Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has been a vocal critic of Harvard’s recently resigned president, Claudine Gay, over allegations of plagiarism and her handling of antisemitism on campus. Now his wife, Neri Oxman, has been accused of similar plagiarism in her own MIT dissertation.
A Business Insider article published Thursday alleged Oxman plagiarized parts of her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT citing several passages that the report found lacked appropriate attribution. NBC News hasn’t independently reviewed the academic sources cited in the report.
Oxman is an American Israeli designer who was a tenured professor at MIT before leaving the university and moving to New York.
The article highlighted issues similar to those found in Gay’s academic work, mainly involving technical passages that were missing quotation marks for proper citations.
While Ackman didn’t back down from his scrutiny of Gay — going so far as to say she should not remain as a faculty member due to her “serious plagiarism issues” — he defended his wife Thursday in a post on X, saying “part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes.”
Oxman plagiarism claims
The Business Insider report claimed Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation” and found “at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” The article presented examples of her dissertation side by side with passages from authors she allegedly failed to cite accurately.
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Oxman apologized for several issues found in the report on X Thursday. She stressed, “I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me.”
The report noted “four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: ‘Material-based Design Computation’” where “I omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used,” she wrote.
“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 explained. “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.”
The examples posted by Business Insider showed Oxman’s explanation as true in three examples of the alleged plagiarism. However, it also showed an example in which she appeared to paraphrase an author without a parenthetical citation or quotes and another passage in which she allegedly inaccurately attributed a passage from the Royal Society of London paper to two different sources.
Oxman explained that she wasn’t able to thoroughly check the claims of the report because not all of her sources are readily available online.
“Unfortunately, because some of the original sources are not online, and Business Insider was unwilling to give me beyond 4pm to review these citations, I cannot confirm whether Business Insider or the sources I referenced for this paragraph are correct,” she wrote in reference to one issue the report pointed out.
“When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections,” she added.
Oxman said she spent 15 years at MIT, where she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in 2005, obtained her doctorate in 2010 and joined the faculty that same year. She left the institution in 2020 after getting married and moving to New York City.
Representatives for Ackman and Oxman told NBC News there would be no further comment than the couples' X statements.
Ackman’s scrutiny of Harvard and Gay
Ackman was very vocal in his criticism of Gay.
The prominent hedge fund manager spoke out online against Harvard over the Ivy League institution’s response to campus protests of the Israel-Hamas war, and of Gay’s congressional testimony regarding the handling of antisemitism on campus.
That pressure against Gay culminated when plagiarism allegations surfaced regarding her academic works.
The Harvard Corporation ordered an investigation that “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” but found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.
The investigation led her to submit four corrections to articles she published, which were part of the review, as well as corrections to her PhD dissertation from 1997, The Harvard Crimson reported.
Gay ultimately stepped down on Tuesday, and Ackman did not relent in his criticism.
On X, he criticized the board for supporting Gay, calling it a “grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board,” called for board members who supported Gay to resign and did not agree with Harvard’s decision to keep Gay as faculty.
“There would be nothing wrong with her staying on the faculty if she didn’t have serious plagiarism issues. Students are forced to withdraw for much less. Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard,” he said in a separate tweet.
Ackman supported Oxman on Thursday after she was accused of similar plagiarism.
“You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life,” he wrote on X. “Please see her post below about today’s Business Insider piece about her dissertation. Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”
