Bill Ackman called his wife, Neri Oxman, “human” after she admitted to instances of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — days after he ripped ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay over accusations that she had committed plagiarism in her own academic work.
The outspoken hedge fund billionaire suggested that it was his crusade against Gay — which has been criticized as “bullying” her into her resignation — that sparked a Business Insider probe into 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 admitted that she did not properly cite four paragraphs of her 330-page PhD dissertation, which falls under MIT’s definition of plagiarism.
Ackman added of Oxman, “she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”
A day earlier, 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 nearly $900,000 salary, Ackman said on X that Gay should leave Harvard altogether due to “serious plagiarism issues.”
You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, @NeriOxman.
I am one of the most fortunate people in the universe in large part because of Neri.
Please see her post below about today’s Business Insider piece about her… https://t.co/SJb9iFsKJY
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 4, 2024
“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.”
Oxman wrote in a post on X on Thursday “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.”
Oxman wrote on X that after she was made aware of the incorrect citations by Business Insider and reviewed the original sources, she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”
“I regret and apologize for these errors,” the 47-year-old Israel-born academic wrote Thursday.
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, and left the university in June 2021 “after I got married, became a mother, and moved to New York City,” she wrote in the post.
Ackman, who shares one child with Oxman and has even credited his fund’s success to his marital bliss, also took the opportunity to boast about his wife’s career.
“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,” he added.
Oxman is no longer working at MIT, which classifies plagiarism as “when you use another’s words, ideas, assertions, data or figures and do not acknowledge that you have done so,” including when the material does not “use quotation marks around the words and cite the source.”
The prestigious university says the consequences of plagiarizing can include “suspension or expulsion” from the school.
Representatives for Ackman at Pershing Square declined to comment, pointing to Ackman and Oxman’s posts on X.
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.
