Neri Oxman, a former M.I.T. professor, is accused of copying from Wikipedia. Her husband, Bill Ackman, vowed to check the work of the entire M.I.T. faculty.
NEW YORK TIMES
Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle over the leadership and direction of elite universities.
For weeks, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president amid accusations of plagiarizing other scholars and of not taking a strong enough stand against antisemitism on campus.
But that battle was brought home after Business Insider, an online publication, posted similar accusations of plagiarism against Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer, who holds a Ph.D. in design computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Business Insider said on Friday that Dr. Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.”
Those examples came a day after the publication reported on several errors in attributing others’ work in her dissertation. Dr. Oxman apologized for those errors on Thursday and said they involved only a few paragraphs of a 330-page thesis.
On Friday evening, before Business Insider had posted 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 M.I.T., had not had time to research the accuracy of the accusations.
