I feel like there’s a new thinkpiece or podcast every day about the downfall of Twitter. While there are some reports about serious decreases in revenue, material losses in valuation, and constant bugs (their search feature is terrible), the content still holds up. With the way some of these high-profile accounts have been constantly tweeting essay-length tweets, treating the site like their diary, it’s hard not to doom scroll through it all. These aren’t just kids blogging away, screaming into the void (me); they’re billionaires with influence. The latest novella? Bill Ackman vs. the World.
Recap
I’ve talked about Bill Ackman before. He’s a billionaire investor who leads Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund. If you follow business, you might remember him from the Herbalife saga, where he famously battled other billionaire Carl Icahn on live television. You may also know him from his pandemic warnings. It’s clear Ackman is no stranger to controversy and this time it’s no different.
You can read his essays on X, but here are the spark notes: Billionaire Harvard Donor is shocked to see the response of some students at Harvard to the October 7th Hamas attacks against Israel, citing their open letter. He then demands a response from Harvard’s leadership about their inaction in condemning the protest which eventually leads to a congressional hearing. At the hearing, presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn were unable to say whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ conduct policies. Billionaire Harvard Donor then calls for the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. In his endeavor, it’s brought to his attention that the Harvard president has been accused of plagiarism, a high crime in the world of academia. Gay eventually steps down. The question then becomes how did she get the job in the first place? Which then moves the target toward Harvard’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mission. However, it is then reported by Business Insider that Billionaire Harvard Donor’s wife, Neri Oxman, is also being accused of plagiarism in her MIT dissertation. Ackman is not happy and is now coming for trusted publication Business Insider for targeting his wife. He now plans to launch a full investigation into accusations of plagiarism throughout the Ivy League, starting with his wife’s alma mater, MIT.
Once you start throwing plagiarism around, you start to question the whole system. Which is exactly what he’s doing in launching the broader investigation. One thing I always appreciate about business is when something’s not working or it seems off, you have to get to the bottom of it — we’ve got bills to pay.
First Principles
The core of a PhD program is the dissertation. A substantial piece of original research that contributes new knowledge or understanding to a particular field. The process involves identifying a unique research question, conducting thorough research, analyzing findings, and presenting the results in a detailed, scholarly format. Now of course, there are rules. With every academic paper, you are building upon the work of others. As such, you end up using various credible sources for information and evidence. But if you’re not careful with your citations, you could accidentally (or deliberately) plagiarize. You don’t want to do that.
Think about it. You devote your life to a subject and spend years studying, reaching the heights of the Ivy League. In business, success is often measured by financial gain or market impact. Similarly, in academia, the success of a PhD dissertation is measured by the contribution it makes to the field. It's about creating new knowledge or understanding that others in the field recognize as valuable and significant.
It seems pretty straightforward, but then my question is: are there degrees to plagiarism? I actually found a great reddit post comparing Neri Oxman’s accusation to Claudine Gay’s.
There are 47 instances of plagiarism referenced in the original complaint against Gay. Most of the allegations involved low-grade misconduct, like crediting sources but failing to put copied passages in quotes. However, there are several instances where she reproduced more lengthy passages without any attribution at all. From the reddit post:
My point here is that plagiarism is about more than seeing (genuine) parallels between two passages of text, the context of what that text is also matters.
This is not to say that no methodological text can't be plagiarised. #28 is perhaps the most clear cut example of plagiarism in the whole list. The original text (Palmquist et al 1996) reads:
The average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If the racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when the changes in one race's turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other's across the graph.
Gay's text from her 1997 PhD dissertation:
The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias (If the racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race's turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.
Here, Gay's text is only slightly paraphrased towards the end, and otherwise reads almost verbatim compared to Palmquist et al's paper. Even though the text is describing a reasonably technical concept, there is clearly no justification to copy such a large proportion of a long passage of text. - u/zezemind on r/academia
Gay is remaining on Harvard’s faculty as a professor after stepping down from the presidency. She will reportedly retain her faculty position and $900K annual salary.
Now let’s take a look at Oxman’s. There are 5 separate instances and 15 instances within her dissertation, as reported by BI. Similar to Gay, the instances are a mix of low-grade misconduct and lack of attribution.
Also in her PhD dissertation, the BI reporters claim to have identified 15 instances of Oxman copying text directly from Wikipedia (timestamped prior to the publication of her dissertation). They presented 4 examples of the side-by-side text in the article, and I could track down 1 more:
Copied verbatim from Weaving page (96 words)
Copied (almost) verbatim from Principle of Minimum Energy page (40 words)
Copied (almost) verbatim from Constitutive Equation page (68 words)
Copied (almost) verbatim from Heat Flux page (144 words)
Copied (almost) verbatim from Manifolds page (131 words)
None of these included any kind of citation to Wikipedia or any of the articles cited by Wikipedia. She also took a diagram from the Heat Flux page and included it as Figure 6.20 in her dissertation without attributing the original source. I’ve looked at the Wikipedia editors/IP addresses that added the text Oxman appeared to have copied, and from their histories/locations it seems highly unlikely that any of them were Oxman writing prior to her dissertation’s publication. - u/zezemind on r/academia
I will add that according to Ackhman:
Neri’s [Oxman] lawyers use the Wayback Machine to check MIT's plagiarism policy back when Neri wrote her thesis in 2009. It turns out that MIT's Academic Integrity Handbook did not require citations or even mention Wikipedia until 2013, four years after Neri wrote her dissertation and used Wikipedia for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms. Bear in mind that 2009 was still the early days for Wikipedia. - Ackman tweet
While we can spend a lot of time going back and forth debating the two cases, the question bouncing around my head is what’s next? Will we discover widespread plagiarism across higher education? Does that crush the academic integrity of it all? Everyone thought the pandemic would actually open up higher education, especially in the Ivy League, with online schooling becoming more acceptable. But it only got more exclusive and more expensive. With businesses dropping college degree requirements, maybe Ackman might’ve just kickstarted a little revolution.
Thank you
Most Americans are probably unaware of any of this. The story itself isn’t that big in the grand scheme of everything else going on in this country and around the world. But it’s hard not to follow the fights of Ackman because he’s got the type of money to actually shake up small parts of the world. This entire story has touched on subjects like freedom of speech, income inequality, donor control, DEI, racism, academia, and higher education. These debates and their consequences eventually trickle their way down to the general public, as legislation is proposed and passed, the ramifications are much more personal than you think. As always, if you have any questions, want more explanations, or strongly disagree, comment below, follow me on Twitter (X), follow me on Threads, follow me on TikTok, or shoot me an email. Oh, and Happy New Year.
Disclaimer: These views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization with which I am affiliated with.