- Neri Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT, apologized for parts of her dissertation.
- Business Insider found that Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, had multiple instances of plagiarism.
- "I regret and apologize for these errors," she wrote on X, and said she would update her work.
Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.
BI identified four instances in Oxman's dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars' work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been "the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors."
Ackman has been on a crusade to force Gay to resign, which she did this week. Revelations that she had plagiarized portions of academic articles, publicized by far-right activist Christopher Rufo, added fuel to his calls for Gay to step down after protests against Israel's war in Gaza rocked Harvard's campus.
Ackman said Gay had mishandled the student protests and created a culture of antisemitism at the elite Cambridge institution. Gay's plagiarism underscored her lack of fitness to lead the institution, or even to teach at Harvard, Ackman wrote on X, calling Gay's plagiarism "very serious."
Oxman, an architect and artist, received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2010 and became a tenured professor there in 2017 before leaving the university in June 2021, an MIT spokesperson said. Her failure to use quotation marks to identify passages of text from other sources meets the definition of plagiarism as spelled out in MIT's academic integrity handbook.
Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to "request that MIT make any necessary corrections."
"As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come," she wrote.
Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on "innovation in product, architectural, and urban design," she wrote on X. "OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year."
Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider's article.
"Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate," he wrote.