In the aftermath of former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation amidst nearly fifty reports of plagiarism, a target has been placed on the back of the wife of a strong advocate for Gay’s ousting.
Business Insider had launched an investigation into billionaire Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, accusing her of plagiarizing sections of her doctoral dissertation; Oxman denies plagiarizing but admits omitting quotation marks despite proper citations.
The article takes a deep dive into Oxman’s work, knit-picking instances where she failed to include quotation marks around borrowed passages – despite providing the proper references – in a desperate attempt to prove that the American-Israeli designer violated MIT’s academic-integrity standards.
The report highlights multiple instances of alleged plagiarism by Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, where Oxman clearly states the authors’ names as references.
Comparatively, Gay, the former president of one of the top elite universities in the world, was hit with another six accusations of plagiarism just last week, bringing the total number of copying claims to nearly 50.
Business insider claimed their analysis proved Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.
Harvard President Claudine Gay at the congressional hearing last month
Oxman responded to the brazen allegations against her, admitting errors in omitting quotation marks but asserting proper crediting 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 PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at MIT in 2010,’ she wrote on X Thursday.
‘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.’
‘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 also identified one sentence in the dissertation where I paraphrased Claus Mattheck and did not cite him,’ she wrote. ‘I should have provided a citation to Mattheck for the above sentence. I paraphrased from his book, ‘Design in nature: learning from trees, Springer 1998,’ which I cited throughout my thesis, and properly attributed in the sections which follow the subject sentence. I deeply apologize to Mattheck for inadvertently not citing him when I paraphrased the above sentence.’
Meanwhile, the rest of the article delves into the private lives of Oxman and Ackman, emphasizing Ackman’s recent activism against plagiarism and anti-Semitism at Harvard, his alma mater.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman , who has actively sought the ousting of Harvard President Claudine Gay applauded her resignation on Tuesday afternoon
Ackman addressed the accusations against his wife in a post on X Thursday, expressing his admiration for his accomplished wife and her ability to take responsibility for her mistakes.
‘You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, Neri Oxman,’ Ackman posted on X Thursday.
‘Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate. Neri, a former tenured professor at MIT, is the author of 74 peer-reviewed papers, eight peer-reviewed book chapters, and numerous other journal papers 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 seen here in bold font
Gay’s alleged plagiarism of Franklin Gilliam’s work seen here in bold font
Gay’s alleged plagiarism of Gary King’s work seen here in bold font
Gay’s alleged plagiarism of David Canon’s work seen here in bold font
Gay’s alleged plagiarism of David Canon’s work seen here in bold font
The Associated Press has faced fierce backlash after they published a headline that said that plagiarism is 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 blasted and forced to make a humiliating U-turn after they published an article about Claudine Gay’s resignation with a sensational headline that said plagiarism was a ‘new conservative weapon.’
Gay, 53, resigned as the President of Harvard University on Tuesday in a bitter letter to colleagues and students – taking zero responsibility for the controversies that marked her leadership in her resignation letter.
She stepped down from her role 28 days after her shocking response at a congressional testimony about campus anti-Semitism. Gay refused to categorize calls for genocide of Jews as harassment or admit that Jewish students had a right not to feel unsafe at Ivy League schools.
After Gay’s resignation, Ackman called for the resignation and replacement of the school’s board, which he said is just as much to blame for its problems as ousted president Gay.
In Gay’s departure, she was lauded by Harvard Corporation, the university board led by Penny Pritzker, Obama’s Commerce Secretary and sister of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, which said it accepted her resignation ‘with sorrow’.
Ackman, a Harvard graduate and donor, vocally campaigned for the resignations of Gay, as well as the presidents of MIT, Sally Kornblut, and Upenn, Elizabeth Magill following their failure to unequivocally condemn antisemitism on their college’s campuses at a congressional hearing last month.