Mr. Ackman softens his stance on plagiarism after his wife’s record is questioned

• Bill Ackman led the campaign to have Harvard University’s Claudine Gay resign over plagiarism allegations.
• His wife, Neri Oxman, admitted: plagiarism Some of her papers follow the BI report.
• Ackman said it is now “almost certain” that academics will inappropriately cite the work of others.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has filed a lawsuit against academic fraud after a Business Insider report revealed that his wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized portions of her doctoral thesis. I softened my tone.

In a wide-ranging 5,139-word post about “They will almost certainly fail to express themselves properly.” Provide citations or attribution to other authors on at least a reasonable percentage of the paper’s pages. ”

“Some plagiarism is due to laziness on the part of the author. Laziness is not a good excuse for a faculty member, but it doesn’t seem like a crime to me,” Ackman said. I have written. “Rather, it reflects the faculty’s ability and motivation. In the real world, it is possible to fire an employee for being lazy, but this can be difficult to do under a tenure system. there is.”

A representative for Mr. Ackman declined to respond to questions from BI regarding his statements regarding plagiarism.

Mr. Ackman’s softening of his stance on plagiarism is a marked difference from his statement less than a week ago, when he called the plagiarism allegations against Gay “a scandal and a stain on Harvard’s reputation.”

Similar allegations against Gay and Oxman

Gay was accused in mid-December of plagiarizing parts of several academic papers, including a political science paper. In a series of Substack posts and published news articles, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and American Conservative contributing editor Christopher Brunette, as well as the Washington Free Beacon and New York Post, , reported on some of her writings that required citations but lacked proper citations. quotation or quotation marks.

Harvard University cleared Gay of “research misconduct” on Dec. 12, and the university found two more instances of “duplicate language without proper attribution” on Dec. 20.

Gay acknowledged the misquote and requested that his text be corrected. But after her resignation, she said she stands by her own research, saying she has “never misrepresented” her own research results and “never claimed credit for anyone else’s work.” added.

Ackman’s wife, Oxman, is now making similar accusations. This comes after BI uncovered multiple instances in which a former tenured MIT professor cited sentences or entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, fellow academics, or technical documents without proper citations in his academic papers.

Since then, Oxman has admitted plagiarismThe company apologized and promised to review its suppliers and request corrections to the work if necessary.

“Gay has been accused, precisely, in at least some cases, of using verbatim passages from outside sources, and in most cases the sources are cited but not marked as quoted.” There wasn’t,” plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey previously said. He BI when comparing two incidents. “That seems to be pretty much what happened here at Oxman.”

Ackman and Gay’s real feud

Ackman’s focus on expelling Gay from Harvard did not begin with the plagiarism accusation that ultimately led to her resignation.

After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the billionaire first targeted academic leaders. Ackman wrote a 3,138-word letter to Gay about anti-Semitism on campus and urged Harvard leadership to discipline and suspend students who engage in anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian activities on campus. He began a months-long campaign by calling on the

But tensions between the two sides reached a climax after Gay and other elite university leaders testified at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing about how they handled reports of anti-Semitic harassment. did.

In response to a pointed question from New York State Assemblywoman Elise Stefanik, Gay said calling for the “genocide of Jews” could violate the school’s code of conduct “in some circumstances.”

She later apologized for the remarks, saying she was “engulfed in a lengthy and combative exchange over policy and procedure at that point.” Still, Ackman said her comments were an “ethical failure” and she argued that other university presidents who reacted similarly should “resign in shame.”

Elizabeth McGill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, told Congress that anti-Semitic speech “can become harassment when turned into action.” He has since resigned. There are no known plagiarism charges brought against her before she resigned.

At the same hearing, MIT President Sally Kornbluth told Congress she had not heard calls for the genocide of Jews on campus, drawing the ire of critics including Ackman.

MIT has not commented on the accusations against Oxman or Ackman’s campaign against Kornbluth. But a representative for the university told BI, “Our leaders are committed to ensuring that the important work of people at MIT can continue – work that is essential to our national security, prosperity, and quality of life.” “We continue to focus on doing that,” he said.

Kornbluth did not respond to BI’s request for comment. Now that McGill and Gay have both left their positions, Ackman has shifted his focus to firing her, but she remains in the job for now.

After news of Gaye’s resignation broke, Ackman posted a creepy message to X saying, “What about Sally?”