The plagiarism accusations first struck Claudine Gay when a right-wing activist published several examples of unattributed text from the Harvard president's academic writings. Though insufficient attribution wasn't the only controversy swirling around Gay — her response to congressional questions about antisemitism on campus played a much bigger role — it was the tipping point that forced her resignation this month.The next volley hit Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and the wife of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who had campaigned vigorously for Gay’s ouster. The publication Business Insider reported that several paragraphs and sentences from Oxman’s dissertation appeared to have been lifted from Wikipedia. Oxman apologized for the errors on social media.
In response, Ackman wrote on X that he would be getting into the plagiarism review game as well. Ackman said his review would cover all the published work of all of MIT’s faculty, its president, Sally Kornbluth, and the university’s board members — plus all the work of the staff at Business Insider, and possibly also the work of the faculties at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth.
“Vetting every publication from every academic over their career at a huge university like Harvard would take thousands of hours,” said Chris Caren.
He would know. Caren is the chief executive of Oakland-based Turnitin, the world’s largest provider of academic integrity software. The company’s products include Feedback Studio, a program designed for high school and college instructors, and iThenticate, a more rigorous offering favored by academic journal editors.
Poster Comment:
How meat-eating white man creatures weaponized accountability...