social media that he had received 2,901 write-in nominations, 337 short of the 3,238 required.

“As far as I know, no write-in candidate had more,” Lessin wrote in a message to his followers posted on X on Friday night.

He blamed technical difficulties in Harvard’s petition process. “I easily have 337 and many more in my inbox from alumni who tried to submit but were blocked!”

The candidates ran on a platform of protecting free speech, reforming governance, protecting against anti-Semitism and ensuring academic rigor. These problems had boiled over at Harvard in recent months, when Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president after fighting accusations of plagiarism and condoning anti-Semitism.

The 30-member Board of Overseers serves primarily as an advisory group to the more powerful Harvard Corporation. But the supervisors do have veto power over presidential appointments, a critical power since Harvard will conduct a search for Dr. Gay’s replacement. And your consent is also required for new members of the Corporation, which currently has 12 members and one vacancy.

Only Harvard alumni can serve as supervisors, and only alumni can vote in the annual board elections. There are five vacant seats for six-year terms.

Ackman, while trying to gather signatures, complained bitterly that Harvard had made the process opaque and cumbersome. Alumni had to navigate a somewhat confusing online system, which required them to register at least 24 hours before the deadline to sign a petition. Ackman said Harvard appeared to have changed the format just days before the signing deadline.

“If this isn’t election interference, I don’t know what is,” Ackman said. published in X before the signatures were counted.

Harvard, Ackman and Zuckerberg declined to comment after the results came out.

Supervisory candidates are traditionally nominated through the Harvard alumni association. But petition candidates have appeared at the polls before, particularly those who called for divestment from the fossil fuel industry or from apartheid-era South Africa.

There have been notable losers: Barack Obama got enough petition it signed in 1991, on a divestment platform in South Africa, but did not get a seat.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are major donors to Harvard, most recently to artificial intelligence research. They were uploaded to YouTube introduce Lessin, whom Zuckerberg met at Harvard. Dr. Chan, a Harvard graduate, is eligible to vote in the election, but Mr. Zuckerberg, who dropped out, is not.

In his video discussion, Mr. Lessin, Class of 2005, argued that supervisors could take a more active role. “They have a veto over a lot of important, high-level things,” he said, adding, “They haven’t used it much lately.”

Ackman’s list consisted of Ms. Bedell, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia; Logan Leslie, founder of Northern Rock, an investment firm; Alec Williams, a mutual fund manager in Boise, Idaho; and Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

Bedell said the list emerged from a core group of friends with a commitment to service. Ackman had hired one of them, Williams, and they asked him for support, she said.

Even if they had managed to appear at the polls, only two of the petition candidates could have won seats. Harvard has imposed a limit of six petition-nominated supervisors at any given time, and there are already four on the board. Voting is scheduled to begin April 1 and last until mid-May.

Another hopeful petition, Harvey Silverglate, co-founder of FIRE, a free speech group, received 457 signatures in his third attempt since 2009 to appear on the ballot.

Silverglate said that without access to a master list of Harvard alumni, it was very difficult to tell people about his candidacy. “This was an insider game,” she said. He plans to run again next year.