Investor who pushed for Harvard president’s departure sees his wife accused of plagiarism
Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the latest weapon in the raging battle for the leadership and direction of elite universities.
For weeks, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has been campaigning on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard president amid accusations of plagiarism from other scientists and of not taking a strong enough stand against anti-Semitism on campus.
But that battle came to light after Business Insider, an online publication, posted similar plagiarism allegations against Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer, who has a Ph.D. in design calculation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Business insider said Friday that Dr. Oxman “had stolen sentences and entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scientists and technical documents in her academic writings.”
Those examples came a day after her dissertation publication reported several errors in attributing the work of others. Dr. Oxman apologized for these mistakes on Thursday and said it was only a few paragraphs of a 330-page dissertation.
On Friday evening, before Business Insider had posted its latest story, Mr. Ackman posted on social media that the publication had contacted his wife about the recent findings, but that he and Dr. Oxman, a former professor at MIT, had had no contact about this. time to investigate the veracity of the allegations.
“It is unfortunate that my actions to address issues in higher education have led to these attacks on my family,” Mr. Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital, said on X, the social media platform, where he has one million followers .
In response, he wrote, he would begin a plagiarism survey of all current MIT faculty members; Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT; and the university’s governing body, and would share the results with the public. “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” Mr. Ackman wrote.
He posted later on Friday that he would also review the work of reporters at Business Insider.
It was unclear whether he referred to Dr. Kornbluth had coined because his wife had received her doctorate. at the university or because of what he perceived as Dr. Kornbluth’s inadequate condemnation of anti-Semitism at a congressional hearing last month.
Mr. Ackman declined to comment beyond his posts on that is essential for the nation.” safety, prosperity and quality of life.”
Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant who also runs the website Plagiarism Today, said he was concerned about the “weaponization of plagiarism.”
“I fear we will see a sharp increase in sloppy analyzes that attempt to blow minor issues out of proportion or show plagiarism where the evidence does not support it,” he said.
Business Insider’s first salvo against Dr. Oxman sounded Thursday, two days after Dr. Gay resigned, and the allegations appeared similar to those against Dr. Gay.
Dr. Oxman apologized the same day.
“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my colleagues and those who came before me,” she wrote on X.
In the age of AI, accusations of plagiarism could be made more easily and could easily be used as a weapon by either side in a dispute.
“Without a doubt, plagiarism has become a weapon on both sides, just as the criminal justice system has become a weapon,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who had his own fight over plagiarism charges years ago and was acquitted by Harvard . “Everything is weaponized in America these days.”
Dr. Gay was accused of plagiarism in her 1997 Harvard dissertation and other academic articles. She acknowledged a handful of citation errors and requested corrections, Harvard said. The university’s board said it had convened a three-member independent review board that cleared her of academic misconduct. But it has refused to publicly reveal the names of the scholars.
Mr. Ackman was instrumental in discrediting Dr. Gay, by regularly criticizing her.
After Dr. Gay stepped down as president, Mr. Ackman criticized the decision to keep her on the Harvard faculty. “There would be nothing wrong with her remaining on the faculty if she did not have serious plagiarism problems,” Mr. Ackman said wrote on X. He added that rewarding her “with a well-paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
After Business Insider on Thursday reported the allegations against Dr. Oxman, Mr. Ackman wrote on
In the first article, Business Insider accused Dr. Oxman of plagiarizing “several paragraphs” of her 2010 dissertation at MIT, “including at least one passage taken directly from other writers without attribution.”
On Thursday, Dr. Oxman, a former professor at MIT’s Media Lab, that she had cited sources but “omitted quotation marks for certain work I used” in four paragraphs of her 330-page dissertation.
Failure to include quotation marks is a “violation of MIT’s Handbook of Academic Integrityboth as it is written now and as it was then,” Business insider wrote.
Dr. Oxman also apologized Thursday for paraphrasing a sentence from a book by Claus Mattheck in her dissertation and not citing him.
Dr. Oxman was portrayed in a 2018 profile in The New York Times as a brilliant, idiosyncratic scientist who founded a discipline she called material ecology, which worked “with natural organisms such as slime molds, monarchs and silkworms, to create extraordinary objects and structures . who do all kinds of extraordinary things.” She was born in Israel and was a first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force. She and Mr. Ackman married in 2019.
Kirsten Noyes research contributed.