Neri Oxman, the spouse of American billionaire Bill Ackman, who initiated a campaign against Harvard president Claudine Gay and advocated for her resignation amidst plagiarism accusations, has conceded to appropriating content in her doctoral dissertation from 2010.
Oxman, a former distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), issued an apology after Business Insider revealed instances where she allegedly failed to attribute the work of other scholars in her extensive 330-page dissertation.
According to Business Insider, Oxman's academic work contained numerous instances of uncredited material, encompassing sentences and entire paragraphs lifted from various sources such as Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents.
Oxman acknowledged that while she did correctly attribute four paragraphs to other sources in her dissertation, she did not utilize quotation marks for the subject language, which is the appropriate method for crediting the work, as reported by CNN. Expressing remorse, she apologized for these errors. Additionally, she admitted to paraphrasing a sentence from a book by Claus Mattheck without providing proper citation, a breach of MIT's academic integrity guidelines.
These allegations emerged shortly after her husband, Ackman had been vocal on social media, campaigning against Gay, who ultimately resigned in the face of the plagiarism charges and criticism for not adequately addressing antisemitism on Harvard campuses.
In response to the accusations, Ackman declared his intention to conduct a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty members, along with the university's president Sally Kornbluth, and governing body, to share the findings publicly. This move was perceived as a response to the scrutiny his family faced following his actions against Harvard's leadership.
“It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family. This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” remarked Ackman, as reported by The Guardian.
Despite Gay stepping down as Harvard's head, Ackman objected to the university's decision to allow her to remain on the faculty, asserting, “There would be nothing wrong with her staying on the faculty if she didn't have serious plagiarism issues,” as quoted by The New York Times.
Oxman, who earned her Ph.D. in Design Computation from MIT, is renowned for coining the term "Material Ecology," a domain that amalgamates natural organisms with design to create inventive objects and structures. Her work has been prominently featured in reputable publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
Since 2018, Oxman, an Israeli-American designer, has been professionally associated with actor Brad Pitt. Despite circulating rumors suggesting a romantic involvement, both Oxman and Pitt have categorically denied any such romantic association, asserting that their relationship is exclusively professional and grounded in their shared passion for architecture and design.
