Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has recently been embroiled in plagiarism allegations in her PhD dissertation. These allegations have become more serious considering the fact that she is the wife of the American billionaire Bill Ackman. He was one of the key people who, a few days ago, actively engaged in accusing Claudine Gay of being a ‘plagiarist’ and called for her resignation from the post of Harvard president.
Who is Neri Oxman?
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Neri Oxman is considered a celebrity in the field of architecture and design. She is an American-Israeli designer who has been a prominent professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is recognised for combining design, biology, computing, and materials engineering in her art and architecture.
Oxman began her Ph.D. studies in architectural design and computation at MIT in 2005 and graduated in 2010. During this time, she also launched an interdisciplinary research project at MIT called ‘material ecology,’ in which she experimented with generative design.
After graduating, she became a professor at MIT and was later awarded tenure in 2017. She served as a faculty member before leaving the school to move to New York City in 2020. She is also the founder of the company, which she calls ‘Oxman.’
In 2019, Oxman married American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, with whom she has a daughter. The couple is also the co-trustee of the ‘Pershing Square Foundation.’
Plagiarism allegations against Neri Oxman:
Image Credit: Business Insider
On January 6, 2024, journalists at Business Insider (BI) published a post in which they claimed they had gathered evidence of plagiarism in Neri Oxman’s Ph.D. dissertation. Last Thursday, Business Insider found four instances of Oxman having lifted passages from other scholars’ work for her doctoral dissertation, which she completed at MIT in 2010. In these passages, she should have used quotation marks, but she did not.
After this, Oxman went to X and apologised for citation errors. She said that she would review the primary sources and request all the corrections that are required. She described her mistakes as instances in which she ‘omitted quotation marks’ for works for the works she has referred to in her dissertation. BI has pointed out that these mistakes were similar in certain cases to the mistakes that were found in Claudine Gay’s dissertation.
Matters did not end here, as Business Insider soon published another article in which they mentioned that Oxman had plagiarised entire paragraphs from Wikipedia and other sources without properly citing the references.
There they wrote that they have found at least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation, ‘Material-based Design Computation,’ which she straight away lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries. BI wrote that these instances of plagiarism are closer to the definition of plagiarism, which is using someone else’s words without any indication of them and passing them off as your own. They also wrote that they found plaigiarized content in her dissertation from other websites, such as the design-software maker ‘Rhino’ and ‘Wolfram MathWorld’, which she did not cite.
Reactions after the plagiarism charges became public knowledge:
Business Insider wrote in its post that MIT did not reply to their request for a comment, stating it was sent outside their normal business hours. BI also wrote that they tried to get a comment from Ackman and Oxman, but they declined to do so through their spokesperson.
Image Credit: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Ackman later posted a response on X in light of the concerned events, in which he promised to conduct plagiarism reviews of MIT’s leadership. He also went ahead and wrote that he found it quite unfortunate that his actions to address plagiarism issues in higher education have now led to attacks on his own family. He further wrote that this experience has inspired him to save all news organisations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews in the future.
In this response, Business Insider has pointed out that Ackman’s tone is very different while talking about his wife’s plagiarism charges compared to what it was in Claudine Gay’s case. BI wrote that in response to Gay’s plagiarism allegations over her 1997 dissertation, Ackman had published a 4,000-word post on X. In that post, he was trying to indicate that Gay was able to be a part of Harvard’s faculty owing to her being ‘a black woman’ and complained about ‘racism against white people.’
He has also pledged to conduct a thorough review of MIT president Sally Kornbluth, the entire MIT faculty, along with the board members and other officers of the MIT Corporation for evidence of plagiarism, in which MIT’s own plagiarism standards will be maintained. He said in a statement that all the ‘findings’ will be released in ‘the public domain’ to maintain ‘the spirit of transparency.’
