Allegations of plagiarism appear to be the latest weapon in the ongoing battle over the leadership and direction of elite universities.
Billionaire hedge fund manager William Ackman has for weeks campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard president amid accusations that she was copying other scholars and not taking a strong enough stance against anti-Semitism on campus. Had given.
But the fight hit home when Business Insider, an online publication, reported Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer who has a Ph.D. Posted similar allegations of plagiarism against. in design calculations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Business Insider said Friday that Dr. Oxman “has stolen sentences and entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholarly, and technical documents in his academic writings.”
These examples came a day after the publication reported several errors in attributing the work of others in her dissertation. Dr. Oxman apologized for those errors on Thursday Said They contained only a few paragraphs of a 330-page thesis.
On Friday evening, before Business Insider posted its latest story, Mr. Ackman posted on social media that the publication had contacted his wife about its recent findings, but that she and Dr. Oxman, a former MIT professor, Had not contacted. Time to research the veracity of the allegations.
“It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family,” Mr. Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital, said on the social media platform X, where he has one million followers.
In response, he wrote, he would initiate a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty members; Sally Kornbluth, President of MIT; and the governing body of the university, and will share the results with the public. Mr. Ackman wrote, “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations the trouble of reviewing for plagiarism.”
He posted later Friday that he would also review the work of journalists at Business Insider.
It was not clear whether he was targeting Dr. Kornbluth because his wife had a Ph.D. Had received. Because of what he considered Dr. Kornbluth’s inadequate condemnation of anti-Semitism at the university or at a congressional hearing last month.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Ackman and Dr. Oxman declined to comment beyond their comments on X. MIT spokeswoman Kimberly Allen said in an email that university leaders “are focused on ensuring the vital work of MIT people.” , work that is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity and quality of life.”
Copyright and plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey, who also runs the website Plagiarism Today, said he is concerned about the “weaponization of plagiarism”.
He said, “I am concerned that we are going to see a rapid increase in shoddy analyzes that either attempt to exaggerate small issues or show plagiarism where the evidence does not support it.”
The first attack from Business Insider against Dr. Oxman came on Thursday, two days after Dr. Gay stepped down, and the allegations seemed eerily similar to those against Dr. Gay.
Dr. Oxman apologized the same day.
“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me,” he wrote on X.
In the age of AI, allegations of plagiarism may be easy to make and can easily be weaponized by both sides in a dispute.
“There’s no doubt on both sides, plagiarism has become weaponized, just as the criminal justice system has been weaponized,” said Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had his own take on plagiarism charges years ago. There was controversy and was acquitted by Harvard. “Everything in America today is weaponized.”
Dr. Gay was accused of plagiarism in his 1997 Harvard dissertation and other academic papers. According to Harvard, he acknowledged some of the citation errors and asked for corrections. The university’s governing board said it had convened a three-member independent review board which cleared him of academic misconduct. But he has refused to publicly disclose the names of the scholars.
Mr. Ackman played a large role in discrediting Dr. Gay and posting extensive posts against him.
After Dr. Gay resigned as president, Mr. Ackman criticized the decision to allow him to remain on the Harvard faculty. Mr. Ekman said, “If he does not have serious plagiarism issues there will be nothing wrong with him remaining on the faculty.” written on x, He said that rewarding him with a “highly paid faculty position sets a very poor precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
After Business Insider reported the allegations against Dr. Oxman on Thursday, Mr. Ackman wrote on X: “You know you get upset when they go after your wife, in this case my love and “Partner in life, @neryoxman.”
In its first article, Business Insider accused Dr. Oxman of plagiarizing “several paragraphs” of his 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT, “including at least one passage taken directly from other authors without citation is included.”
On Thursday, Dr. Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT’s Media Lab, said she had cited sources in four paragraphs of her 330-page thesis, but “left out the quotation marks for some of the works I used.” .
Business Insider wrote, not including the quotation marks “is a violation of MIT’s academic-integrity handbook, both as it is currently written and as it was at the time.”
Dr Oxman also apologized on Thursday for paraphrasing and not citing a sentence from a book by Klaus Mathek in his thesis.
Dr. Oxman was featured in a 2018 profile in The New York Times as a brilliant, quirky scholar who founded a discipline called physical ecology that used slime molds, monarchs and silkworms to create extraordinary objects and structures. Like worked with natural creatures. Do all kinds of extraordinary things. Born in Israel, she was a first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force. She and Mr. Aikman were married in 2019.
Kirsten Noyes Contributed to research.
