A former professor of information technology, Neri Oxman is being accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Bill Ackman, her husband, committed to examining the work of every member of the Harvard University faculty.
Plagiarism accusations appear to be the newest weapon in the intensifying war for top university leadership and direction.
For weeks, billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman has waged a social media campaign against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president over charges of plagiarizing other researchers and failing to take a strong enough stand against antisemitism on campus.
That dispute was brought home to Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer with a Ph.D. in design computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after Business Insider, an online newspaper, published identical claims of plagiarism against her.
According to Business Insider, Dr. Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing.”
Those examples came a day after the journal reported on multiple inaccuracies in her dissertation’s attribution of others’ work. Dr. Oxman apologized on Thursday for the inaccuracies, which he said were only a few pages in a 330-page thesis.
Mr. Ackman posted on social media on Friday evening, before Business Insider published its latest story, that the publication had contacted his wife about its recent findings, but that he and Dr. Oxman, a former tenured professor at M.I.T., had not had time to investigate the accuracy of the accusations.
Resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay
Harvard University’s first black president resigned after being accused of plagiarism and criticized for her handling of antisemitism on campus.
A Contextual Flaw: According to A.O. Scott, the fate of Harvard’s president is the latest proof of a major crisis in American education.
Interim President: Alan Garber, the provost and top academic officer at Harvard, will act as the university’s interim president. Here’s what you need to know.
An Unavoidable Problem: The narrative of Gay’s brief presidency has sparked debates about plagiarism, fairness, antisemitism, and leadership. But at its heart lies the American issue of race.
Taking Credit:
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, whose questioning regarding antisemitism on college campuses placed Gay on the spot during a congressional hearing, celebrated after Harvard’s president announced her resignation. “Unfortunately, my efforts to address issues in higher education have resulted in these attacks on my family,” Mr. Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital, said on X. On this social media platform, he has a million followers.
In response, he wrote that he would conduct a plagiarism review of all present M.I.T. faculty members, Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president, and the university’s governing council and that the results would be made public. “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” Mr. Ackman said in a statement.
Later that day, he announced that he would be reviewing the work of Business Insider reporters. It was unclear if he was targeting Dr. Kornbluth because his wife obtained her Ph.D. at the university or because he felt Dr. Kornbluth’s denunciation of antisemitism at a congressional hearing last month was inadequate.
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Mr. Ackman and Dr. Oxman declined to comment further on X through a spokeswoman. According to Kimberly Allen, an M.I.T. spokesperson, the university’s leaders “remain focused on ensuring the vital work of the people of M.I.T. continues, work that is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity, and quality of life.”
Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism and copyright consultant who also operates the website Plagiarism Today, expressed concern about the “weaponization of plagiarism.”
“I worry that we’re going to see a sharp rise in shoddy analyses that attempt to either blow minor issues out of proportion or show plagiarism where the evidence doesn’t support it,” he added.
The first volley from Business Insider against Dr. Oxman came on Thursday, two days after Dr. Gay resigned, and the claims seemed familiar. The following day, Dr. Oxman apologized.
“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,” she said in a blog post. In the age of artificial intelligence, accusations of plagiarism may be simpler to make and are simple targets for either side of a debate.
“Without a doubt on both sides, plagiarism has become a weapon, just as the criminal justice system has become weaponized,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who was cleared of plagiarism allegations years ago. “Everything is weaponized in America today.”
Dr. Gay was accused of plagiarizing her Harvard dissertation and other scholarly articles in 1997. According to Harvard, she acknowledged a few citation problems and requested repairs. The university’s governing body said that a three-member independent review board had convened and cleared her of academic wrongdoing. However, the names of the scholars have not been made public.
Mr. Ackman played a significant part in undermining Dr. Gay by frequently posting broadsides against her. Mr. Ackman attacked the choice to keep Dr. Gay on the Harvard faculty after she resigned as president. “There would be nothing wrong with her staying on the faculty if she didn’t have serious plagiarism issues,” he wrote in regards to X. He went on to say that rewarding her “with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
Mr. Ackman said on X after Business Insider published the allegations against Dr. Oxman: “You know you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, @NeriOxman.”
Business Insider accused Dr. Oxman of plagiarizing “multiple paragraphs” of her Ph.D. dissertation at M.I.T. in 2010, “including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”
Dr. Oxman, a former tenured professor at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, admitted Thursday that she cited the sources but “omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used” in four paragraphs of her 330-page thesis. The absence of quotation marks is a “violation of MIT’s academic integrity handbook, both as it is currently written and as it was at the time,” according to Business Insider.
Dr. Oxman also apologized on Thursday for repeating a passage from a book by Claus Mattheck and failing to cite him in her thesis. In a 2018 profile in The New York Times, Dr. Oxman was portrayed as a brilliant, quirky scholar who founded material ecology, a discipline in which she worked “with natural organisms like slime molds, monarchs, and silkworms to make extraordinary objects and structures that do all sorts of extraordinary things.” She was a first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force and was born in Israel. In 2019, she and Mr. Ackman married.
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