Jewish billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been leading the campaign against antisemitism on U.S. campuses since October 7, is now facing a personal attack following his actions.
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Last week, Business Insider published a series of allegations against his wife, Israeli academic Neri Oxman, alleging she plagiarized portions of her doctoral dissertation.
Ackman didn’t remain silent at the charges and immediately declared that he and his team would conduct an investigation into the doctoral theses and publications of all senior faculty members at MIT, including its president, Sally Kornbluth, who is the last university president to remain in her position following the U.S. congress hearing on antisemitism spreading on college campuses.
Ackman noted he may also expand the scale of his investigation to include other universities. Last week, he posted to his X (formerly Twitter) account saying, “Last night, no one at MIT had a good night’s sleep.”
“Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. 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,” the post read.
“But it wasn’t just the MIT faculty that did not sleep last night. The Harvard faculty, its governing board members, and its administrative leadership did not sleep either. Because why would we stop at MIT? The best approach is probably to launch an AI startup to do this job (I would be interested in investing in one) as there is plenty of work to do, and the donors are going to demand that the review is done by an independent third party,” Ackman added.
“When I woke up on the morning of October 7, my first thought was not that I was going to launch an effort to save higher education from itself. I had other more pressing concerns about the world, and I still have these concerns. But as we all know, our higher education system (HES) is critically important as it can affect and influence the minds of our younger generations, thereby profoundly impacting the lives of all of us.”
The charges against Oxman came shortly after Ackman won a symbolic victory after Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, announced her resignation. In recent months, Ackman has put significant pressure on Gay and the institution's administration to combat antisemitism on campus, and personally opposed the future employment of students supporting Hamas.
The allegations against Oxman pertain to several quotes in her 2009 doctoral dissertation that weren’t given the appropriate citations according to academic standards. Ackman noted that the journalist who published the article gave them an hour and 32 minutes to respond to 12 pages of claims related to her work submitted years ago.
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Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth
(Photo: Reuters / Ken Cedeno, EPA-EFE/WILL OLIVER, AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
“A reporter was attacking my wife yet again, a woman who is totally uninvolved in my advocacy, but they thought attacking my family would cause me more pain. Even the mafia operates with more dignity and respect for family,” Ackman wrote on his X account.
Oxman herself responded to the allegations, explaining that most of them were not accurate and that following a thorough examination, she found four places in her dissertation where she did not provide an exact citation, expressing her regret for it.
Oxman is a computer-aided design expert who has had a long academic career, including at MIT. Currently, she leads her company, Oxman, in New York, specializing in product design, architecture, and urban design.