The debate over plagiarism widens after the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Now that she’s resigned and been replaced by a guy who seems equally enthusiastic about DEI, the person who was in large part behind the effort to get rid of Gay, billionaire financier Bill Akerman, has his own plagiarism scandal. Namely, his wife, Neri Oxman, an Israeli architect and designer, has admitted to having lifted sections of her PhD dissertation without proper attribution.
According to an investigation from Business Insider, many sections of her 330 page dissertation were lifted from Wikipedia, random textbooks, and other sources.
Conservatives are crying foul. This is the guy’s wife, that’s off limits, they are saying. Yet she’s a former professor of MIT–is this a damsel in distress? It isn’t clear why conservatives are so eager to defend Ackman’s wife, besides the fact that they perceive of Ackman as being on their “team.” (SEE ALSO: Ramaswamy Rebuffs Reporter’s ‘White Supremacy’ Gotcha Question)
The very long response from Ackman posted on X reads like an extended cope, frankly. He believes that the plagiarism charges came from other faculty at MIT. I’m not sure why that’s even relevant. But what else can the guy say at this point? He charged Claudine Gay with plagiarism, got her to resign, and then his own wife turns out to have done the same thing. It’s kind of funny.
Ackman stated:
“It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.” So Ackman is playing the family card, again suggesting her status as “wife” means she’s off bounds. All the sudden we’re supposed to be chivalrous because it’s a woman involved. Now of course this attack against Oxman is politically motivated; no one previously cared about her dissertation. But likewise the attacks against Claudine Gay were politically motivated; the real reason for attacking her was her supposed antisemitism.
Ackman is playing the family card…
The fact is both these women are guilty of plagiarism, and this raises questions about the degrees that universities are handing out these days. Many are claiming that there’s a different standard for POC and plagiarism. If anything, there’s a lower standard. Otherwise, how would Gay have been there in the first place? And what happened to standards in the case of Nori Oxman?
In conclusion, there is a double standard for Claudine Gay–because the standard for her was even lower than for other academics. But the standard was also pretty low for Bill Ackman’s wife. So what’s going on in academia? Is it DEI for me but not for thee?
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