Claudine Gay, Neri Oxman, and MIT caught in Ackman's plagiarism crossfire
Claudine Gay, Neri Oxman, and MIT caught in Ackman's plagiarism crossfire
Billionaire's social media feud expands, elevating accusations of copying and inaction
The latest chapter in billionaire Bill Ackman's quest against U.S. higher education institutions sees his wife cast in a surprising role. Allegations of plagiarism have surfaced regarding his wife Neri Oxman's MIT doctoral thesis, this, on the back of Ackman's active role in calling for the resignation of university presidents, such as Harvard's Claudine Gay, after she and other presidents of Ivy League schools were widely criticized for their congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
Plagiarism accusations have emerged as a potent tool in the broader discourse surrounding the integrity of elite U.S. universities. Ackman's recent social media activity, targeting Gay over material copying and campus anti-Semitism, has set the stage for these heightened tensions. As the conflict escalated, Business Insider further fueled the fire, claiming that Oxman stole entire sentences and paragraphs from various sources in her doctoral thesis.
Ackman responded with a stern vow—a comprehensive review of works submitted by faculty members at the esteemed institution, while claiming that the source for the report published by Business Insider is at MIT.
1 View gallery
Bill Ackman (left) and his wife Neri Oxman.
(Photo: Jacopo Raule/Getty images, Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg)
“Last night, no one at MIT had a good night’s sleep,” Ackman tweeted on Saturday. “Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp could be heard around the campus. Why? Well, every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others.”
Accusations of plagiarism have become a new element in the ongoing discourse surrounding the conduct of elite U.S. universities. For weeks, Ackman, the founder and CEO of the Pershing Square hedge fund, used his platform on X to attack Gay, who recently resigned as president of Harvard. This unfolded amid accusations that she copied materials from other academics and did not take a strong enough stance against anti-Semitism on campuses.
Business Insider raised similar accusations of plagiarism against his wife, architect and designer Neri Oxman, who holds a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The website alleged that Oxman stole entire sentences and paragraphs from Wikipedia, from other academics, and from technical documents, in her academic work. A day earlier, the website reported several errors in citing the sources of quotations in her work, for which Oxman apologized, claiming they were only a few paragraphs out of a 330-page work.
Oxman was born in Israel and completed her studies at HaReali high-school in Haifa. Her father, Robert Oxman, is a dean and researcher in the field of history and theory at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion in Haifa, and her mother, Rivka Oxman, is a researcher in the field of digital architecture at the Technion. She served in the IDF Air Force during her military service, and upon its completion, she began studying at the Hadassah School of Medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
After two years, she changed direction and pursued studies in architecture at the Technion, graduating in 2004 from the London Architectural Association School of Architecture. In 2005, she moved to Boston to join a Ph.D. program in computer-aided design at MIT, and her thesis focused on material-aware design. In 2010, she was appointed as a full lecturer at the MIT Media Lab and became a Sony Corporation Career Development Professor.
Oxman operates in a field she calls material ecology, which combines technological developments in computerized design with synthetic biology and digital production (3D printing) for the creation of biodegradable structures, glass objects that change their optical and structural properties, and clothing made from a single piece of silk fabric. During her research, Oxman created a mask for the singer Bjork using a sample of her skin, and in the laboratory, utilized silkworms to create a giant dome and produced wearable creations from bacterial culture.
She founded the design and technology company, OXMAN, in New York in 2020 with the aim of bridging the gap between nature and humanity. She believes that soon, buildings will be constructed by 3D printers using materials that react to the environment and decompose organically. The objects she creates are displayed in art museums and science museums and receive both scientific and aesthetic appreciation.
In recent years, she has been recognized in the list of "100 creative and inspiring people in the world," featured in the review of "20 architects who will influence our future," and has won, among other accolades, the "Earth Award." In 2012, a Jewish-American magazine ranked her first on the list of "the most talented, intelligent, funny, and beautiful Jewish women in the world."
Before the initial publication on BI, Ackman stated that the site had contacted him and his wife about the matter, but they did not have enough time to review the allegations. “How can one defend oneself when one learns about a 12-page plagiarism accusation at 540pm on Friday night when one celebrates Shabbat and you are told the article would be published shortly, in this case at 7:10pm?” Ackman tweeted.
Ackman also suggested that the plagiarism storm will soon be spreading across the world.
“It wasn’t just the MIT faculty that did not sleep last night. The Harvard faculty, its governing board members, and its administrative leadership did not sleep either. Because why would we stop at MIT? Don’t we have to do a deep dive into academic integrity at Harvard as well? What about Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth? You get the point,” he wrote. “While we are going to do a detailed review of plagiarism at MIT, we are not going to be the only ones who do so. Every college and university in the world is going to have to do the same for themselves. They will do so because they will need to validate all plagiarism accusations, or someone else will do it for them,” he wrote. “The best approach, however, is probably to launch an AI startup to do this job (I would be interested in investing in one) as there is plenty of work to do, and many institutions won’t have the resources to do it on their own. Perhaps more importantly, the donors are going to demand that the review is done by an independent third party.”
