Bill Ackman’s wife accused of plagiarizing MIT dissertation after he criticized Harvard
Eden Villalovas
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Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, has been accused of plagiarizing parts of her doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shortly after he led calls for Claudine Gay to exit from her role as Harvard University’s president due to plagiarism allegations and celebrated her resignation.
Oxman, an American Israeli designer and former MIT’s Media Lab professor, responded to accusations that she “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation,” according to a Business Insider report published Thursday. The report claimed Oxman’s dissertation included “one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”
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In a social media response to the report, Oxman acknowledged the alleged plagiarism came from four paragraphs in her 330-page doctoral dissertation titled “Material-based Design Computation,” which “proposes a material-based approach to tiling.”
The news website noted that leaving out quotations when citing a source violates MIT’s academic integrity handbook and falls under the category of plagiarism.
“I properly credited the original source’s author(s) with references at the end of each of the subject paragraphs, and in the detailed bibliography end pages of the dissertation,” Oxman said, regarding the four paragraphs under scrutiny.
“In these four paragraphs, however, I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work,” Oxman wrote. “I regret and apologize for these errors.”
Oxman said the outlet did not provide her with enough time to check a source in one of the questioned paragraphs in which she “paraphrased Claus Mattheck and did not cite him.” Oxman noted the source was not online, but she will work to obtain the original source and “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”
Ackman defended his wife, quoting Oxman’s post and writing, “Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”
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Ackman, a Harvard alumnus, took to social media to make his case against Gay as claims of antisemitism and plagiarism swarmed the Ivy League leader. In the past month, Ackman has reposted and written lengthy statements on X, formerly known as Twitter, after Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth provided testimony regarding antisemitism on college campuses before a House committee on Dec. 5, 2023. Gay was accused of plagiarizing multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis from 1997, which her thesis adviser has denied, and other works.
In one post, Ackman said “someone with first person knowledge” of the Harvard presidential search team refused to select a candidate “who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria,” adding other elite universities likely did the same during that time. Gay became the first black president of Harvard when she was sworn in this summer, and her resignation makes her the university’s shortest-serving president.