Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman plagiarized from MIT paper

• Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned after conservative activists exposed her plagiarism.
• Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and prominent donor to Harvard University, spearheaded the accusations against Gay.
• BI analyzed Mr. Ackman’s wife’s doctoral dissertation and found numerous instances of plagiarism.

Billionaire hedge fund manager and major donor to Harvard University bill ackman I caught the facts revealed by the president of Harvard University. claudine gay plagiarized passages from her academic work to make his point demand her removal after he recognized that she had been wrong in her response to the massive protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza on Harvard’s campus.

A Business Insider analysis found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at MIT in 2017.

According to Business Insider, Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs from his 2010 doctoral thesis, including at least one passage taken directly from another author without citation.

Her husband, Ackman, takes a strong stance against plagiarism. On Wednesday, in response to the news that Mr. Gay would remain on Harvard’s faculty after stepping down as president, he wrote in X magazine that Mr. Gay should be fired outright, citing “serious plagiarism issues.”

“Students are being forced to leave their schools for much less,” Ackman continued. “Rewarding her with her well-paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for Harvard’s academic integrity.”

Oxman is an architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature. new york times and Elle.She collaborated with Björk, exhibited at MOMA, and was then stalked by paparazzi Brad Pitt visits MIT lab In 2018.

In 2019, Emails exposed by the Boston Globe Ackman pressures MIT to keep Oxman’s name out of the scandal over an original sculpture he gave Jeffrey Epstein in return for a $125,000 donation to Oxman’s lab. revealed that.

Although MIT and the Pershing Square Foundation continue to portray her as a professor in their online biographies, a spokesperson for Pershing Square Capital Management said she “married, became a mother, and moved to New York City.” He said he left MIT in 2020.

Meanwhile, her husband has spoken out since Kornbluth testified Dec. 5 before a Congressional committee investigating how the university’s president responded to student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. has been vocal about wanting to remove MIT President Sally Kornbluth. Kornbluth said in her opening statement that she does not support “speech rules” that limit student speech during protests.

Ackman attacked not only Kornbluth’s testimony, but also that of Liz McGill, a gay University of Pennsylvania president. equivalent To supporting anti-Semitism. He also criticized the presidents’ stated goals of increasing campus diversity, equity, and inclusion, saying they “violate fundamental American principles.”

“To the @MIT Board of Directors: Let’s make a deal: If you immediately fire President Kornbluth, I promise not to write you a letter,” Ackman posted on He referred to an open letter he sent to the Polytechnic Board of Governors. Harvard University Board of Trustees Criticizing gay leadership.

Oxman and Ackman declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider. An MIT spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple instances of plagiarism from 2010 papers

In Oxman’s doctoral dissertation, completed at MIT, she cited a 1998 paper by two Israeli scholars, Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner, published in Nature by New York University historian Pedar Anker. He plagiarized a 2006 paper and a 1995 paper published in the proceedings of an academic conference. Royal Society of London. She also quoted from a book published in 1998 by German physicist Klaus Mattek, and in a more classic plagiarism fashion, copied a paragraph from Mattek without citing or attributing the source.

“The basic building blocks of the bone family of materials are mineralized collagen fibrils,” Wiener and Wagner write in their paper. “It is composed of collagen, a structural form of fibrous protein that is also present in skin, tendons, and a variety of other soft tissues. Collagen is the main component of the three-dimensional matrix within and sometimes overlying it. It makes up minerals. ”

The passage was published in full in Oxman’s doctoral thesis. Although she quoted Weiner and Wagner, she did not put the passage in quotation marks, putting her in violation of the code. MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbookboth what is written now and what was then.

Similarly, in most of the other instances identified by BI in which Oxman cited passages from other works, she cited the author but did not enclose the plagiarized material in quotation marks. MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbook states that authors should either “cite the source by enclosing the word in quotation marks” or “citing the source with an appropriate paraphrase or summary.” Oxman published her paper in 2010.At least the MIT handbook has the same wording. Fast forward to 2007.

Oxman also quoted passages from Mattek’s book without attribution and inaccurately attributed a passage she quoted from a Royal Society of London paper to two different sources.

Additionally, she reused the language she used in her doctoral thesis in subsequent papers. For example, the opening paragraph of her doctoral thesis is published almost verbatim in an article she published in 2013. Although her reuse of materials is not a formal violation of MIT’s academic integrity rules, A guide to “ethical writing” What the university recommends to academics and students, we warn against.

Ackman said the Harvard president’s plagiarism made her unsuitable for the job.

It turns out that, like Oxman, Gay also quoted passages from other scholars’ work without using quotation marks when citing the author.

Gay’s plagiarism was considered relatively unimportant by some academics, including many of the researchers she plagiarized from.

George Reed Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of Gaye’s plagiarists, told the newspaper. new york post He said that what Gay had done “is common in academic writing, and to me it does not rise to the level of plagiarism.”

“I’m glad she read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to her readers,” Andrews continued.

But for Bill Ackman, the plagiarism not only justified Gaye’s immediate ouster as Harvard’s president, but also her expulsion from the faculty altogether. In the weeks leading up to her resignation as president, he posted about her plagiarism in X more than a dozen times.

Mr. Ackman is a graduate of Harvard University. value Approximately $4 billion has contributed significantly to schools. His largest gift, his $25 million in 2014, supported the expansion of the economics department and his endowment of three professorships. He also made some contributions to the rowing team he was on during his undergraduate years.

Ackman and Oxman married in 2019.and their first child was to be born It’s the same year. In 2015, Ackman purchased It’s a luxury apartment in New York’s swanky One57 building, which Oxman also lists as his address, according to public records.Both couples listed as a director of the Pershing Square Foundation, a charitable organization;

Ackman started a movement to eliminate gays. widespread protests An incident related to Israel’s invasion of Gaza in October occurred on Harvard University’s campus. Ackman denounced the protests as anti-Semitic and accused Gay of not doing enough to protect Jewish students and “academic freedom.”

“The gay president has sparked an explosion of anti-Semitism and hatred on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard University’s history,” he wrote in X last month.

Ackman also implied that he had inside information that Gaye was offered the job as president of Harvard University simply because she was a black woman. Gay became the school’s first black president and second female president in July.

In X, he wrote that he was informed that Harvard University would not select a president who “does not meet the DEI Office’s standards.” He hinted that he likely “wouldn’t have gotten” the presidential role “if his finger hadn’t been on the scale.”

Gaye’s plagiarism was brought to the fore by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who openly talked about plans to “secretly” leak news of Gaye’s plagiarism “to media outlets” to lend credibility to those calling for Gaye’s resignation. Ta.

Harvard University’s umbrella organization, the Harvard Corporation, initially supported Gay’s response to the campus protests and her plagiarism. However, pressure on Gay to resign has increased in recent weeks. spearhead This is due in no small part to Ackman.

Gay resigned as president of Harvard University on Tuesday. In a letter to the Harvard community, Mr. Gay wrote that part of the reason for his resignation was “personal attacks and intimidation fueled by racial animus.”

But Ackman continues to search for the other head. Of the three presidents who testified before the university, At a disastrous early December parliamentary session, Two of them, Gay and McGill, are no longer in their positions. That leaves Kornbluth, president of MIT, where Oxman wrote the paper and where he worked from 2010 to 2020.

When an X user asked Ackman why he didn’t go after Kornbluth, Ackman’s answer was spot on.

“Stay tuned to MIT,” Ackman replied.