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.
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.