In the wake of former Harvard President Claudine Gay's resignation amid nearly 50 reports of plagiarism, the wife of a strong advocate for Gay's impeachment has become a target.
Business Insider had launched an investigation into billionaire Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, accusing her of plagiarizing parts of her dissertation; Oxman denies plagiarism, but admits he omitted quotation marks despite correct citations.
The article delves deep into Oxman's work, unearthing examples where she failed to place quotation marks around borrowed passages – despite providing proper references – in a desperate attempt to prove that the American-Israeli designer met MIT's standards in the area of academic integrity.
The report highlights multiple cases of alleged plagiarism by Oxman, who became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, where Oxman clearly lists the authors' names as references.
By comparison, Gay, the former president of one of the world's top elite universities, was hit with six more plagiarism allegations last week, bringing the total number of copying claims to almost 50.
Business insiders claimed that their analysis showed that Oxman plagiarized several paragraphs of her 2010 dissertation, including at least one passage taken directly from other writers without attribution.
Harvard President Claudine Gay during last month's congressional hearing
Oxman responded to the brutal accusations against her, admitting errors in the omission of quotation marks but claiming that the citation was correct through references.
“I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page dissertation, 'Material-based Design Computation,' which I completed at MIT in 2010,” she wrote on X Thursday.
'Where I have omitted quotation marks for certain works that I used. For each of the four paragraphs in question, I have properly credited the author(s) of the original source with references at the end of each of the topic paragraphs and on the detailed bibliographic end pages of the thesis.'
'However, in these four paragraphs I have not placed the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the correct approach to crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”
“Business Insider also identified one sentence in the dissertation in which I paraphrased Claus Mattheck and did not quote him,” she wrote. 'I should have given Mattheck a quote for the above sentence. I paraphrased from his book 'Design in nature: learning from trees, Springer 1998', which I have cited throughout my dissertation and properly attributed in the sections following the topic sentence. I deeply apologize to Mattheck for accidentally not quoting him when I paraphrased the above sentence.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the article delves into the private lives of Oxman and Ackman, highlighting Ackman's recent activism against plagiarism and anti-Semitism at Harvard, his alma mater.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who has actively sought the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, applauded her resignation Tuesday afternoon
Ackman addressed the allegations against his wife in a post on Thursday, expressing his admiration for his talented wife and her ability to take responsibility for her mistakes.
“You know you've struck a nerve when they go after your wife, in this case my love and life partner, Neri Oxman,” Ackman posted on X on Thursday.
'Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, acknowledges them, and apologizes when necessary. Neri, a former professor at MIT, is the author of 74 peer-reviewed articles, eight peer-reviewed book chapters, and numerous other journal articles and proceedings.'
“She has been awarded 15 patents for various innovations, and her work has been featured in 116 exhibitions around the world, including two recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and SF MoMA,” he added.
Gay's alleged plagiarism of Franklin Gilliam's work, here in bold letters
Gay's alleged plagiarism of Franklin Gilliam's work, here in bold letters
Gay's alleged plagiarism of Gary King's work, here in bold letters
Gay's alleged plagiarism of David Canon's work, here in bold letters
Gay's alleged plagiarism of David Canon's work, here in bold letters
The Associated Press faced strong backlash after publishing a headline calling plagiarism the “new conservative weapon” in a piece about Claudine Gay's resignation.
This comes as other mainstream media outlets attempt to downplay the allegations against Gay.
The Associated Press was criticized and forced to make a humiliating about-face after publishing an article about Claudine Gay's resignation with a sensational headline saying plagiarism was a “new conservative weapon.”
Gay, 53, resigned as president of Harvard University on Tuesday in a bitter letter to colleagues and students, failing to take responsibility for the controversies that characterized her leadership.
She resigned from her position 28 days after her shocking response to congressional testimony about anti-Semitism on campus. Gay refused to categorize calls for genocide against Jews as harassment and refused to concede that Jewish students had a right not to feel unsafe in Ivy League schools.
After Gay's resignation, Ackman called for the resignation and replacement of the school board, which he said is just as responsible for the problems as ousted President Gay.
Upon Gay's departure, she was praised by the Harvard Corporation, the university board led by Penny Pritzker, Obama's Commerce Secretary and sister of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, which said it accepted her resignation “with sadness.”
Ackman, a Harvard graduate and donor, has vociferously campaigned for the resignation of Gay, as well as MIT presidents Sally Kornblut and Upenn Elizabeth Magill, after she criticized anti-Semitism on their campuses during a congressional hearing last month. universities had not unequivocally condemned.