Hacker News Reader

Comment by benzible | Hacker News Reader

First, she didn't cop to the wholesale Wikipedia copying that BI later found. A truly "gracious" response would be to fully come clean.

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.

View on HN

Business Insider targeted Ackman's wife because she's Ackman's wife.

Ackman targeted Gay because she was President of Harvard.

President of Harvard is an important role in academia. Wife of Ackman is not.

Wife of guy moralizing about plagiarism and making sweeping racialized claims is quite relevant, not to mention that it's belittling to Oxman to reduce her solely to "wife of Ackman". She was a very high profile academic prior to her relationship with him.

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.

I had never heard of a 'limited hangout' before, and I hadn't realized that HN norms require that a reply must address all points in the parent comment.

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.

Great, so we're on the same page that investigating Oxman's academic output was an effective tactic for BI. Now if we're just going to focus on the social impact, I guess it depends on what it is that you'd like to see "moved forward". The people behind the campaign against Gay, including right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, have been very open and explicit that this was about advancing their agenda and that plagiarism was a means to an end [1] so you'd have to be pretty credulous to pretend that this was initially about academic honesty.

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...

I agree BI did a great service, but not because I disagree with Rufo'a agenda and think it needs to be pushed back.

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!

Cool, so we've established that you're somewhere on the spectrum from indifferent to supportive of the agenda of a man who is pretty explicitly trying to bring Orban-style authoritarianism to the US [1]. Personally, I'm far more concerned about a looming existential threat to US democracy than I am about academic plagiarism by the leadership of high-profile universities. So, agree to disagree, I guess.

[1] https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-r...

Why is this about individuals at all? As a former academic I feel academia has a higher principle to uphold its principles about assigning credit where it is due and so on. Right and left are largely meaningless terms, we should be striving for the truth.

Ackman targeted Gay because she resisted pressure to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests at Harvard.

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.

The questions about the integrity and quality of her dissertation are important. Copying from Wikipedia? Seriously? Even my undergrad students know that Wikipedia is not a source, but just a place you may find references to sources.

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?

Her relationship with Ackman is more recent (Google her and you’ll see that she dated Brad Pitt a few years ago).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com