The billionaire bully and his plagiarist wife.
Rules for thee but not for me.
Who is Bill Ackman?
He is one of the billionaire hedge funders who believe, often correctly, that the world is their’s, and their’s alone, to dictate to about how things get run.
Ackman is a Harvard grad and big donor to the university which he believes makes him uniquely able to dictate to Harvard’s students and faculty what they can say and not say.
When Harvard students protested Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza, Ackman called for the publication of the names of all students involved in signing the letter so that he could ensure his company and others do not "inadvertently hire" any of the signatories.
Ackman was joined other CEOs such as Jonathan Neman, David Duel and Jake Wurzak, saying they would create a do-not-hire list made up of any students seeking employment after graduation and who signed the letter.
For many it triggered memories of the McCarthy era, the Blacklist and Red Channels.
By the way, Ackman is a Democrat.
It was Ackman who led the charge to have the Harvard corporation board fire the university president Dr. Claudine Gray after her appearance before a congressional hearing where she did not give the answers Ackman wanted to hear.
Dr. Gay is the first African American woman to be president of Harvard in its over 300 year history.
Among the accusations leveled at Dr. Gay was that she had plagiarized some of her earlier research.
Clearly the firing of Dr. ray had more to do with her failure to listen to Bill Ackman’s councel than it had to do with her research history.
This week we learn that Bill Ackmans wife, a former professor at MIT, has done some plagiarizing herself.
The wife of Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire who accused Claudine Gay of being a plagiarist and led calls for her resignation as Harvard president, is now facing allegations of plagiarism herself.
Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has apologized after Business Insider identified multiple instances in which she lifted passages from other scholars’ work without proper attribution in her 2010 dissertation. She also pledged to review the primary sources and request the necessary corrections.
Business Insider on Thursday initially labeled four passages of Oxman’s dissertation as plagiarized – without any attribution – from Wikipedia entries. But by Friday, the outlet had found at least 15 such passages, a turn of events that was similar to that which led to Gay’s ouster from the Harvard presidency.
But while Oxman has apologized, Ackman was not in the least contrite.
In response to Gay’s resignation, Ackman published a 4,000-word post on X – formerly Twitter – in which he criticized diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as well as complained about “racism against white people”. He also complained that Gay, a Black woman, was allowed to remain on Harvard’s faculty. Gay had faced plagiarism allegations over her 1997 dissertation, but she requested corrections and was cleared of academic misconduct by a three-member independent review board.
Ackman struck a different tone on X when addressing the plagiarism allegations against his wife. He wrote on X: “It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family. This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.”
He went on to promise to lead plagiarism reviews against all current MIT faculty, board and committee members, and its president, Sally Kornbluth.
As the saying goes, “rules for thee but not for me.”