Isn’t this the pot calling the kettle black? Bill Ackman, the conservative billionaire who viciously called for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to be fired, has a wife who was accused of the very same plagiarism allegations that eventually costed Gay her job.
According to an explosive new report from Business Insider, Neri Oxman plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation at MIT. The outlet states that Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.”
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Additionally, Business Insider reported that MIT “found at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” Ironically, Ackman was one of the most notable and heinous detractors of Gay. She resigned from her role as president of Harvard earlier this week.
When it comes to Oxman, Ackman has insisted that folks are human and mess up—that same logic just doesn’t apply to Black women. “Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote on X/Twitter. He then listed off her accolades, as if that makes her exempt from any wrongdoing.
Oxman responded with a 800-word response via social media on Thursday. She stated that there were four paragraphs in her dissertation—which was 330 pages long—where her sources were correctly cited but “did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work.”
“When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections,” Oxman explained. “I regret and apologize for these errors.” She became a tenured member at MIT 2017, but left the school just three years later after she married Ackman and moved to New York City.
Ackman won’t admit his hypocrisy when it comes to Oxman and Gay, but his behavior remains abhorrent nonetheless. It also illustrates how fear informs how conservatives move to dismantle systems that help Black people.
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