Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, admitted to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation while getting her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the prestigious university where she later worked as a tenured professor.
Oxman wrote in a post on X “that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation … [where] I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work.”
“I regret and apologize for these errors,” she shared Thursday after Business Insider made the 47-year-old Israel-born academic aware of the grave flaws.
Oxman, who married Pershing Square Capital Management’s billionaire founder in 2019, received her PhD from MIT in 2010. She became a tenured professor there in 2017 before leaving the university in June 2021.
“After I got married, became a mother, and moved to New York City,” she wrote in the post.
Per MIT’s definition of plagiarism, it “occurs when you use another’s words, ideas, assertions, data or figures and do not acknowledge that you have done so,” including when material does not “use quotation marks around the words and cite the source.”
Oxman’s failure to cite properly is therefore considered plagiarism at MIT, which says the consequences of plagiarizing can include “suspension or expulsion from the Institute.
Oxman confessed to the improper citations in her dissertation following Ackman’s public tirade against Harvard University’s Claudine Gay — who resigned from her position earlier this week after facing a slew of allegations that she plagiarized in her own academic work.
Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”
Representatives for MIT and Oxman at her latest venture, a biology and materials engineering firm called OXMAN, did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Ackman suggested that it was his crusade against the now-former Harvard president — which has been criticized as “bullying” Gay into her resignation — was the reason that Insider pointed out the faults in Oxman’s work.
“You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, @NeriOxman,” he shared to X on Thursday, just minutes after Oxman’s admission.
Ackman, who shares one child with Oxman and has even credited his fund’s success to his marital bliss, also boasted about his wife’s career in the post.
“Neri, a former tenured professor at @MIT, is the author of 74 peer-reviewed papers, eight peer-reviewed book chapters, and numerous other journal papers and proceedings,” shared Ackman, who called Gay’s plagiarism “very serious.”
However, he brushed off similar allegations against his wife, and lauded her as “human” because “she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”
On Wednesday, after it was revealed that Gay would no longer be Harvard’s president but would remain part of the Ivy League’s faculty — and keep her near-$900,000 salary — Ackman wrote on X that she should be fired completely due to “serious plagiarism issues.”
“Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” Ackman wrote. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
Representatives for Ackman at Pershing Square declined to comment, pointing to Ackman and Oxman’s posts on X.
