(Bloomberg) -- Sam Lessin knows he’s running out of time. 

The venture capitalist, who’s founded companies and worked in a senior role for his college friend Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, is emailing, making calls and fielding reporter questions. It’s all part of a campaign to win the right to challenge for a seat on Harvard University’s alumni board.

It’s a remarkable level of effort, for what is traditionally an obscure, unheralded role with ill-defined responsibilities and no clear power. 

But these are remarkable times for the oldest and richest college in America. 

Lessin, 40, has until 5 p.m. on Wednesday to persuade his fellow Harvard grads to nominate him to be a write-in candidate for the board of overseers. It requires about 3,300 online signatures and he’s not sure exactly how many he has. So he’s urging his network to trawl their address books and ask 10 people to submit his name.

Lessin’s request is reminiscent of student politics, but his aims are significantly larger — he hopes that if he can get elected to this group, he can then challenge Harvard’s powerful board, led by former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and ultimately influence the direction of the school.

“Harvard needs to return to academic excellence,” said Lessin, who shored up support on a Zoom meeting last week from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. “Harvard needs to get back to the core mission.” 

Harvard has been pummeled in recent months — by Congress, alumni, wealthy donors, its former president and students. Condemnation started in the aftermath of Oct. 7 when a group of students solely blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack on the Jewish state and the school failed to quickly respond. The criticisms have broadened to Harvard’s approach to combating antisemitism, its support of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and the selective enforcement of free speech. 

Ken Griffin, one of Harvard’s biggest donors, said this week he would no longer give money to the school unless he sees fundamental change, accusing Harvard and elite colleges of producing “whiny snowflakes” instead of the future leaders of America. 

Read More: Griffin Rips Harvard, Says Colleges Spawn ‘Whiny Snowflakes’

Lessin isn’t the only one running for five anticipated vacancies on the 30-person board. There’s an official Harvard alumni group of nominated candidates that includes a judge, business professor and the executive director of the Boston Ballet. 

Another write-in group has the backing of billionaire Bill Ackman, who made it his mission to force out president Claudine Gay. That four-person slate includes several military vets under the title “Renew Harvard.” 

Ackman has used his platform on X, where he has more than 1 million followers, to support the nominees and bash Harvard. In recent days he’s slammed the university for raising the requirement from 600 to 3,300 signatures and a difficult online registration process. Ackman has accused Harvard of “election interference” and creating a “labyrinth of complexity” to make it harder to effect change. 

Lessin also addressed how some alumni have struggled to navigate the process. 

“First, you are not alone and I will be addressing it with a ton of evidence of how broken this system is,” Lessin wrote in an email titled Final Hours to Vote for Harvard. 

Even if they get on the ballot, the election begins April 1 with voting lasting more than a month. 

The board’s role is high-minded. Responsibilities include helping the president and other senior officers “fulfill their executive responsibility.” Another is to advance Harvard’s efforts to secure the “human, academic, physical, and financial resources needed to achieve its mission.”

Lessin said he became interested in the role after Gay testified before the House Education and the Workforce Committee on Dec. 5. She resigned less than a month later, unable to shake off the disastrous testimony and accusations of plagiarism in her scholarship.

“I was pretty sad at the failures you’re seeing from the leadership, and I thought about how to get involved,” he said. “The Corporation is a governing body. They have a serious job to do.”

Lessin said its leaders need to be more accountable and governance should be run by a group that isn’t just “honorary boosters.” The board currently comprises a dozen people drawn from finance, academia and the legal world, including Pritzker, former American Express Co. head Ken Chenault, investor and Harvard Treasurer Timothy Barakett and interim president Alan Garber. 

Barakett and Garber also serve on the overseer board, which includes Mark Carney, chair of Bloomberg Inc.’s board and a former Bank of England governor, and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic. 

Lessin says the campaign has been a grind, but there’s been value in it. 

“It’s been dramatically more work than I expected it to be,” said Lessin, who grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, and now lives in the San Francisco area with his wife, Harvard classmate Jessica Lessin, and their children. “It’s been actually really fun to reconnect with a ton of classmates and interesting people who I didn’t know before.”

There’s one vote though he can’t get. While Zuckerberg gave Lessin his endorsement, the billionaire can’t actually participate since he never graduated. 

(Updates with Lessin email request in 13th paragraph.)

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