Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a report in Business Insider.
At least one of the passages was lifted directly from another writer without citation, according to an analysis by the publication that was posted on Thursday.
Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, cited allegations of plagiarism against Harvard President Claudine Gay among the reasons he spent weeks calling for her removal. Gay, the school’s first Black leader, resigned Tuesday following the allegations and criticism of her handling of antisemitism on campus in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Ackman, who has more than 1 million followers on X, responded on the social media platform that “you know you struck a chord when they go after your wife.”
Oxman, in her own posting, acknowledged the Business Insider claim that she paraphrased Claus Mattheck without citation. “I deeply apologize to Mattheck for inadvertently not citing him when I paraphrased the above sentence,” she wrote.
She also said that while she properly credited the original source’s authors in the four paragraphs referenced by Business Insider, she didn’t place the subject language in quotation marks. This “would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors,” she said.
Ackman married Oxman, 47, in 2019 when she was a professor at MIT’s Media Lab. A first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force, she was a graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Oxman enrolled at MIT in 2005 and has a Ph.D in design computation from the school. Oxman specialized in what she terms “material ecology”, using disciplines including computational design, architectural elements and synthetic biology.
She left MIT in 2020 and has created her own company called Oxman to “advance innovation in product, architectural, and urban design,” according to her X posting.