Wife of investor who pushed for resignation of Harvard president faces plagiarism accusations

‘I regret and apologize for these errors,’ Neri Oxman wrote after she was made aware of some of the allegations

The wife of Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who pushed for the resignation of Harvard’s president amid plagiarism claims, now faces similar plagiarism allegations.

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor, admitted to plagiarising her own dissertation in an X post after Business Insider found instances of her lifting sentences from and neglecting to cite other researchers.

Dr Oxman wrote that she had received four paragraphs in question from the outlet regarding her 2010 paper. “For each of the four paragraphs in question, 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,” she wrote.

However, she added, “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.”

Following the initial accusations, Business Insider reported finding 28 additional examples of plagiarism in her work — including allegedly lifting passages from Wikipedia. The publication noted sections of her dissertation that appeared to be more or less taken verbatim from numerous Wikipedia entries without proper attribution.

The allegations arrived days after Claudine Gay stepped down after pressure from lawmakers and Mr Ackman, a Havard alum. Dr Gay had faced intense scrutiny following her appearance at a Congressional hearing regarding her response to antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Hamas attacks.

Mr Ackman suggested she was hired because she met the “DEI office’s criteria,” but his efforts ramped up following the discoveries that she plagiarised portions of her PhD dissertation.

Mr Ackman wrote a scathing 4,000-word post on X about the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. He also addressed the Harvard board’s response to the plagiarism allegations against her.

He wrote, “When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as ‘unintentional’ and invented new euphemisms, i.e., ‘duplicative language’ to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.”

Following Business Insider’s report, the hedge fund CEO took to X to defend her through a series of questions.

He remarked on the timeline, “How can one defend oneself against an accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia for a dissertation written 15 years ago in 2009?” Ms Gay’s dissertation was written in 1997.

Mr Ackman then asked about Wikipedia: “Isn’t the whole point of Wikipedia that it is a dynamic source of info that changes minute by minute based on edits and contributions from around the globe?”

He then asked whether the website is copyrighted, and added, “Has anyone (other than my wife) ever been accused of plagiarism based on using Wikipedia for a definition of a word?”

The Independent has reached out to Mr Ackman and Dr Oxman for comment.