Two days ago I called attention to the crusade by the site Business Insider, of all places, against Neri Oxman, the wife of gazillionaire and Harvard-basher Bill Ackman. Ackman, you’l recall, was instrumental in the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. He had called attention to her lame performance before the House committee, and also said he would no longer donate to Harvard until it got rid of its antisemitic climate. Bit was Ackman’s repeated emphasis on Gay’s academic plagiarism that finally helped bring her down.
For some reason, Business Insider (BI) decided to examine the plagiarism not by Ackman, but by his wife, apparently as a way to get back at Ackman for attacking Gay (at least, that’s my theory, which is mine). In two hit pieces (here and here), BI had found four instances in Oxman’s MIT Ph.D. thesis in which, while citing sources properly, she didn’t put quotation marks around the copied material. That is a technical violation of MIT’s code of conduct, and so, according to their lights, she plagiarized. Oxman admitted she erred, apologized, and asked MIT to correct the four excerpts lacking quotation marks.
Although Oxman was a professor at MIT, she left for good in 2021, so this doesn’t affect her career at all. While it is grounds for criticism, it’s hardly relevant any more, and is surely not as important as Gay’s plagiarism, which was more widespread, arrant, and occurred in her published papers, which is more serious. Further, Gay was President of Harvard, and must be held to the highest standards, so her resignation for plagiarism was appropriate.
However, BI has kept digging, for they’re relentless. (The glee with which they revealed Oxman’s plagiarism was palpable, and they brought up other irrelevant stuff, like a present she gave to Jeffrey Epstein, to smear her in a way that seemed inappropriate.)
But this time BI struck pay dirt. As the article below shows (click on screenshot, or find it archived here), Oxman did something less palatable this time: she plagiarized at least 15 times in her thesis from Wikipedia, without any citation or attribution, as well as from two other sources. In addition, two of her published papers appear to have lifted material as well, also without either an inline citation or quotation marks. These are more serious matters:
Quotes from BI are indented, and I’ll give two examples of the Wikipedia plagiarism.
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.
. . .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.
Here are two examples, and the copying is almost word for word. WHY would anyone plagiarize from Wikipedia? And it’s hard to see this as just an error, since there are neither citations to the site nor quotation marks.
Others are shown, but the point is made. There are fifteen in toto, and that’s not good.
She also lifted an illustration:
But Oxman never acknowledged having pulled from Wikipedia. She didn’t just lift text, either: She also took an illustration from the article for “Heat flux” without citing a source, despite requirements in the image’s Creative Commons license to credit where the picture came from.
I’ve sometimes used Wikipedia illustrations without citing the Creative Commons License, but found out about the need for that only recently and will cite that unless the photo info says you don’t have to cite the source of the picture licensed by CC.
Some plagiarism from other papers in her thesis, without attribution or quotation marks:
Wikipedia wasn’t the only resource she cited without attribution in the paper that earned her a doctorate. In a footnote, she used 54 consecutive words without attribution from the website of the design-software maker Rhino to explain what a “Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline” is. She also used technical language about tessellations that matched language from the website Wolfram MathWorld — which, again, she didn’t cite.
And plagiarism in Oxman’s published papers, again without attribution, at least in some cases.
She plagiarized both before and after she received her Ph.D. in 2010. Of three peer-reviewed papers reviewed by BI, two — 2007’s “Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry” and 2011’s “Variable Property Rapid Prototyping” — also contained plagiarism.
The 2011 paper included more than 100 words exactly as they appeared in the 2005 book “Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age,” without quotation marks, citation, or a mention in Oxman’s bibliography. She pulled material from “Path planning of functionally graded material objects for layered manufacturing,” a 2004 paper by M.Y. Zhou, without mentioning it in her bibliography. And she included two verbatim sentences from the 1999 book “Functionally Graded Materials: Design, Processing and Applications” without quotation marks or an in-line citation, though the work is mentioned in her bibliography.
The 2007 “Get Real” paper pulled language describing tensors — an algebraic concept that includes scalars and vectors — from an earlier-published work, the “CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.” In a 2010 paper, “Per Formative: Towards a Post Materialist Paradigm in Architecture,” that was not peer-reviewed, BI also found another instance of plagiarism, with Oxman using chunks of language from publisher Da Capo Press’ description of “The Modern Language of Architecture” by Bruno Zevi.
So yes, her plagiarism is now more extensive and more serious in nature than before. But again, it carries no consequences for her since she’s not in academia. If these cases are substantiated, Oxman should apologize and correct both her thesis again as well as the published paper.
There’s no apology yet, just a couple of tweets from Oxman and Ackman. I have to admit that she has a sense of humor.
I am Jane Doe. John Doe is my husband. https://t.co/QHNiuaJs3P
— Neri Oxman (@NeriOxman) January 7, 2024
But Ackman, who is apparently very angry at BI, is now vowing to examine possible plagiarism in academics not just at MIT, but everywhere in America. Oy!
Some have questioned my commitment. They don’t know me. https://t.co/4Jmaam148x
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 8, 2024
The upshot: Yes, Neri Oxman plagiarized in her thesis and some published papers. It’s more serious than before, but again, she will suffer no consequences, though her reputation has been a bit sullied. It’s still not the equivalent of what Gay did, as it’s lesser in extent, mostly in a Ph.D. thesis, and, most important, Gay held an important and symbolic academic position.
I’m not excusing Oxman, for she transgressed. But there’s little more to be done than to extract her apology and corrections of her copying. But as for Ackman, the guy seriously needs to chill!
That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Why? Plagiarism is bad.
According to the BI article:
Presumably they’ve got nothing to fear, unless the plagiarism in US academia really is a widespread problem. In which case, it will be good to have some sunlight shining on it.
Plagiarism is constant in academia. In the last decade or so of my 40+ years as a faculty member at several major research universities, we used software such as TurnItIn to check for plagiarism in student papers, and I can recall only a couple of papers that found 0% copying without attribution. Indeed, my last sentences are 75% copied without attribution. Over and over, students lift a sentence or two from Wikipedia, sometimes from an online publication, and fail to provide appropriate citation/attribution. When I called out students on this, they were typically surprised that they needed to provide such attribution for public sources such as Wikipedia, especially for one sentence, and were happy to do so. If we expelled every student who made such errors, we’d have lots of nice, small classes to teach instead of the large lectures….
Judah Grunstein wrote recently:
“There’s a misconception that plagiarism involves crossing a hard and clear line that then incurs an automatic penalty.”
But he forgives it in his wife who’s plagiarism is worse than Gays? Funny how that works! Please, billionaire Oligarchs like Ackman would kill you dead if it made them a buck, we all know it. This has nothing to do with antisemitism nor plaigairism, it has to do with a crybully billionaire who didn’t get his way.
The man’s history is riddled with foolish and idiotic decisions and obsessions that punished his clients and friends ALL for his personal mania and biases.
The destructive, manipulative, gnostic cult of the Dialectic / Left wins again – “how dare you“.
Really, no one will remain. That’s the End of History, when all contradiction has been dialectically synthesized into a pure sublation of The Spirit.
Oh, please.
We’re supposed to believe that Oxman intended the latter, even though it is incorrect writing style? Deliberate plagiarism seems more plausible.
If you read Jerry’s previous posts about this story, you’ll see some examples. She wrote things like:
We’re supposed to believe that Oxman intended the latter, even though it is incorrect writing style? (Pidcock 2024)
instead of
“We’re supposed to believe that Oxman intended the latter, even though it is incorrect writing style?” (Pidcock 2024)
To me, an accidental omission of quotation marks seems entirely plausible. Well, it did before I read this article.
If she had actually written what we’re expected to believe she intended (quotation followed by citation), her graduate committee would have brought it to her attention to be corrected. You know, Pidcock (2024): “We’re supposed to believe that Oxman intended the latter, even though it is incorrect writing style?”
One thought that immediately struck me about the Wikipedia examples is: how do we know she didn’t write those sections of the Wikipedia entries herself? Have they checked the state of the articles in question at the time she wrote her thesis, and determined which users were responsible for creating or editing the sections in question?
I’ve made small edits to dozens of Wikipedia entries over the years, and when my book on 16th- and 17th-century Arctic exploration is finally published I may find I’ve used very similar phraseology in places to the patches and corrections I’ve supplied in Wikipedia.
I have similar questions. With its crowd-sourced, constantly changing information, how does one plagiarize Wikipedia?
This explainer from Molly White
A Wikipedian explains Wikipedia to Bill Ackman
+1
Oxman cheated, badly. BI is crudely attacking her to get at her husband. It’s not a good look all around. It’ll go away in a few days, once the numbers of clicks decline and a new shiny object comes into view.
Your theory (which is yours) is spot on! It’s standard woke playbook.
When Ackman critiques DEI at Harvard, they attack Ackman personally (ok, his wife).
When Chris Rufo critiques CRT in schools, they attack Rufo, trying to paint him as a “far right” extremist.
When JK Rowling offers the mildest possible criticisms of trans ideology, she is instantly attacked and demonised.
When Elon Musk removes woke censorship from Twitter and pushes it in more of a free-speech direction, on which all viewpoints are tolerated, most of the mainstream media then goes after Musk.
Couldn’t you say the exact same thing about the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay? They weren’t the product of some dispassionate analysis of her scholarship. They were uncovered because Chris Rufo and others disagreed with her responses to Elise Stefanik’s questioning.
Of course that doesn’t excuse Gay’s plagiarism, or mean that it was a bad thing to uncover the plagiarism. But it does mean that the strategy you attribute to the woke playbook (attacking a political opponent by scouring their lives for faults that may be unrelated to the particular political opinion in question) is employed by some of the anti-woke as well.
Gay’s plagiarism is centrally relevant to her academic leadership of Harvard, and is part of a much wider pattern. To my mind, the plagiarism is the least of the issues with Gay. More important (as I see it), are her track record as a DEI advocate, her hypocritical double standards over free speech and academic freedom, her treatment of Roland Fryer and Ronald Sullivan, the fact that she has a very meagre academic track record and is obviously a diversity hire, and the fact that her academic work is low quality, mistaking correlation for causation, showing dubious cherry picking of data, and that she is refusing to allow other scholars access to her original data to check her work.
It’s unclear to me what the quality of Gay’s scholarship has to do with her views on the kind of speech that should be allowed on campus. I wouldn’t be surprised if being a good scholar is essentially uncorrelated (or even negatively correlated) with being a good administrator.
I’m not saying discussions of the quality of her work shouldn’t be taking place. I’m saying that people are only focusing on her work in retaliation for the statements she made about whether endorsements of genocide are permissible at Harvard. She made comments at the hearing people found abhorrent, and some of those people decided to comb through her scholarship to see if they could find dirt that would discredit her. And it turns out they did find that dirt.
That seems to fit the pattern you were describing earlier.
If somebody had a bone to pick with me, and instead of attacking me went after my wife, I would be quite upset.
Also, as far as I can tell, Oxman did not steal anyone’s ideas or original scholarship. She mostly copied widely accepted facts and common knowledge expressed in boilerplate language. This is the academic equivalent of jaywalking.
In any event, on net Oxman probably benefited from the Streisand effect. I certainly had never heard of her before this kerfuffle.
I agree that attacking someone’s family in retaliation seems pretty vicious.
On your second point, though, I don’t think I agree. If we go by your standard, then I think Claudine Gay is essentially off the hook as well. In all the examples I’ve seen of her plagiarism, she isn’t stealing original ideas or passing off novel arguments as her own. She’s mainly plagiarizing summaries of the existing literature on a subject, or the details of how a particular methodology works.
I would still say that what she has done is considerably more serious than the academic equivalent of jaywalking. And the same goes for Oxman.
Dude, you need help. Setting aside the fact that you brushed off an academic cheating on her Doctoral dissertation, there are so many errors in this piece, ie. Oxman was ridiculed for TAKING money from Epstein AFTER it came out about diddling kids, not GIVING anything to him.
Plus, it doesn’t matter if she WORKS at MIT anymore. What matters is that she cheated on her dissertation and therefore it is incumbent upon the school to revoke her PhD and she should be fired from ALL the boards and companies she sits on works for like her latest scam company.
Or, do the elite get their own rules? Cheating is cheating is cheating, hypocrites beware.
I believe I said in a previous post that she gave Epstein a present after he gave her money. That’s a different matter from this plagiarism charge. And I said that her reputation has been eroded because of this. I don’t agree with you that she should be fired for this; her situation is not the same as Gay’s. But companies have the right to fire anybody they want at will.
However, because you’re a rude person (see the first sentence), you’ll post no more on this website. Calling me “dude” is the act of a moron, and you clearly haven’t read the posting rules.
This article brings up an issue that I have been curious about from the start of the Gay affair. Namely: what is the ‘average’ rate of plagiarism among scholars? This should really be studied. For one thing, ignorance about the true incidence of plagiarism in academia enables partisans to argue whatever they want – e.g., that Gay was pilloried for a common, trivial academic transgression (thereby proving that the REAL reason for her ouster was hostility to her for her race / DEI / Palestine or all of the above) OR that Gay was an unethical academic outlier who thoroughly deserved to be ousted for that reason alone.
The advent of sophisticated plagiarism detecting software makes it feasible for a quantitative social scientist (such as Gay herself?!) to take a random sampling of scholars and search their entire body of work for any instances of plagiarism. This way, it would be possible to have actual data about the actual incidence of plagiarism in academia.
I got the idea from this article by Ian Bogost in the Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/plagiarism-war-claudine-gay/677020/
The author used software to analyze his entire body of scholarship for plagiarism. Despite having written much more than Gay, there were zero instances of plagiarism detected. That says something.
But it also (possibly) says something that BI’s investigation came up with multiple plagiarism hits on one of the scholars they targeted.
Can anybody suggest a free plagiarism-checking tool? This affair has me wondering how much of my own writing has picked up bits that came from other sources.
There’s a number of them – check here: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=plagiarism+checker+free
Predictably, the trolls have invaded and are saying that I’m pronouncing what Oxman did as okay. I clearly didn’t do that. A quote from this piece:
Worse, the trolls are bawling that I gave Oxman a pass and called for Gay to resign, so I must be a racist. That’s balderdash. If Oxman was an academic and not somebody running her own company, I would call for her to resign or at least be sanctioned. But she’s not, so all I can say, which I did, is that her reputation is eroded.
Anyone who says I’m completely excusing Oxman didn’t read what I said.
I’m sorry, I’m having trouble finding this.
I’m guessing they’re attempted comments that didn’t make it to post.
I first became aware of Oxman due to the minor controversy about her connections to Epstein a few years back. Though I don’t recall the details of that controversy, I do recall noticing that her work at MIT seemed to be lacking much technical depth. You can see some examples here:
https://neri.media.mit.edu/projects.html
Am I the only one who thinks most of the work featured on that page comes across more as sci-fi concept design than any sort of technically serious design or engineering? I was surprised to learn she was married to Bill Ackman, but given her work, it did not surprise me to learn that her academic work is not up to standards. Anyway, my intent is not to unnecessarily impugn Oxman or her work, which is very striking and interesting as art, but just does not seem to have as much serious technical underpinning as she and others wish to claim. Perhaps I am drawing too much of a conclusion from a limited sample of her output? Is anyone more familiar with all of her body of work who can comment?
FYI: Your link is broken.
Thanks. Fixed it.
I’m glad you did. Interesting. Yes, I agree that I don’t really see an engineer-bent to her work- she’s talented nonetheless. Perhaps she should be working for designers in Hollywood.
Yes, she is an artist, not an engineer.
She doesn’t solve engineering problems per se because she isn’t a trained or practising engineer, although she is a qualified architect. She plagiarised definitions for “raster graphics” and “b-splines” when any engineer working in 3D graphics would have written a sentence quicker than they could have copied and pasted from her sources.
Being an artist isn’t easy because the value of art is subjective. To make it pay you have to convince benefactors to support you. That’s where Oxman excels. Her beauty and charm are exceptional and she has cultivated the latter to appeal to a certain class of tech entrepreneur with access to funding and connections that puts her projects in an exclusive class of artistic endeavour.
Justice Gorsuch plagiarized multiple times and was rewarded with a seat on the SCOTUS. I guess it depends on the person doing the plagiarizing; apparently, some people are “too big to fail.”
So, we are about to be treated to a season of plagiarism-detection wars. It will be fun all around. I can’t help wondering how prevalent copying is in the grievance studies journals, where genuflecting to a few dominant texts is so central to the enterprise.
Up until a few years ago, I used to contribute occasionally to a now defunct internet magazine. We routinely used to copy pictures for our articles from other internet sites. I suppose the editor and the writers could be sent to Devil’s Island for this offense, but luckily the editor has since joined the choir invisible, and the former writers are mostly lying low.
Gosh I hope not. I sincerely hope and expect that the current plagiarism craze will come to an end quickly, as this is really about Gay and Ackman. That said, now that plagiarism as been used to good effect, it remains available in as an arrow in the critic’s quiver.
It is all about Israel/Palestine, on both sides. Plagiarism is just a smokescreen. Ackman was set off by Gay’s Congressional testimony, and Business Insider has a DSA-ish streak and a nasty post-Gawker attitude that makes them unleash the hounds on anyone they decide is an “enemy.” BI’s news editor called his sister-in-law “morally bankrupt” for living in Israel (as documented by…his wife, unbelievably enough: https://www.theawl.com/2011/06/life-after-zionist-summer-camp/ )
Ackman probably feels like he and his wife are being personally targeted as part of a vendetta for having the wrong politics, and he’s right. BI and others will probably keep digging for anything about Ackman and Oxman that they can find. That can make a person paranoid. Ackman’s got the resources to fight back, so get the popcorn everyone.
Irrelevant mudslinging.
Easy enough to do, including dissertations. (https://dissexpress.proquest.com/search.html) But if he goes through the MIT faculty and doesn’t find anything, you can bet he won’t tell us.
And now the parent company of the publisher of BI is ordering an investigation. Presumably there was pressure from Ackman, and they have agreed to do this, likely to see if the journalists were simply indulging in a petty ‘gotcha’ exercise, or were reporting legitimate news.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/08/media/business-insider-bill-ackman-reliable-sources/index.html
The article suggests that staffers at BI are alarmed at the ‘chilling effect’ this will have on investigative reporting. I take that to mean that they are brave when it comes to agreeing to pull the tail of a powerful person, at least until he turns round and complains, and then it’s all ‘literal violence’!
Thanks for the topic post and the reader comments.
As a three-time casualty of plagiarism, some observations. First, the occupational status of the plagiarist is generally irrelevant, unless one is comparing a tenured history professor with the octogenarian host of your neighborhood gardening blog. In the present case, the supposed plagiarists are PhDs, one a university president and the other a scholar of some renown. Both should have known better.
Second, the motivation of the whistleblower is likewise irrelevant. Whistleblowers often have an agenda of some sort. The offense is still plagiarism.
Third, an overlooked aspect of plagiarism is the role of research assistants and scriveners of that ilk, who research and write for busy scholars. The only thing worse than trying to weasel out of the plagiarism charge by admitting inadvertent error or carelessness is to confess that you never wrote your dissertation to begin with.
This, and Claudine Gay’s activity, are plagiarism in the same sense that being touchy-feely in the sense of Al Franken is sexual assault. Yes, it’s bad practice, it’s potentially disrespectful and it has to stop, and yes, the definitions of “plagiarism” and “sexual assault” that are used to terrorize teenagers would seem to cover them, but really. We would be better served by having a more nuanced vocabulary.
Both in Oxman and in Gay’s case, what is really at stake is not stealing credit or the fruit of another’s sweat, but being a bad writer – and pretending to have understood and internalized matters you haven’t.
Turnitin should be used as a tool for detecting *possible* cases of plagiarism; it doesn’t prove plagiarism. It’s up for humans to judge plagiarism.
The plagiarism charges against Claudine Gay are what the tax fraud charges were to Al Capone. They were both engaging in wrong-doing, but their opponents needed substantial proof of some concrete wrong-doing. In Al Capone’s case it was his dodgy tax accounts, with Gay her spotty academic record. Their real crimes of course were far more serious. Capone was a murderous gangster and Gay was uneven in her application of free speech, giving free rein to those she agreed with, while firing those she didn’t based on her own political machinations.