Angry billionaire Bill Ackman was an outspoken critic of Harvard president Claudine Gay, identifying examples of plagiarism in her work as evidence she was unfit for academia. Sadly for Ackman, Business Insider reports a similar pattern of uncredited appropriation in the work of his wife, celebrity academic Neri Oxman.
Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.
Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Managment founder Bill Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for numerous university presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of student protests related to Israel's war in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a "very serious" offense.
He used revelations unearthed by right-wing activists that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized dozens of times across the body of her academic work to underscore his calls for her resignation. Gay stepped down on Tuesday.
While Ackman continued to tweet, declaring that he will now exhaustively survey the work of her MIT colleagues and Business Insider for plagiarism, Oxman set about apologizing for hers.
Ackman also suggests it's not plagiarism if its from Wikipedia—"Wikipedia changes minute by minute. The authors are unknown. Is it even copyrighted material?"—in a stream of remarks suggesting a poor understanding of it and the subject in general. The one eminently reasonable excuse—that Oxman's plagiarism was trivial in scope and extent—is not available to him, as it was explicitly disclaimed in discussions of Gay when he targeted her. So instead we have comments such as "Note that they are attacking the Israeli wife of the protagonist in this situation."
To think Oxman had to sit there watching her husband going on about plagiarism, knowing that he was dooming her to this.
