Today in Bill Ackman’s highly principled opposition to plagiarism

I don’t claim that this is the biggest deal in the world, and obviously reactionaries are more or less by definition unbothered by hypocrisy charges, but this is still pretty funny:

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Managment founder Bill Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for numerous university presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of student protests related to Israel’s war in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a “very serious” offense.

He used revelations unearthed by right-wing activists that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized dozens of times across the body of her academic work to underscore his calls for her resignation. Gay stepped down on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Business Insider identified four instances in which Oxman had lifted passages from other scholars’ work in her doctoral dissertation, completed at MIT in 2010. Three of those were passages where she should have used quotation marks but did not, and one included language from another author without any citation. In a post on X, Oxman admitted the plagiarism, apologized, and said she would review the primary sources and request corrections as needed.

But what’s even funnier is the Twitter meltdown of the guy who’s spent weeks arguing that plagiarism less egregious than this is an instant fireable offense:

“As an Academic Integrity Standards Knower, I can assure you that cutting and pasting without citation can’t be plagiarism if it’s from Wikipedia. CHECKMATE LIBS!”

I’m beginning to think that the plagiarism charges against Claudine Gay were pretextural.

…via CD in comments, this is excellent: