2024-01-07 06:36:01
Neri Oxman, the wife of American financier Bill Ackman, who accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism and pushed for her resignation as the head of Harvard University, is herself facing plagiarism allegations.
A prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxman apologised after Business Insider reported that she admitted plagiarising content for her doctoral dissertation in 2010. The publication identified multiple instances in which Oxman was accused of not attributing the work of other scholars in her dissertation, according to a report by The Guardian.
Business Insider reported that Oxman’s academic work contained multiple instances of unattributed material, including sentences and entire paragraphs lifted from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents. Oxman issued an apology, acknowledging that she had omitted quotation marks in four paragraphs of her extensive 330-page thesis.
She also admitted to paraphrasing a sentence from a book by Claus Mattheck without proper citation, which is considered a violation of MIT’s academic integrity guidelines.
The allegations surfaced shortly after her husband, Ackman, had been vocal on social media, campaigning against Gay, who resigned amid her own plagiarism scandal and criticisms of not adequately addressing antisemitism on Harvard campuses.
In response to these accusations, Ackman announced his intention to conduct a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty members, as well as the university’s president and governing body, and to share the findings publicly. This move was seen as a reaction to the scrutiny his family faced following his actions against Harvard’s leadership.
Oxman, who received her Ph.D. in Design Computation from MIT, is known for coining the term “Material Ecology”, a field that combines natural organisms with design to create innovative objects and structures. Her work has been featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and WIRED.
