Bill Ackman calls out MIT, Business Insider as wife Neri Oxman faces plagiarism accusations

By Eva Rothenberg, CNN

New York (CNN) — Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said Sunday that he has “good reason to believe” the plagiarism accusations against his wife Neri Oxman were spearheaded by either faculty or administrators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ackman said it was based on “new information,” which he did not share.

“Our leaders remain focused on ensuring the vital work of the people of MIT continues, work that is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity and quality of life,” an MIT spokesperson told CNN on Sunday.

Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT, allegedly plagiarized in more than two dozen instances in peer-reviewed academic papers and her PhD dissertation, according to a report published Friday by Business Insider.

The Business Insider investigation, which was published one day after another report from the outlet accusing Oxman of plagiarizing portions of her dissertation, cited 28 more alleged examples of plagiarism, some apparently from Wikipedia entries. CNN has not independently verified the Business Insider report.

Oxman has seemingly been pulled into this controversy in part because of her connection to Ackman, one of the most prominent critics in a successful effort to oust former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

The instances of Oxman’s alleged plagiarism cited by Business Insider appear similar to those launched against Gay. She stepped down last week amid accusations of inadequate citations in her PhD dissertation and several scholarly articles. The accusations snowballed onto the barrage of criticism Gay had already faced with regard to her response to a rise in reported antisemitic incidents on campus following the terror attacks by Hamas on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza.

Oxman, an American-Israeli designer credited with pioneering an interdisciplinary approach called “material ecology,” addressed the initial Business Insider report.

In a post Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter, she acknowledged that there were four paragraphs in her 330-page dissertation in which she correctly cited her sources but “did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

Oxman has not publicly responded to the new plagiarism allegations.

Ackman responded to the most recent Business Insider report on Friday night, claiming the outlet did not give Oxman and him enough time to counter the accusations before publishing.

“How can one defend oneself when one learns about a 12-page plagiarism accusation at 540pm on Friday night when one celebrates Shabbat and you are told the article would be published shortly, in this case at 7:10pm?” he wrote on X. Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, a practice that begins on sundown Friday night and typically involves setting aside work obligations, and sometimes all technology such as phones and computers, in the name of rest.

Ackman said that the new accusations against Oxman have “inspired (him) to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” announcing that he will launch a review of all current MIT professors, the university’s president and its governing board.

Ackman added that he will also be conducting a plagiarism review of Business Insider’s reporters and staff.

A representative for Ackman has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

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CNN’s Allison Morrow and Matt Egan contributed to this reporting.