Bill Ackman's academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
https://twitter.com/NeriOxman/status/1742993073078947843?t=D...
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1743407502312505795?t=...
https://twitter.com/codybrown/status/1743414136476664263?t=M...
Second, presumably she signed off on Ackman's response, which was to launch an investigation of the entire MIT faculty. Again, not what I would call "gracious".
Further, Ackman characterized this as an attack on his family whereas when he did exactly the same thing to Gay he was "addressing problems in higher education". Yeah, sure…
Also, if, as he has claimed, Gay’s plagiarism is evidence that DEI is causing unqualified people to be promoted, what does it say that his wife and probably a bunch of other white MIT faculty did the same thing? Looking forward to him recanting that.
Ackman targeted Gay because she was President of Harvard.
President of Harvard is an important role in academia. Wife of Ackman is not.
More generally, the idea that academic work can only be investigated when the faculty member has some sort of high-profile leadership role is ludicrous. By your logic, the investigations of Dan Ariely, Francesca Gino and others were not sufficiently important to merit investigation and coverage by the press.
And you didn't address anything else I said about her response, which amounted to a "limited hangout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout) or her husband's response which again, she presumably signed off on.
Back to the point I was making: BI didn't choose Oxman due to her academic position. They chose her because she is the wife of Bill Ackman.
It's a good tactic! But let's assume Oxman and Gay are equal on both scholarly output and extent of plagiarism.
Removing Gay (who was President of the world's most famous university) seems like it moves things forward. Bringing Oxman into it seems like it's aimed at halting that progress. BI is engaged in whataboutism. If they were trying to show how pervasive plagiarism is, they could have chosen a current academic, ideally one with a senior position at a famous university.
Rufo and Ackman managed to shift the Overton window and have achieved their goals, for example, by getting mainstream press outlets like the NYT to publish "just asking questions" articles linking Gay's ousting with DEI. Given that this was the original motivation for this whole thing, from my point of view, BI did a great service in pushing back on this agenda, and looking at Oxman as an exemplar of a white academic (recent academic who became famous for her academic work, whatever) was the perfect way to do this.
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/01/04/msnbcs_al...
BI 'poked the bear' and provoked Ackman into putting resources into shining a light on some (albeit limited) aspect of the problems with the academic establishment.
Assuming he follows through, we will all get a bunch of interesting analysis, without spending a dime ourselves!
[1] https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-r...
The "plagiarism" that was found in Gary's work is much less serious than the plagiarism found in Oxman's work. Unlike Oxman, Gay fully attributed everything to the original authors. Gay didn't try to misrepresent anyone else's work as her own. She paraphrased too closely, but she did cite the works she was paraphrasing. Oxman just ripped passages from Wikipedia without any attribution.
But wait, there's more. She graduated in 2010 and was immediately hired as an MIT professor. That just does not happen at places like MIT. Even if you are really good, you will first be expected to do a couple of postdocs at other institutions.
Honestly, something smells, so one looks further. Her professorship appears to be externally funded (the "Sony Corporation Career Development Professor"). So why, exactly, would Sony pay MIT to hire a fresh grad as a professor? Ackman has been known to make direct donations to MIT. Has he made other, more indirect ones as well?
The MIT Media Lab operates quite differently from other MIT departments. Its emphasis is pretty explicitly on sexy demos above all else and its hiring process likely reflects that. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18160491 for more background on Oxman.
A graduate student? Multiple instances in their thesis or dissertation? I would fail them so fast their head would spin. Then they would be up before a board at the school, to see if they should be failed entirely out of the program.
I never heard of Ackman before this weekend, and his motivation sucks. But I hope he really does go through with his threat. Check the dissertations of every staff and faculty member at all of the Ivy's. A bucket of cold water may inspire some housecleaning.
That's what all of this is about.
If you look at the supposed examples of Gay's plagiarism, she cites the works she's using. Most of the examples are of the form, "As John Smith writes, a dog can often be a man's best friend (Smith 1990)." Then you look at Smith (1990), and you find something like, "A dog is often a man's best friend." Gay's mistake was leaving out quotation marks when she paraphrased too closely. It's not really plagiarism in spirit, because she's obviously not passing off anyone else's work as her own, but it could run afoul of the rules.