After Harvard President, MIT University female professor also accused of plagiarism from Wikipedia

Plagiarism allegations appear to be becoming the latest weapon in the battle over leadership and direction at America's elite schools, according to a review by The New York Times.

For weeks, billionaire Bill Ackman has been campaigning on social media against former Harvard President Claudine Gay amid accusations she plagiarized other scholars.

However, recently, Business Insider published similar allegations of plagiarism against his wife, professor Neri Oxman - an architect and designer, who has a PhD in computational design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Business Insider's "shot" against Dr. Oxman came on Thursday (January 4, 2024), two days after Harvard President Dr. Gay resigned.

According to the complaint, Dr. Oxman “stole sentences and entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in his academic writing.”

Ms Oxman later publicly apologized. “As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognised the profound importance of the contributions of my colleagues and those who came before me,” she wrote on social media.

Dr Oxman also said he cited sources but "omitted quotation marks for some of the works he used" in four paragraphs of his 330-page thesis.

“Not including quotation marks is a violation of MIT's academic integrity handbook,” Business Insider argued.

Dr. Oxman also apologized for paraphrasing a sentence from a book by Claus Mattheck in his thesis and not citing him.

“Weaponizing plagiarism”

Meanwhile, in response to the accusations against his wife, billionaire Bill Ackman said he would investigate plagiarism of all current MIT faculty, including Sally Kornbluth, the school's president, and would share the results with the public.

Kimberly Allen, an MIT spokesperson, said in an email that university leaders “remain focused on ensuring the important work of everyone at MIT continues, which is essential to the nation’s security, prosperity, and quality of life.”

On the other side of the coin, Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant and operator of the website Plagiarism Today, said he worries about the "weaponization of plagiarism."

“I worry that we will see a sharp increase in shoddy analyses that try to exaggerate minor issues or make accusations of plagiarism when the evidence is not strong enough to support it,” he said.

In the age of AI, plagiarism allegations can be made more easily and can be easily weaponized by either side in a dispute.

“There is no doubt on both sides that plagiarism has become a weapon, just like the criminal justice system has been weaponized,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who contested plagiarism charges against himself years ago and was cleared by Harvard.

“Everything is weaponized in America today,” the professor said. Dr. Oxman was described in a 2018 profile by The New York Times as: “A brilliant scholar who founded a discipline she calls material ecology, working “with natural organisms like molds, monarchs and silkworms, to create extraordinary objects and structures that do all sorts of extraordinary things.”

Born in Israel, Oxman is a first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force. She and billionaire Ackman married in 2019.