Bill Ackman said Harvard University’s endowment is heading for a painful financial reckoning as it weighs selling some of its private equity holdings while battling the Trump administration over federal research funding.
A sale of private equity assets will only come at a “meaningful discount” to their valuation in Harvard’s $53 billion endowment, Ackman said Tuesday at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Other private equity investments should be marked down accordingly, he said.
“The reality of Harvard is it’s in a financial crisis right now. It may not yet know it. But it is,” said Ackman, the billionaire founder of Pershing Square Capital Management and Harvard alumnus who has become an outspoken critic of the university. “It’s called a $53 billion endowment. It’s probably a $40 billion endowment.”
Harvard is in advanced talks to sell about $1 billion in private equity fund stakes, Bloomberg News reported last month, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The school has allocated almost 40% of its endowment to private equity, according to an annual report for the year ended in June. Ackman assailed the fund as “highly illiquid, poorly invested.”
Harvard Management Co., which runs the endowment, declined to comment.
In comments earlier this week, Ackman singled out Penny Pritzker, a former US commerce secretary who leads Harvard Corp., the body that oversees the school, for what he described as mismanaging the university, including its finances and relationship with the government.
At the Milken conference, Ackman dismissed Harvard as “a bunch of old buildings, some nice real estate,” and accused the school of turning a blind eye to administrative bloat.
Harvard’s financial challenges have grown more acute this year as the Trump administration scrapped $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, claiming it failed to enforce civil rights laws to protect Jewish students. In the latest escalation, the Trump administration said Monday it would halt new federal research grants to Harvard.
The university has fired back, questioning the administration’s interest in working jointly to confront antisemitism and suing the government for freezing federal funding. Harvard has said the scrapping of federal contracts has imperiled scientific research.
Ackman said individual scientists deserve credit for research advances at Harvard, saying they could leave to join other universities.
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