It all started with the ouster of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who served in the role for a total of six months, the institution’s shortest-lived presidency and the only Black woman to have held the title. Gay’s resignation from Harvard resulted from two overlapping factors: First, a bungled congressional hearing on antisemitism; second, accusations of plagiarism. After the congressional hearing (and the resignation of former UPenn president Liz Magill over the same hearing), Gay received the backing of Harvard's board in December and an initial investigation by Harvard’s highest governing body into the plagiarism allegations “fell short” of “research misconduct,” but that didn’t stop critics from continuing to push for her removal.
Enter: Hedge fund manager billionaire Bill Ackman, a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Business School. Ackman is what journalist Michael Massen calls a “hedge fund activist”: “In many cases, [hedge fund activists] seek changes in a company’s operations and threaten to wage proxy fights to bring them about.” Ackman, who has given over $25 million to Harvard, has been obsessing over his alma mater for the last several months.
According to The Guardian, as of January 3, Ackman had “tweeted about Gay, Harvard, or both, more than 100 times to his 1 million followers” since early December. Throughout that month, Ackman continued to post about further accusations of plagiarism being raised by conservative bad actors including the higher ed-obsessed Christopher Rufo and US Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who’s been accused of promoting rhetoric reminiscent of the white nationalist and antisemitic great replacement theory.
Ackman’s complaints, as listed by Massen in The Nation, include Harvard’s diversity and equity in hiring practices; he pushed for the names of Harvard students who signed a letter about Israel and the October 7 Hamas attack to be publicized so those students could be blacklisted from jobs; and he publicized a clip from the December congressional hearing on his X (formerly Twitter) account to over 100 million views, “helping fuel the outrage against” Gay, Magill, and Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After Gay’s resignation on January 2, Ackman tweeted at MIT’s Kornbluth, “Et tu Sally?” implying she was next on his warpath. If Ackman thought the path had been cleared for Kornbluth’s exit, he was unprepared for what instead became the next big story: accusations of plagiarism against his wife, Neri Oxman, in her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT, as well as other papers.
Before the plagiarism accusations were reported, Oxman had come under fire after 2019 reporting in The Boston Globe tied her to Jeffrey Epstein, reporting that recirculated after Gay’s resignation (at the same time that new documents about Epstein were being released). While at MIT, Oxman’s lab received $125,000 from Epstein; after Oxman reportedly asked students to prepare a gift for Epstein and ship it to him, a graduate student raised concerns about Epstein, whose history of sexual misconduct was already being reported. Oxman and others involved at MIT at the time have since apologized and/or resigned.
Two days after Gay’s resignation, Business Insider reported four instances of Oxman's text lifted from other work without quotation marks. The same day, Oxman tweeted an apology, admitting to the errors. The next day, Business Insider reported another 28 instances of similar conduct across Oxman’s work, including text directly taken without attribution from Wikipedia. Students generally know not to use Wikipedia as a primary source, because anyone can edit it. (Source: Me, in eighth grade, when I changed a celebrity’s Wikipedia page to read that he was best friends with a character from Gossip Girl. It stayed up only a few hours, but still.)
It’s important to make clear here that Ackman was extremely concerned by the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, calling them “very serious.” But after the allegations of plagiarism were directed toward his wife, Ackman appeared to change his tune, writing of his wife in one of the several-thousand-word screeds he posted on X in the last week, “Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”
But in a comparison of the plagiarism allegations against Gay and Oxman, conducted by Business Insider, the outlet said experts and an internal analysis agreed that the two cases “have more similarities than differences.” Nonetheless, Ackman has continued his crusade in higher education, and is now spreading it to the beleaguered media industry.
On Friday, following Business Insider’s reports, Ackman announced he would conduct a plagiarism investigation of all MIT faculty and board members — as well as those at Business Insider.
On Saturday, Ackman posted yet another screed, this time claiming that the AI-based investigation — you know, the thing that keeps getting accused of committing plagiarism — he's undertaking at MIT would cause “incredible embarrassment” because “[n]o body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI.” In the 5,000-plus word post, Ackman called improper citations a “near certainty,” which critics see as a big shift away from calling Gay’s “a scandal and a stain on the reputation of Harvard.”
As Ackman continues threatening higher ed, he is also intensifying his focus on the media. While we wait for multiple investigations to come to a close, Ackman shows no signs of slowing down.
But I’ve got a complaint I’d love someone to investigate: Can we stop treating the amassing of incredible wealth, undoubtedly at the expense of others, as a qualification for intervening in education? I’ll wait until after the AI plagiarism check is over for an answer.
