Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman promised to conduct “plagiarism reviews” of all Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and leadership on Friday after his wife was accused of plagiarizing portions of her dissertation.
Ackman said his decision to conduct the reviews comes after Business Insider claimed they found at least 15 instances of plagiarism in his wife, Neri Oxman’s dissertation. The report comes after the billionaire led calls for former Harvard President Claudine Gay to exit from her role due to plagiarism allegations.
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“It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family,” Ackman posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Friday. “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.”
My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.
Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 5, 2024
Ackman said the reviews would include work from MIT President Sally Kornbluth and members of the MIT board and would be conducted using MIT’s plagiarism standards as outlined in the school handbook.
Oxman was accused of plagiarizing portions of her dissertation from MIT, where she previously worked as a media lab professor. Business Insider’s initial report on Thursday claimed Oxman’s dissertation included “one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”
The former professor 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,” where she did not put quote marks around certain passages. Leaving out quotations when citing a source violates MIT’s academic integrity handbook and is considered 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. I regret and apologize for these errors.”
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Ackman and Oxman have both claimed that they were not given enough time to review the passages and respond to the allegations and vowed to share their findings with the public when they are completed for transparency.
Ackman also said he would review the work of reporters and staff members at Business Insider “for completeness.”
