The aggrieved billionaire is gunning for Harvard, Business Insider, and anyone who talks about his wife.
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman has a lot of opinions, and he’s going to make sure you hear them.
How Ackman came to be a main character at the center of not one but two academic plagiarism scandals is a messy tale indeed. It started with Ackman amplifying allegations of academic dishonesty leveled against Harvard University president Claudine Gay by right-wing activists; Gay resigned from her post in early January due to the controversy. Ackman, who is Jewish, first set his sights on Gay after she failed, in his view, to adequately condemn pro-Palestinian student protests in which chants such as “from the river to the sea” were repeated.
But Ackman’s accusations came back to bite him after similar charges of plagiarism were made against his wife, former MIT professor Neri Oxman. Two Business Insider reports made the claim that Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing.” Oxman wrote on X that she regretted some of the errors, while saying that in other instances she couldn’t confirm Business Insider’s claims. Her husband has since launched a fresh offensive — this time against Business Insider.
Ackman isn’t a celebrity (unless you spend too much time online), or an academic, or even someone who has shown previous zeal for the cause of rooting out plagiarism. But he is worth $4 billion, and that can buy you a lot of attention.
_____________
Continues at: https://www.vox.com/2024/1/13/24032176/bill-ackman-claudine-gay-harvard-plagiarism-business-insider-explained