Wife of donor who called for Harvard president's firing faces plagiarism accusations

Jan. 6 (UPI) -- The wife of a billionaire donor who accused former Harvard President Claudine Gay of plagiarism and called for her resignation now faces her own plagiarism accusations.

Neri Oxman, former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, apologized Thursday after Business Insider reported multiple instances of plagiarism in her 2010 dissertation, where she lifted passages from scholars' works without proper attribution.

She said she would review her primary sources and request the appropriate corrections.

According to report, Oxman plagiarized a 1998 paper by Israeli scholars Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner, a 2006 article published in the journal Nature by the New York University historian Peder Anker and a 1995 paper published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

When Oxman lifted a passage from Weiner and Wagner, she cited the authors but did not include the passage in quotation mark, which is a violation of MIT's academic-integrity handbook. Business Insider noted many other similar instances in Oxman's dissertation.

The publication also said Oxman took a passage from a book published in 1998 by the German physicist Claus Mattheck without attribution.

Oxman was a tenured faculty member at MIT before leaving and moving to New York City in 2020. Her new design firm was being launched when she issued her apology in response to the report.

He husband, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, has since taken to X, vowing to scour the work of MIT faculty, including President Sally Kornbluth for plagiarism.

Ackman also implied in a post that the accusations leveled against his wife were retaliation for his campaign to fire Gay.

"You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case, my love and partner in life," Ackman said on X, adding "part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate."

Gay resigned as president of Harvard Tuesday amid accusations of plagiarism and a backlash over her response to student protests of Israel's war in Gaza. She retains her faculty position despite Ackman's call for her to be removed from the university entirely.

Ackman, a Harvard graduate worth roughly $4 billion, had been a prolific donor to the university. He began calling for Gay's resignation amid student protests of the war in Gaza and what he said was Gay's inadequate response to an "explosion" of antisemitism on campus.