- A Business Insider report found several cases of plagiarism by Neri Oxman, an MIT professor and Bill Ackman’s wife.
- The hedge fund billionaire had expressed outrage over former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism.
- Here’s how the plagiarism instances of Gay and Oxman compare.
Neri Oxman — who was a tenured professor at MIT and the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman — has apologized for multiple instances of plagiarism in her 2010 doctoral dissertation.
Ackman — who went on a monthslong crusade against former Harvard president Claudine Gay, including for citation blunders very similar to Oxman’s — has described his wife’s errors as honest mistakes.
“Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote in a post on X following Business Insider’s report on Oxman’s plagiarism.
That’s a starkly different approach than the one he took toward Gay after she stepped down earlier this week. At the time, Ackman said she should be fired from Harvard’s faculty entirely due to what he called “serious plagiarism issues.”
“Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” he posted on X. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
However, the examples seen of Oxman and Gay’s plagiarism have more similarities than differences, according to experts and an internal analysis.
“Gay was accused, accurately in at least some of the cases, of using verbatim text from outside sources and, though in most cases the source was cited, it was not marked as quoted text,” Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert, told Business Insider. “That seems to be pretty much what happened here with Oxman.”
Both authors made mistakes in their papers, Bailey said, but a handful of improper citations found in a research paper or dissertation spanning a couple hundred pages would not typically rise to the level of termination in academia.
This kind of plagiarism “usually comes not so much from a malicious intent to steal, but from a very, very sloppy writing style,” he added.
Here’s how the two stack up.
Neither Oxman nor Gay are accused of stealing big ideas — but their works do contain citation inadequacies
The main issue for both Gay and Oxman has to do with quotation marks: The two included direct passages cribbed from other academics, and while they cited their sources in line and included the sources in their bibliographies, the passages were not put in quotes.
Below is a passage from a paper by Israeli scholars Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner alongside a passage from Oxman’s dissertation:
A similar comparison, first identified by Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, and Christopher Brunet, a contributing editor at The American Conservative, shows Gay failing to put quotation marks around a passage from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin D. Gilliam’s “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment” in her 1997 Harvard dissertation.
“The results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas-as indicated by control of the mayor’s office-are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.” — Lawrence Bobo and Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. in “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment”
“Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in “high black-empowerment” areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.” — Claudine Gay in “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies”
While omitting quotation marks violated MIT’s academic integrity code at the time of Oxman’s dissertation and is against Harvard’s current policy, experts — including scholars whose work Gay and Oxman copied — have largely agreed the offense is inconsequential.
When researchers make this type of mistake, a typical course of action might be to issue a correction and perhaps take a remedial course on research writing, Bailey, the plagiarism expert, said.
“For Gay and for Oxman, there’s no real pattern to what sentence is used,” Bailey said, adding that both of these cases could be a case where the author pulled text and forgot to put it in quotes or intended to paraphrase but forgot to do so.
Gay requested several corrections to her papers after the citation errors were highlighted in December.
Harvard’s board cleared Gay of “research misconduct.” In an op-ed published in The New York Times following her resignation, Gay stood by her work.
“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others,” she wrote. “Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”
After BI’s report, Oxman apologized in a post on X and said she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”
Anne R. Williamson, a professor at Miami University whose work was improperly cited by Gay in a 2017 article, told The Harvard Crimson in an email that she was “completely satisfied” with Gay’s subsequent correction.
Peder Anker, who had a passage of text used by Oxman without quotations, told Business Insider he had the “deepest respect” for Oxman and that it was an “honor” to be quoted by her.
“Having said that, the quotation is from a pedantic point of view incorrect, and she has publicly apologized for that on X,” he said. “Rest assured that her apology is accepted.”
Carol Swain, a former Vanderbilt University professor, did, however, express dismay at Gay’s mistakes and admonished her and Harvard in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“Ms. Gay’s damage to me is aggravated because her early work was in the area where my research is considered seminal. Her scholarship on black congressional representation, electoral districting and descriptive representation builds on terrain where I plowed the ground,” Swain wrote.
Both Oxman and Gay copied language almost word-for-word, without any citation
In her 330-page dissertation, Oxman pulled a paragraph, almost word-for-word, from a book published in 1998 by German physicist Claus Mattheck without quotation or attribution. In the post on X, Oxman wrote, “I deeply apologize to Mattheck for inadvertently not citing him when I paraphrased.”
Gay faces some of the same issues.
A complaint sent to Harvard argued that her 1993 article “Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations” in the journal Origins contained passages of text that closely mirrored writing by the scholar David Covin without any mention of him.
For example, Gay wrote:
“The fundamental organizational unit, as approved by the founding National Assembly in 1978, was to be the Center of Struggle (Centro de Luta). Centers were to be formed in work areas, villages, prisons, candomble and umbanda temples, samba schools, churches, and favelas.”
In a 1990 article titled “Afrocentricity in O Movimento Negro Unificado” in the Journal of Black, Covin, by comparison, wrote:
“In the basic organizational structure which they approved, the Centers of Struggle were the fundamental organizational units. These were to be formed in work areas, villages, prisons, candomblé and umbanda temples, samba schools, afoxés, churches, and favelas.”
Gay’s plagiarism problems go beyond her dissertation
Gay’s citation issues extend beyond her dissertation and to her academic writing. Eight of her published works have been flagged to Harvard for containing instances of plagiarism.
Business Insider has analyzed Oxman’s dissertation for plagiarism, not her entire body of academic writings, and there has been much greater scrutiny of Gay’s writing than Oxman’s. So far, instances of plagiarism have only been reported as an issue in Oxman’s dissertation.
Bailey told Business Insider that Oxman and Gay exemplified “poor writing habits” that he often sees in students who make citation a part of the editing process rather than the writing task. Cite as you write to avoid making these types of mistakes, he said.
“It indicates a bad process to drafting this stuff, and I would say that’s true for both Gay and Oxman,” he said. “But it doesn’t necessarily, in either case, represent a malicious desire to take the work of others and not give them credit for it. It’s just poor writing.”