Neri Oxman, Wife of Harvard Donor Bill Ackman, Apologizes After Plagiarism Allegations
Ackman relentlessly called for the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay over her own plagiarism allegations.

Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Neri Oxman, a tenured MIT professor and the wife of billionaire Harvard donor Bill Ackman, plagiarized passages of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, a review by Business Insider claimed. Ackman relentlessly called for the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay over plagiarism allegations, tweeting that “Students are forced to withdraw for much less.” As it turns out, Oxman engaged in a “similar pattern of plagiarism” in her dissertation, according to Business Insider, plagiarizing from papers found in Nature, the Royal Society of London and a 1998 book published by Claus Mattheck, a German physicist. Oxman responded to Business Insider’s story via X, formerly Twitter, saying she was double checking her work to determine if there are indeed any errors. “When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections,” she said. “I regret and apologize for these errors.”
I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at @MIT in 2010,https://t.co/6LE1O4FiiL
— Neri Oxman (@NeriOxman) January 4, 2024
where I omitted quotation marks…
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