HOISTED BY HIS OWN PETARD
Bill Ackman says he'll review all MIT professors for plagiarism
His move comes after BI reported on several instances of plagiarism in his wife's academic work.
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert
Jan 5, 2024
Brian Snyder/Reuters
Bill Ackman is ramping up his search for plagiarism and pledged to review all MIT professors' work.
Bill Ackman is ramping up his search for plagiarism and pledged to review all MIT professors' work.
His move comes after BI reported on several instances of plagiarism in his wife's academic work.
Ackman led the charge to get Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign over plagiarism accusations.
Bill Ackman is ramping up his crusade against plagiarism to include the work of all Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors after Business Insider reported on several instances of plagiarism found in academic work by his wife, Neri Oxman, a tenured MIT professor.
MIT has not yet commented on the accusations against Oxman. However, a representative for the university told Business Insider "our leaders remain focused on ensuring the vital work of the people of MIT continues, work that is essential to the nation's security, prosperity and quality of life."
Ackman recently spearheaded the campaign to get Harvard's former president, Claudine Gay, to resign from her position over allegations that she had plagiarized in her own academic papers. The push to get her to leave her post came after Ackman and others condemned Gay's response to the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel.
Gay resigned Tuesday following weeks of criticism.
"It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family," Ackman said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday. "This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews. We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism."
My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.
Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story…— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 5, 2024
A representative for Ackman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
In December, Ackman began calling for Gay's resignation, as well as that of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and MIT's Sally Kornbluth following their testimony before Congress about handling antisemitism on campus.
Critics derided the testimony from the elite schools' leaders as being insufficient to address antisemitism on campus, which students say has increased in the wake of Israel's declaration of war on Hamas.
Magill resigned on December 9, just four days after her testimony in which she stated that if antisemitic speech "turns into conduct, it can be harassment." Donors to Penn and the board of Wharton, the university's business school, had called for her resignation. No known accusations of plagiarism were involved in her decision to step down.
Kornbluth remains in her role as of Friday, announcing the day after Gay's resignation a plan for four "new steps" for progress at MIT, including improving student disciplinary processes and making sure its DEI programs effectively meet campus needs.
Kornbluth did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
Bill Ackman’s wife is accused of plagiarizing part of her dissertation
Allison Morrow, CNN
Fri, January 5, 2024
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Neri Oxman, an academic and wife of billionaire investor Bill Ackman, plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation at MIT, according to a report from Business Insider.
Ackman has become one of the most prominent critics amplifying a series of accusations, including plagiarism, against Harvard’s leader, who resigned this week.
The Business Insider report, which CNN could not independently verify, said Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.” The report “found at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”
Oxman, an American–Israeli designer, wrote a more than 800-word response to Business Insider on social media Thursday. Oxman acknowledged that there were four paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation in which she correctly cited her sources but “did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”
Omitting quotation marks is a violation of MIT’s academic integrity handbook, “both as it is currently written and as it was at the time,” Business Insider wrote.
Oxman said that Business Insider was unwilling to give her sufficient time to check a source in one of the disputed paragraphs because the source was not online.
“When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections,” she said in the statement.
The plagiarism accusations lobbed at former Harvard president Claudine Gay were similarly technical — many related to “inadequate citations,” according to Harvard. Gay says she promptly requested corrections in her writings upon learning of the errors and denies she ever claimed credit for others’ research.
One of the scholars Gay quoted improperly, David Canon, has spoken out in her defense.
“I am not at all concerned about the passages … This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism,” Canon told CNN.
But Ackman took a firm line on the right-wing-led plagiarism accusations against Gay, calling them “serious” grounds to fire her.
In response to the Business Insider report, Ackman defended Oxman on X.
“Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote.
A representative told CNN that Ackman and Oxman have no further comment beyond their posts on X.
Oxman is a prestigious figure in architecture and design circles, and she is credited with pioneering an interdisciplinary approach called “material ecology.”
She became a tenured member of MIT’s faculty in 2017, though she left the school in 2020 after she married Ackman and moved to New York City, according to her X post on Thursday.
— CNN’s Matt Egan contributed reporting.
Allison Morrow, CNN
Fri, January 5, 2024
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Neri Oxman, an academic and wife of billionaire investor Bill Ackman, plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation at MIT, according to a report from Business Insider.
Ackman has become one of the most prominent critics amplifying a series of accusations, including plagiarism, against Harvard’s leader, who resigned this week.
The Business Insider report, which CNN could not independently verify, said Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.” The report “found at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”
Oxman, an American–Israeli designer, wrote a more than 800-word response to Business Insider on social media Thursday. Oxman acknowledged that there were four paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation in which she correctly cited her sources but “did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”
Omitting quotation marks is a violation of MIT’s academic integrity handbook, “both as it is currently written and as it was at the time,” Business Insider wrote.
Oxman said that Business Insider was unwilling to give her sufficient time to check a source in one of the disputed paragraphs because the source was not online.
“When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections,” she said in the statement.
The plagiarism accusations lobbed at former Harvard president Claudine Gay were similarly technical — many related to “inadequate citations,” according to Harvard. Gay says she promptly requested corrections in her writings upon learning of the errors and denies she ever claimed credit for others’ research.
One of the scholars Gay quoted improperly, David Canon, has spoken out in her defense.
“I am not at all concerned about the passages … This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism,” Canon told CNN.
But Ackman took a firm line on the right-wing-led plagiarism accusations against Gay, calling them “serious” grounds to fire her.
In response to the Business Insider report, Ackman defended Oxman on X.
“Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote.
A representative told CNN that Ackman and Oxman have no further comment beyond their posts on X.
Oxman is a prestigious figure in architecture and design circles, and she is credited with pioneering an interdisciplinary approach called “material ecology.”
She became a tenured member of MIT’s faculty in 2017, though she left the school in 2020 after she married Ackman and moved to New York City, according to her X post on Thursday.
— CNN’s Matt Egan contributed reporting.
Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation after BI report
Katherine Long
Thu, January 4, 2024
Business Insider
"The basic building block of the bone family of materials is the mineralized collagen fibril," Weiner and Wagner wrote in their paper. "It is composed of the fibrous protein collagen in a structural form that is also present in skin, tendon, and a variety of other soft tissues. The collagen constitutes the main component of a three-dimensional matrix into which, and in some cases onto which, the mineral forms."
Business Insider
That passage was included in its entirety in Oxman's dissertation. She cited Weiner and Wagner but did not include the passage in quotation marks, a violation of MIT's academic-integrity handbook, both as it is currently written and as it was at the time.
Business Insider
Similarly, in most of the other instances that BI identified in which Oxman lifted passages from other works, she cited the author but did not put quotation marks around the plagiarized material.
Business Insider
MIT's academic-integrity handbook notes that authors must either "use quotation marks around the words and cite the source," or "paraphrase or summarize acceptably and cite the source." Oxman published her thesis in 2010; identical language appeared in MIT's handbook at least as far back as 2007.
From MIT's academic-integrity handbook.MIT
Oxman also took a passage from Mattheck's book without attribution and inaccurately attributed a passage she lifted from the Royal Society of London paper to two different sources.
Business Insider
She also recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013. While re-using material isn't a formal violation of MIT's academic-integrity code, a guide to "ethical writing" recommended by the university to its scholars and students warns against it.
Ackman said Harvard president's plagiarism made her unfit to work
Like Oxman, Gay was found to have lifted passages from other academics' work without using quotation marks while citing the authors.
Gay's plagiarism was seen by some academics, including many of those she plagiarized, as relatively inconsequential.
George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the people Gay plagiarized, told the New York Post that what Gay did "happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism."
"I am glad she read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to her readers," Andrews continued.
But for Bill Ackman, the plagiarism wasn't only cause for Gay's immediate ouster as Harvard's president — it also warranted her total removal from its faculty. In the weeks leading up to her resignation as president, he posted more than a dozen times about her plagiarism on X.
Ackman, a Harvard graduate worth roughly $4 billion, has been a prolific donor to the school. His most substantial donation, of $25 million in 2014, supported the expansion of the economics department and the endowment of three professorships. He also made a smaller contribution to the rowing crew, a team he was part of as an undergraduate.
Ackman and Oxman married in 2019 and their first child was born the same year. In 2015, Ackman purchased a luxury apartment in New York's swanky One57 building, which Oxman also lists as an address, according to public records. The couple are listed as trustees for the Pershing Square Foundation, a charitable organization.
Ackman began campaigning for Gay's removal in the wake of widespread protests on Harvard's campus related to Israel's invasion of Gaza in October. Ackman decried the protests as antisemitic and accused Gay of not doing enough to protect either Jewish students or "academic freedom."
"President Gay catalyzed an explosion of antisemitism and hate on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard's history," he wrote last month on X.
Ackman also intimated that he had inside information that Gay had only been offered the job as Harvard's president because she is a Black woman. Gay became the school's first Black president and the second woman president in July.
On X, he wrote that he had been informed that Harvard would not choose a president "who did not meet the DEI office's criteria." Gay, he implied, would most likely "not have obtained" the role of president "were it not for a fat finger on the scale."
Gay's plagiarism was surfaced by the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who was forthright about his plans to "smuggle" the news of the plagiarism "into the media apparatus" to lend credence to those calling for Gay's resignation.
Harvard's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, initially stood by Gay's handling of the on-campus protests and her plagiarism. In recent weeks, though, pressure on Gay to resign has mounted, spearheaded in no small part by Ackman.
Gay resigned as Harvard's president on Tuesday. In a letter to the Harvard community, Gay wrote that she was stepping down in part due to "personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus."
But Ackman remains on the hunt for one more head. Of the three university presidents who testified in front of Congress in a disastrous early December session, two of them — Gay and Magill — are no longer in their posts. One remains: Kornbluth, the president of MIT, where Oxman wrote her thesis and worked from 2010 to 2020.
When a user on X asked Ackman why he wasn't going after Kornbluth, Ackman's response was to the point.
"Stay tuned @MIT," Ackman replied.
Katherine Long
Thu, January 4, 2024
BUSINESS INSIDER
Neri Oxman at an event in 2017.Riccardo Savi / Getty Images
Neri Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT, apologized for parts of her dissertation.
Business Insider found that Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, had multiple instances of plagiarism.
"I regret and apologize for these errors," she wrote on X, and said she would update her work.
Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.
BI identified four instances in Oxman's dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars' work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been "the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors."
Ackman has been on a crusade to force Gay to resign, which she did this week. Revelations that she had plagiarized portions of academic articles, publicized by far-right activist Christopher Rufo, added fuel to his calls for Gay to step down after protests against Israel's war in Gaza rocked Harvard's campus.
Ackman said Gay had mishandled the student protests and created a culture of antisemitism at the elite Cambridge institution. Gay's plagiarism underscored her lack of fitness to lead the institution, or even to teach at Harvard, Ackman wrote on X, calling Gay's plagiarism "very serious."
Oxman, an architect and artist, received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2010 and became a tenured professor there in 2017 before leaving the university in June 2021, an MIT spokesperson said. Her failure to use quotation marks to identify passages of text from other sources meets the definition of plagiarism as spelled out in MIT's academic integrity handbook.
Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to "request that MIT make any necessary corrections."
"As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come," she wrote.
Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on "innovation in product, architectural, and urban design," she wrote on X. "OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year."
Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider's article.
"Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate," he wrote.
Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism
Katherine Long, Jack Newsham
Thu, January 4, 2024
BUSINESS INSIDER
Patrick McMullan/Steven Ferdman/Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, resigned after conservative activists revealed she had plagiarized.
The hedge fund manager and prominent Harvard donor Bill Ackman helped lead the charge against Gay.
BI analyzed Ackman's wife's doctoral dissertation and found numerous instances of plagiarism.
The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel's bombardment of Gaza on Harvard's campus.
An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.
Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.
Her husband, Ackman, has taken a hardline stance on plagiarism. On Wednesday, responding to news that Gay is set to remain a part of Harvard's faculty after she resigned as president, he wrote on X that Gay should be fired completely due to "serious plagiarism issues."
"Students are forced to withdraw for much less," Ackman continued. "Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard."
An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as The New York Times and Elle. She has collaborated with Björk, exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.
In 2019, emails uncovered by the Boston Globe showed Ackman pressured MIT to keep Oxman's name out of a brewing scandal over an original sculpture she gave to Jeffrey Epstein in thanks for a $125,000 donation to her lab.
While MIT and Pershing Square Foundation continue to describe her as a professor in online biographies, a spokesperson for Pershing Square Capital Management said she left MIT in 2020 "after she got married, became a mother, and moved to New York City." After this article was published, MIT responded to a prior request for comment, writing that Oxman left MIT in June 2021.
Her husband, meanwhile, has been vocal about wanting to see MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, fired since Kornbluth testified on December 5 in front of a congressional panel examining how university presidents handled student protests against Israel's war in Gaza. Kornbluth said in her opening statement that she didn't support "speech codes" that would restrict what students say during protests.
Ackman attacked Kornbluth's testimony, as well as that of Gay and the University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, as tantamount to supporting antisemitism. He also criticized the presidents' stated goals of improving campus diversity, equity, and inclusion as "violations of basic American principles."
"To the @MIT governing boards: Let's make a deal. If you promptly terminate President Kornbluth, I promise I won't write you a letter," Ackman posted on X on December 10, referring to an open letter he sent to Harvard's governing board criticizing Gay's leadership.
Both Oxman and Ackman declined to comment when reached by Business Insider. Both posted lengthy responses on X to the piece shortly after it was published.
Multiple instances of plagiarism from a 2010 dissertation
In Oxman's dissertation, completed at MIT, she plagiarized a 1998 paper by two Israeli scholars, Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner, a 2006 article published in the journal Nature by the New York University historian Peder Anker, and a 1995 paper published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of London. She also lifted from a book published in 1998 by the German physicist Claus Mattheck and, in a more classical mode of plagiarism, copied one paragraph from Mattheck without any quotation or attribution.
Neri Oxman at an event in 2017.Riccardo Savi / Getty Images
Neri Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT, apologized for parts of her dissertation.
Business Insider found that Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, had multiple instances of plagiarism.
"I regret and apologize for these errors," she wrote on X, and said she would update her work.
Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.
BI identified four instances in Oxman's dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars' work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been "the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors."
Ackman has been on a crusade to force Gay to resign, which she did this week. Revelations that she had plagiarized portions of academic articles, publicized by far-right activist Christopher Rufo, added fuel to his calls for Gay to step down after protests against Israel's war in Gaza rocked Harvard's campus.
Ackman said Gay had mishandled the student protests and created a culture of antisemitism at the elite Cambridge institution. Gay's plagiarism underscored her lack of fitness to lead the institution, or even to teach at Harvard, Ackman wrote on X, calling Gay's plagiarism "very serious."
Oxman, an architect and artist, received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2010 and became a tenured professor there in 2017 before leaving the university in June 2021, an MIT spokesperson said. Her failure to use quotation marks to identify passages of text from other sources meets the definition of plagiarism as spelled out in MIT's academic integrity handbook.
Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to "request that MIT make any necessary corrections."
"As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come," she wrote.
Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on "innovation in product, architectural, and urban design," she wrote on X. "OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year."
Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider's article.
"Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate," he wrote.
Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism
Katherine Long, Jack Newsham
Thu, January 4, 2024
BUSINESS INSIDER
Patrick McMullan/Steven Ferdman/Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, resigned after conservative activists revealed she had plagiarized.
The hedge fund manager and prominent Harvard donor Bill Ackman helped lead the charge against Gay.
BI analyzed Ackman's wife's doctoral dissertation and found numerous instances of plagiarism.
The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel's bombardment of Gaza on Harvard's campus.
An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.
Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.
Her husband, Ackman, has taken a hardline stance on plagiarism. On Wednesday, responding to news that Gay is set to remain a part of Harvard's faculty after she resigned as president, he wrote on X that Gay should be fired completely due to "serious plagiarism issues."
"Students are forced to withdraw for much less," Ackman continued. "Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard."
An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as The New York Times and Elle. She has collaborated with Björk, exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.
In 2019, emails uncovered by the Boston Globe showed Ackman pressured MIT to keep Oxman's name out of a brewing scandal over an original sculpture she gave to Jeffrey Epstein in thanks for a $125,000 donation to her lab.
While MIT and Pershing Square Foundation continue to describe her as a professor in online biographies, a spokesperson for Pershing Square Capital Management said she left MIT in 2020 "after she got married, became a mother, and moved to New York City." After this article was published, MIT responded to a prior request for comment, writing that Oxman left MIT in June 2021.
Her husband, meanwhile, has been vocal about wanting to see MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, fired since Kornbluth testified on December 5 in front of a congressional panel examining how university presidents handled student protests against Israel's war in Gaza. Kornbluth said in her opening statement that she didn't support "speech codes" that would restrict what students say during protests.
Ackman attacked Kornbluth's testimony, as well as that of Gay and the University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, as tantamount to supporting antisemitism. He also criticized the presidents' stated goals of improving campus diversity, equity, and inclusion as "violations of basic American principles."
"To the @MIT governing boards: Let's make a deal. If you promptly terminate President Kornbluth, I promise I won't write you a letter," Ackman posted on X on December 10, referring to an open letter he sent to Harvard's governing board criticizing Gay's leadership.
Both Oxman and Ackman declined to comment when reached by Business Insider. Both posted lengthy responses on X to the piece shortly after it was published.
Multiple instances of plagiarism from a 2010 dissertation
In Oxman's dissertation, completed at MIT, she plagiarized a 1998 paper by two Israeli scholars, Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner, a 2006 article published in the journal Nature by the New York University historian Peder Anker, and a 1995 paper published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of London. She also lifted from a book published in 1998 by the German physicist Claus Mattheck and, in a more classical mode of plagiarism, copied one paragraph from Mattheck without any quotation or attribution.
Business Insider
"The basic building block of the bone family of materials is the mineralized collagen fibril," Weiner and Wagner wrote in their paper. "It is composed of the fibrous protein collagen in a structural form that is also present in skin, tendon, and a variety of other soft tissues. The collagen constitutes the main component of a three-dimensional matrix into which, and in some cases onto which, the mineral forms."
Business Insider
That passage was included in its entirety in Oxman's dissertation. She cited Weiner and Wagner but did not include the passage in quotation marks, a violation of MIT's academic-integrity handbook, both as it is currently written and as it was at the time.
Business Insider
Similarly, in most of the other instances that BI identified in which Oxman lifted passages from other works, she cited the author but did not put quotation marks around the plagiarized material.
Business Insider
MIT's academic-integrity handbook notes that authors must either "use quotation marks around the words and cite the source," or "paraphrase or summarize acceptably and cite the source." Oxman published her thesis in 2010; identical language appeared in MIT's handbook at least as far back as 2007.
From MIT's academic-integrity handbook.MIT
Oxman also took a passage from Mattheck's book without attribution and inaccurately attributed a passage she lifted from the Royal Society of London paper to two different sources.
Business Insider
She also recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013. While re-using material isn't a formal violation of MIT's academic-integrity code, a guide to "ethical writing" recommended by the university to its scholars and students warns against it.
Ackman said Harvard president's plagiarism made her unfit to work
Like Oxman, Gay was found to have lifted passages from other academics' work without using quotation marks while citing the authors.
Gay's plagiarism was seen by some academics, including many of those she plagiarized, as relatively inconsequential.
George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the people Gay plagiarized, told the New York Post that what Gay did "happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism."
"I am glad she read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to her readers," Andrews continued.
But for Bill Ackman, the plagiarism wasn't only cause for Gay's immediate ouster as Harvard's president — it also warranted her total removal from its faculty. In the weeks leading up to her resignation as president, he posted more than a dozen times about her plagiarism on X.
Ackman, a Harvard graduate worth roughly $4 billion, has been a prolific donor to the school. His most substantial donation, of $25 million in 2014, supported the expansion of the economics department and the endowment of three professorships. He also made a smaller contribution to the rowing crew, a team he was part of as an undergraduate.
Ackman and Oxman married in 2019 and their first child was born the same year. In 2015, Ackman purchased a luxury apartment in New York's swanky One57 building, which Oxman also lists as an address, according to public records. The couple are listed as trustees for the Pershing Square Foundation, a charitable organization.
Ackman began campaigning for Gay's removal in the wake of widespread protests on Harvard's campus related to Israel's invasion of Gaza in October. Ackman decried the protests as antisemitic and accused Gay of not doing enough to protect either Jewish students or "academic freedom."
"President Gay catalyzed an explosion of antisemitism and hate on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard's history," he wrote last month on X.
Ackman also intimated that he had inside information that Gay had only been offered the job as Harvard's president because she is a Black woman. Gay became the school's first Black president and the second woman president in July.
On X, he wrote that he had been informed that Harvard would not choose a president "who did not meet the DEI office's criteria." Gay, he implied, would most likely "not have obtained" the role of president "were it not for a fat finger on the scale."
Gay's plagiarism was surfaced by the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who was forthright about his plans to "smuggle" the news of the plagiarism "into the media apparatus" to lend credence to those calling for Gay's resignation.
Harvard's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, initially stood by Gay's handling of the on-campus protests and her plagiarism. In recent weeks, though, pressure on Gay to resign has mounted, spearheaded in no small part by Ackman.
Gay resigned as Harvard's president on Tuesday. In a letter to the Harvard community, Gay wrote that she was stepping down in part due to "personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus."
But Ackman remains on the hunt for one more head. Of the three university presidents who testified in front of Congress in a disastrous early December session, two of them — Gay and Magill — are no longer in their posts. One remains: Kornbluth, the president of MIT, where Oxman wrote her thesis and worked from 2010 to 2020.
When a user on X asked Ackman why he wasn't going after Kornbluth, Ackman's response was to the point.
"Stay tuned @MIT," Ackman replied.
Israeli wife of billionaire who pushed to oust Harvard president accused of plagiarism
Neri Oxman, partner of Bill Ackman, acknowledges and apologizes for several attribution errors in her dissertation; faces fresh claims she also copied from Wikipedia
Israeli-born designer and academic Prof. Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, has apologized for several errors in her 2010 dissertation, after Business Insider alleged it contained a number of instances of plagiarism.
Earlier this week, Business Insider reported Oxman had “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.”
Ackman was a leading figure in the campaign to oust Harvard president Claudine Gay, citing both her failure to tackle antisemitism on campus and the accusations of plagiarism against her. He said the allegations against his wife were part of “attacks on his family” due to his “actions to address problems in higher education.”
Oxman wrote on X Thursday that in four cases in the 330-page work, though she did cite the sources for her text in the paragraph, she “did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work.”
She also acknowledged that in one other case, she paraphrased the work of another writer without proper attribution, while noting she had acknowledged him and clearly quoted him in multiple instances throughout the work.
“I regret and apologize for these errors,” she wrote.
Bill Ackman attends the Hamptons International Film Festival on August 6, 2016 in East Hampton, New York (Matthew Eisman/Getty Images North America/Getty Images via AFP)
After she made her statement, Business Insider on Saturday published further allegations, saying the dissertation contained at least 15 passages it claimed had been lifted straight from Wikipedia, without quotations or attribution. Oxman had not yet responded as of Saturday evening.
Gay resigned earlier this week amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a US congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy.
Following the hearing, Gay’s academic career came under intense scrutiny by activists who unearthed several instances of alleged plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
Oxman was previously caught up in controversy in 2019, when it was revealed that convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein gifted some $125,000 to Oxman’s Mediated Matter research group at MIT’s prestigious Media Lab.
Oxman said then she had been told at the time that Epstein was an approved donor, and said she regretted accepting the funds.
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