Investor defends wife, Neri Oxman, from plagiarism allegations
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman on Monday continued to defend his wife, the architect and former MIT professor Neri Oxman, from allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, writing on social media that she was given only 90 minutes to respond to a lengthy inquiry from the publication that broke the story.
Ackman, a central figure in the drive to have Claudine Gay step down as Harvard president over plagiarism allegations and concerns about campus antisemitism, said that Business Insider had granted Oxman “no due process” as it reported the story, which posted last week.
“@NeriOxman was given 90 minutes to respond to a 7,000word plagiarism allegation before Business Insider published a piece saying she was a plagiarist,” Ackman wrote Monday on X.
He said Gay, by contrast, “had the opportunity for many weeks of private review” before responding to the allegations about her work, which Harvard has said it first learned about in October, when the New York Post began making inquiries to the university. Gay resigned last week.
Ackman’s post came in response to an academic who had posted that Oxman was receiving “the same trial in the court of opinion” with the Business Insider reports as Gay.
A Business Insider spokesperson declined to comment Monday.
“Let’s assume you got a call from Business Insider this morning and you were asked to respond to a 7,000 word email of plagiarism allegations in your life’s work in 90 minutes,” Ackman wrote. “And by the way let’s assume you were on vacation with limited WiFi access.”
Such logistics are challenging, Ackman continued.
“And because you can’t properly respond or even read the email in its entirety in time or get access to the sources, you are branded a plagiarist by Business Insider in their opening story and it becomes the number one, front page news around the world because your life partner is a high profile person,” Ackman wrote.
Business Insider’s reporting points to multiple instances of purported plagiarism by Oxman in her 2010 doctoral dissertation for MIT and other pieces of her published work.
The Globe could not independently verify the online news publication’s reports.
Business Insider published its first article about Oxman’s work on Thursday, highlighting three paragraphs in her dissertation in which Oxman failed to use quotation marks when quoting the work of other scholars and a fourth paragraph in which she paraphrased another author but did not cite their work.
Shortly after the article was published online, Oxman responded on social media, apologizing and acknowledging “errors” with those paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation titled “Material-based Design Computation.”
“For each of the four paragraphs in question, I properly credited the original source’s author(s) with references at the end of each of the subject paragraphs, and in the detailed bibliography end pages of the dissertation,” Oxman wrote on X. “In these four paragraphs, however, I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”
Business Insider published a second story Friday evening, reporting that Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing.”
The outlet reported that “at least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.”
About an hour before that story was published Friday, Ackman posted on X that Business Insider had “just contacted” Oxman about additional instances of plagiarism in her work.
“Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story this evening,” he wrote. “As a result, we don’t have time to research their claims prior to publication.”
He then said he would launch a wide-ranging plagiarism review at MIT.
“We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President [Sally] Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism,” he wrote.
“We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency.”
Ackman also suggested via X over the weekend that Business Insider’s source for their reporting on Oxman may have come from within MIT senior leadership.
Asked for comment Monday, an MIT spokesperson said the school’s “leaders remain focused on ensuring the vital work of the people of MIT continues, work that is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity and quality of life.”
On Monday, Ackman vowed to continue waging public battles when necessary.
“I will pursue these societally important issues including problems with how our media operates, the ideological take over of our education system, discrimination in all forms, and free speech to the end of the earth,” Ackman wrote.
In an earlier posting on X, Ackman wrote that members of Harvard’s governing board should also step down following Gay’s resignation and that he had been falsely labeled a racist for asserting the presidential search had excluded candidates who did not meet “the DEI criteria,” using the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Gay was Harvard’s first Black president.