Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has been a vocal critic of Harvard’s recently resigned president, Claudine Gay, over allegations of plagiarism and her handling of antisemitism on campus. Now his wife, Neri Oxman, has been accused of similar plagiarism in her own MIT dissertation.
A Business Insider article published Thursday alleged Oxman plagiarized parts of her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT citing several passages that the report found lacked appropriate attribution. NBC News hasn’t independently reviewed the academic sources cited in the report.
Oxman is an American Israeli designer who was a tenured professor at MIT before leaving the university and moving to New York.
The article highlighted issues similar to those found in Gay’s academic work, mainly involving technical passages that were missing quotation marks for proper citations.
While Ackman didn’t back down from his scrutiny of Gay — going so far as to say she should not remain as a faculty member due to her “serious plagiarism issues” — he defended his wife Thursday in a post on X, saying “part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes.”
Oxman plagiarism claims
The Business Insider report claimed Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation” and found “at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” The article presented examples of her dissertation side by side with passages from authors she allegedly failed to cite accurately.
Oxman apologized for several issues found in the report on X Thursday. She stressed, “I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me.”
The report noted “four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: ‘Material-based Design Computation’” where “I omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used,” she wrote.
“For each of the four paragraphs in question, I properly credited the original source’s…
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