The wife of Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire who accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism and led calls for her resignation as Harvard president, is now facing plagiarism claims herself.
Neri Oxman, a distinguished former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has apologized after Business Insider discovered many instances in her 2010 dissertation in which she stole parts from other experts’ work without proper citation. She also promised to go over the main materials and make any required changes.
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On Thursday, Business Insider branded four portions of Oxman’s dissertation as plagiarized – without citation – from Wikipedia entries. However, by Friday, the outlet had discovered at least 15 such sections, a similar turn of events to Gay’s removal from the Harvard president.
Business Insider also discovered plagiarism in Oxman’s academic works, including a 2007 article titled Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry and a 2011 study titled Variable Property Rapid Prototyping.
According to Business Insider, the 2011 article had more than 100 words copied verbatim from a book, two phrases lifted verbatim from another book without attribution, and content pulled from a 2004 paper without citation.
In response to Gay’s resignation, Ackman wrote a 4,000-word article on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and complaining about “racism against white people.” He also objected to Gay, a Black woman, remaining on Harvard’s faculty. Gay was accused of plagiarism in her 1997 dissertation, but after requesting changes, a three-member independent review board cleared her of academic dishonesty.
According to Business Insider, the 2011 article had more than 100 words copied verbatim from a book, two phrases lifted verbatim from another book without attribution, and content pulled from a 2004 paper without citation.
When it came to his wife’s plagiarism claims, Ackman took a different tone on X. “It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have resulted in these attacks on my family,” he wrote on X. This incident has motivated me to save all news organizations the bother of performing plagiarism checks.”
He then promised to launch plagiarism investigations into every present MIT faculty, board, and committee member, as well as its president, Sally Kornbluth.
Ackman also chastised Business Insider and the reporters who wrote the story about Oxman, threatening to launch plagiarism investigations against the publication’s staff.
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