Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle for leadership and direction at elite universities.
For weeks, William Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard president amid accusations of plagiarism by other scholars and that she did not take a strong enough stand against him. anti-Semitism on campus.
But that battle hit home after Business Insider, an online publication, published similar allegations of plagiarism against Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer who holds a Ph.D. in design computing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Business Insider said Friday that Dr. Oxman “stole sentences and entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing.”
These examples came a day after the publication cited several errors in attributing the work of others to its thesis. Dr Oxman apologized for those mistakes on Thursday and he said they covered only a few paragraphs of a 330-page dissertation.
On Friday night, before Business Insider published its latest story, Mr. Ackman posted on social media that the publication had contacted his wife about its recent findings, but that he and Dr. Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT, did not have time to investigate the accuracy of the accusations.
“It’s unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education led to these attacks on my family,” Mr. Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital, said on X, the social media platform where he has a million followers.
In response, he wrote, he would initiate a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty members. Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT. and the governing body of the university and will share the results with the public. “This experience inspired me to save all news organizations the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” Mr. Ackman wrote.
Later on Friday, he announced that he would also review the work of journalists at Business Insider.
It was not clear if he was targeting Dr. Kornbluth because his wife had received her Ph.D. at the university or because of Dr. Kornbluth’s inadequate denouncing of anti-Semitism in a congressional hearing last month.
Through a spokesperson, Mr. Ackman and Dr. Oxman declined to comment beyond their comments about X. Kimberly Allen, an MIT spokeswoman, said in an email that university leaders “remain focused on ensuring the vital work of MIT people continues. , work that is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity and quality of life.”
Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant who also runs the website Plagiarism Today, said he was concerned about the “weaponisation of plagiarism”.
“I’m concerned that we’re going to see a sharp increase in bad analysis that attempts to either blow up minor issues or show plagiarism where the evidence doesn’t support it,” he said.
The first volley from Business Insider against Dr. Oxman came on Thursday, two days after Dr. Gay’s resignation, and the accusations were 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 in X.
In the age of artificial intelligence, accusations of plagiarism could be easier to make and can easily be weaponized by either side in a dispute.
“Without a doubt on both sides, plagiarism has become a weapon, just as the criminal justice system has been weaponized,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who has had his own controversy over plagiarism charges before years and was dismissed from Harvard. “Everything is armed in America today.”
Dr. Gay has been accused of plagiarism in her 1997 Harvard thesis and other academic papers. It identified a handful of reporting errors and requested corrections, according to Harvard. The university’s governing board said it convened a three-member independent review board that cleared her of academic misconduct. However, he declined to publicly reveal the names of the scholars.
Mr. Ackman played a large role in discrediting Dr. Gay, often publishing findings against her.
After Dr. Gay stepped down as chair, Mr. Ackman criticized the decision to remain on the Harvard faculty. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing for her to stay in school if she didn’t have serious plagiarism issues,” Mr. Ackman wrote to X. He added that rewarding her “with a highly paid professorship sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
After Business Insider made the accusations against Dr. Oxman on Thursday, Mr Ackman wrote on X: “You know you’ve struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and life partner, @NeriOxman.”
In its first article, Business Insider accused Dr. Oxman for plagiarizing “several paragraphs” of her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT, “including at least one passage lifted directly from other authors without attribution.”
On Thursday, Dr. Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT’s Media Lab, said she had cited the sources but “left out citations for specific work that I used” in four paragraphs of her 330-page thesis.
Not including quotes is “a violation of MIT’s academic integrity manual, both as it is currently written and as it was then,” Business Insider wrote.
Dr Oxman also apologized on Thursday for paraphrasing a sentence from a book by Claus Mattheck in her thesis and not citing him.
Dr. Oxman was portrayed in a 2018 profile in the New York Times as a brilliant, quirky scholar who founded a discipline he called material ecology, which worked “with natural organisms like slime molds, monarchs and silkworms to make extraordinary objects and structures who do all sorts of unusual things.” Born in Israel, she was a second lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force. She and Mr. Ackman married in 2019.
Kirsten Noyes contributed to the research.
