Very prestigious, selective, and status driven. Based on making deep science accessible to the outside world in a way that the rest of the institute wasn't willing or able to. Lots of projects based around the intersection between previously unrelated fields of study, with an eye towards catchy aesthetics.
At an institute where researchers were expected to knowing a single field of study to a mind-boggling level of detail, there was an assumption that mix-and-matching completely disparate fields required either a talent that surpassed the world-class talent in other departments, or a willingness to accept a much more superficial understanding of the constituent fields. The TED-talk/Malcolm-Gladwell shine on so many Media Lab researchers certainly made people assume it was the latter.
I've only read this blog post, the abstract of Oxman's paper, and the referenced section. Drawing together the aesthetic similarity of voronoi diagrams, phase diagrams, and metallurgy structures feels exactly on brand. It's the kind of insight porn that makes the Media Lab accessible to fairly intelligent outsiders who can fund it rather than bothering with a post-doctorate career of their own.
The paper is inherently about design, with the core thesis seeming to be "hey, what if we had designs emerge from the materials instead of designing first and then picking whatever materials we want later?" I'm not sure how deep of an understanding of the sub-fields is necessary. I'd expect an understanding of materials science, since the thesis is about materials, and a material scientist was on the review committee. But sprinkling in other fields without knowing them at a PhD level would seem very expected to me within the Media Lab's culture.
I appreciate a post looking at both pieces of work, given the politically-driven attacks in either direction. That being said, her section on Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations seems a bit over-explained for a PhD dissertation, but it certainly isn't "technical mumbo-jumbo" or particularly confusing. If he's complaining that she's fluffing up her word count I totally get it, but if he's saying it's GPT-style nonsense I have to disagree.
And if we have to choose between someone defending their MIT PhD (a) not knowing the equation for the hypotenuse of a triangle or (b) messing up the LaTeX and putting a radical in the wrong place... I'm personally going with "b."
The plagiarism itself speaks to the cargo cultism of dissertations themselves, and the need to write long boilerplate sections summarizing prior work and contextualizing the original research. That seems to be where people keep getting caught with verbatim or near-verbatim copying (my first experience with this was my first high school summer program in a lab, where the researcher pointed out a "nice sentence" I should grab from someone else's paper for the intro section).
The very concept of plagiarism in a scientific dissertation is a bit odd, almost a category error when not applied to the actual original research itself (research in the "did something new" sense not in the "read a bunch of other papers" sense). Why is a PhD candidate supposed to write an entirely original summary of the state of the field? I think it is very, very common to start with an existing summary and modify it for these sections. And I'm not sure that I find that un-ethical.