Plagiarism takes another scalp

“You know you’ve struck a chord when they go after your wife.” Thus Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor, in response to a Business Insider report on Friday that his wife, Neri Oxman, lifted passages from Wikipedia and other scholars’ work without attribution in her academic writing. Oxman, who has a PhD from MIT, has admitted as much and apologised. Ackman has said he’ll now conduct plagiarism reviews on MIT’s entire academic staff. What gives? The ripple effects of Israel’s war on Gaza keep spreading out and taking on lives of their own. The weaponisation of plagiarism accusations has spread to MIT via Oxman because her husband was a prime mover behind the campaign to remove Claudine Gay as president of Harvard – a campaign that got its scalp last week. More than 40 accusations of plagiarism against Gay proved her undoing as the university’s first non-white president, but the impetus to remove her dated from her failure to answer “yes” when asked in Congress last month if calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct. She later apologised, but in a post-resignation piece for the NYT, where the Gay case has occasioned almost as much soul-searching as at Harvard, she said she’d walked into a “well-laid trap”. Ackman, too, should probably be careful where he treads.