Speaking of Bill Ackman

You may recall that Bill Ackman led the charge to get Harvard president Claudine Gay fired.

In my not so humble opinion, it was because at least in part because it fit in nicely with his anti-DEI Jihad.

Because she is black, and her parents immigrated from Haiti, he thinks that she was an affirmative action hire.

She's not.  Her family owns the largest cement factory in Haiti, and she went to high school at very exclusive, and very expensive, Phillips Exeter Academy.

Still, he, and his merry band of jack booted thug racists went after, and found misattributions in some of her parers, most notably her PhD thesis, and eventually the furor forced her out.

They do not appear to rise to the level of deliberate plagiarism, but appear to be some sloppy work.

Well the good folks at Business Insider started looking around Ackmanand they discovered that his wife, Neri Oxman, had a similar pattern of sloppiness and misattribution in her PhD thesis.

What we are talking about here largely things like missing quote marks, or footnotes, things in both case that are typically addressed by public announcements of corrections, and not disciplinary proceedings.

BTW, if you want to understand Oxman's work, you could check out her TED talk to see what she got her PhD for, but I only made it through 5 minutes, and as near as I can tell, she is in the bullshit bingo business.

Bill Ackman, lost it completely, see my earlier post, and started threatening the staff of Business Insider, and later he threatened  the entire faculty of MIT, because, this was like using nuclear weapons, and bad, as he had learned from The Barbie Movie Oppenheimer.  (Mr. Ackman, I believe that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want a word with you.)

Well, BI dug deeper, probably because when someone loses their shit and starts issuing threats over a story, it often means that there is more to come, and they discovered that Oxman had, among other problems with her sources, had cut and paste entire paragraphs from Wikipedia.

That is not sloppiness, that is middle school level fraud:

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for numerous university presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of student protests related to Israel's war in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a "very serious" offense.

………

On Thursday, Business Insider identified four instances in which Oxman had lifted passages from other scholars' work in her doctoral dissertation, completed at MIT in 2010. Three of those were passages where she should have used quotation marks but did not, and one included language from another author without any citation. In a post on X, Oxman admitted the plagiarism, apologized, and said she would review the primary sources and request corrections as needed.

………

In her response, Oxman described her mistakes as instances in which she "omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used." The cases she apologized for were similar in character to some cases that the Washington Free Beacon found in Claudine Gay's academic history — failures to use quotation marks around passages from works that were otherwise cited.

But a thorough review of her published work revealed that Oxman's failure to cite sources went beyond that — and included multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way. At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.

The instances of plagiarism BI found on Friday are closer to a more common definition of plagiarism — the use of someone else's words without any indication that you are passing them off as your own.

"Both warp and weft can be visible in the final product," Oxman wrote. "By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warp faced textile. Conversely, if the warp is spread out, the weft can slide down and completely cover the warp, giving a weft faced textile, such as a tapestry or a Kilim rug."

The passage is presented in the dissertation as Oxman's original writing, without reference to any source for the sentences.

………

Oxman's cribbing from the "Weaving" article was one of 15 examples that BI found Oxman plagiarizing from a Wikipedia article in her dissertation. The articles she pulled from were primarily technical, covering topics like "Functionally graded material," "Manifolds," and "Constitutive equation."

(emphasis mine) 

It goes on from there, and it gets uglier and uglier.

It appears that Mr. Ackman has had a change of heart now though, and says that making errors in citations is almost inevitable in academe, so we should give his wife a break.

Glass houses, dude.

Bill Ackman is a whiny little bitch.