Neri Oxman, the wife of American hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation while getting her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Ackman was one of the most vocal critics of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first-ever Black president, who was forced to resign this week after being accused of plagiarism. In his public tirade against Gay, Ackman also accused her of antisemitism.
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military…
However, his energies should have been directed more closely to home.
In a report published by Business Insider, Oxman allegedly “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.” The report “found at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”
I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at @MIT in 2010,https://t.co/6LE1O4FiiL
— Neri Oxman (@NeriOxman) January 4, 2024
where I omitted quotation marks…
“I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at @MIT in 2010 where I omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used. 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, formerly Twitter.
“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,” she continued.
This is not Oxman’s first misstep.
The Boston Globe also uncovered emails back in 2019 which showed Ackman urging MIT to keep his wife’s name out of the the Jeffrey Epstein scandal after dozens of celebrities were found to have ties to the the convicted sexual predator. Oxman gifted the late billionaire a sculpture after he donated $125,000 to her lab.
Ackman is yet to comment on the report.
