The College Fix

Bill Ackman launched review following plagiarism accusations against his wife

This past weekend, hedge fund founder Bill Ackman announced he would launch an AI plagiarism review of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s faculty and leaders with possible plans to extend the probe to other elite universities.

Ackman (pictured), CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, wrote Friday on X that he was “inspired” by what he described as unfounded plagiarism accusations against his wife, American-Israeli designer and former MIT Professor Neri Oxman, “to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.”

“We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President [Sally] Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism,” Ackman wrote.

He wrote their work would be checked against the school’s plagiarism standards, linking to the MIT student handbook on academic integrity.

On Saturday, Ackman wrote in a lengthy X post that “last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.”

Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep.

Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 7, 2024

“Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed,” he wrote. “No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others.”

He announced he or others would extend the plagiarism search to other top higher education institutions, writing, “Why would we stop at MIT?”

Ackman stated that colleges and universities would need to conduct their own internal plagiarism reviews, “or someone else would do it for them.”

He recommended launching an AI startup to conduct such investigations and declared interest in investing in one.

Ackman’s promise of plagiarism reviews at MIT and elsewhere followed accusations that his wife, Neri Oxman, had herself plagiarized parts of her dissertation by not citing Wikipedia, technical documents, and other scholars, according to Business Insider.

Oxman acknowledged Thursday in an X post that she had made “errors” in not properly citing sources.

In four paragraphs in her MIT dissertation, “did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work,” she wrote.

In December, Ackman said on X he had confirmed Harvard University’s appointment of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s former president recently outed for plagiarism, was determined by diversity, equity and inclusion principles, as The College Fix previously reported.

“I have confirmed now from multiple sources that the search committee that led to President Gay’s appointment excluded non-DEI eligible candidates from the process,” Ackman, a Harvard alumnus, posted.

Even more, Ackman wrote in January following Gay’s resignation that Harvard’s espousal of DEI fueled the scandal, and the university’s board must be reorganized.

On Jan. 2, conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote on X that he is “contributing an initial $10,000 to a ‘plagiarism hunting’ fund.”

“We will expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life,” he wrote.

MORE: Claudine Gay will resign as Harvard president

IMAGE: Bill Ackman/Facebook

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