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"I am fine (with speaking English). After all, I am a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, in Irvine. So it's not that I mind English, but I don't want it to be my primary language, OK? This is how I put it: For me, and for everybody, if you know all the languages of the world, and you don't know your mother tongue, that's enslavement, mental enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment." "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." (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss with additional reporting by Gram Slattery and Jarrett Renshaw Editing by Marguerita Choy) BEVERLY HILLS, May 6 (Reuters) - Billionaire investor Bill Ackman on Tuesday said Harvard University, one of the nation's oldest and wealthiest, should not be entitled to taxpayer funds when the school wastes money on what he calls "administrative bloat." "On the one hand, I am grateful to be here and to have a job at a California university, as a distinguished professor.

I appreciate that. But I was coming from a country which was a white seller colony, and I can't forget that when I'm here. People don't even talk about it here. They talk about it as if it were normal. So we talk about the American Revolution. But is it not Native Americans who were colonized? So I am very fascinated by this normalized abnormality." Ng~ug~i has published a handful of books over the past decade, including the novel "The Perfect Nine" and the prison memoir "Wrestling with the Devil," and was otherwise in the news in 2022 when his son, M~ukoma wa Ng~ug~i, Online Writing 2nd Grade Program alleged that he had physically abused his first wife, Nyambura, who died in 1996 ("I can say categorically it´s not true," Ng~ug~i wa Thiong'o responds).

His U.S. publisher, The New Press, has just released "Decolonizing Language," which the author praises as a "beautiful" title. "Decolonizing Language" includes essays and poems written between 2000 and 2019, with subjects ranging from language and education to such friends and heroes as Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author whose 1958 novel, "Things Fall Apart," is considered by many the starting point for modern African literature.

Achebe also helped launch Ng~ug~i's career by showing a manuscript of an early novel, "Weep Not, Child," to publisher William Heinemann, who featured it in the landmark African Writers series. "In Kenya, even today, we have children and their parents who cannot speak their mother tongues, or the parents know their mother tongues and don't want their children to know their mother tongue. They are very happy when they speak English and even happier when their children don't know their mother tongue.

That's why I call it mental colonization." Harvard responded that the administration letter doubles down on demands that would impose "unprecedented and improper control" over the university and makes new threats to "illegally" withhold funding for lifesaving research.