Billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on Harvard’s campus.

An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at MIT in 2017.

Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.

Her husband Ackman has taken a hardline stance on plagiarism. On Wednesday, responding to news that Gay will remain a part of Harvard’s faculty after she resigned as president, he wrote on X that Gay should be fired completely due to “serious plagiarism issues.”

…An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as the New York Times and Elle. She collaborated with Björk, exhibited at MOMA, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.
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I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at @MIT in 2010,https://t.co/6LE1O4FiiL

where I omitted quotation marks…

— Neri Oxman (@NeriOxman) January 4, 2024

…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.

When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections…