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Neri Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, acknowledged using plagiarized text in her doctoral dissertation while pursuing her degree at the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she subsequently held a tenured professorship.
In a post on X, Oxman stated, “I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work, in four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation.”
“I regret and apologize for these errors,” the 47-year-old scholar who was born in Israel said on Thursday after Business Insider pointed out the serious shortcomings.
Oxman earned her PhD from MIT in 2010 and married the wealthy founder of Pershing Square Capital Management in 2019. There, in 2017, she was appointed as a tenure-track professor, and she left the institution in June 2021
“After I moved to New York City, got married, and became a mother,” she wrote in the post.
Plagiarism, according to MIT, “occurs when you use another person’s words, ideas, assertions, data, or figures and do not acknowledge that you have done so.” This includes when text is not properly referenced (i.e., quote marks are not used around words).
Therefore, Oxman’s failure to properly reference is seen as plagiarism at MIT, where plagiarizing might result in “suspension or expulsion” from the institution.
Following Ackman’s public outburst against Claudine Gay of Harvard University, who resigned earlier this week amid numerous accusations that she plagiarized in her own academic work, Oxman admitted to the incorrect citations in her dissertation.
Oxman stated on X that she intends to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections” after reviewing the original sources.
The Post requested comment, but neither MIT nor Oxman’s representatives at her most recent endeavor, a biology and materials engineering company named OXMAN, responded right away.
Insider’s criticism of Oxman’s work, according to Ackman, stemmed from his campaign against the now-former Harvard president, who has been accused of “bullying” Gay into resigning.
Shortly after Oxman’s admission on Thursday, he shared with X, “You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, @NeriOxman.”
In the same piece, Ackman—who has a child with Oxman and even attributes the success of his fund to his marital bliss—bragged about his wife’s work.
Ackman said that Gay’s plagiarism was “very serious.” “Neri, a former tenured professor at @MIT, is the author of 74 peer-reviewed papers, eight peer-reviewed book chapters, and numerous other journal papers and proceedings,” Ackman said.
But he dismissed similar accusations made against his wife, praising her for being “human” and for the fact that “she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”