According to Business Insider, Neri Oxman, a well-known academic and former professor at MIT,
plagiarized entire sentences and paragraphs from other academics, technical documents,
and Wikipedia for her scholarly writing.
Oxman is married to Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of Pershing Square Capital Management,
who has been vocally calling for the resignation of several university presidents due to his belief that they handled student protests against Israel’s Gaza war improperly?
Plagiarism is a “very serious” offense, according to Ackman.
He emphasized his demands for Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation by citing revelations uncovered by right-wing activists showing that she had plagiarized numerous times throughout her academic career.
Gay resigned on Tuesday.
Business Insider discovered on Thursday that Oxman had plagiarized four separate times in her doctoral dissertation,
which she finished at MIT in 2010. In three of those, she omitted quotation marks when she should have and one used language from another author without providing credit.
Oxman acknowledged the plagiarism, expressed regret, and promised to review the sources and request any necessary corrections in a post on X.
“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation,” she wrote about X, “I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me.”
Oxman acknowledged her errors in her response, stating that she “omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used.”
The instances for which she issued an apology shared characteristics with certain instances that the Washington Free Beacon discovered in Claudine Gay’s academic background:
omissions of quotation marks surrounding sections from works that were otherwise referenced.
However, an extensive examination of her published work showed that Oxman’s neglect to cite sources extended beyond that. —
and contained numerous instances of plagiarism where she misrepresented writing from outside sources as her own without giving due credit to the original author.
She took at least fifteen passages from her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT and used them in Wikipedia entries without giving credit.
The instances of plagiarism that BI discovered on Friday are more in line with the definition of plagiarism that is more widely accepted,
which is the use of someone else’s words without giving them credit or acknowledgment.
Neri Oxman’s doctoral dissertation contained direct quotes from Wikipedia.
In her dissertation “Material-based Design Computation,”
Oxman included two statements that had already been on Wikipedia without giving credit.
“Both warp and weft can be visible in the final product,” Oxman stated.
“The weft that binds the warp can be fully covered by the warp by spacing it closer together, resulting in a warp-faced textile.
On the other hand, if the warp is widely spaced,
the weft may fall and cover the warp entirely, creating a textile with a weft facing, like a Kilim rug or tapestry.”
The dissertation presents the passage as Oxman’s work, citing no sources for any of the sentences.
Around the same sentences could be found in the “Weaving” Wikipedia article in April 2010, the month Oxman turned in his dissertation.
“The finished product exhibits both warp and weft.
The warp can completely cover the weft that binds it if it is spaced closer together.
Presenting a warped-faced cloth On the other hand, a weft-faced textile, like a tapestry or a Kilim rug, can be produced if the warp is spread out and the weft slides down to fully cover the warp.”
According to WikiBlame, a search tool that facilitates rapid comparisons of historical versions of Wikipedia articles,
substantially identical language was present in eight snapshots of the article that BI randomly reviewed dating back to 2009. Variations of those lines have appeared in the article going at least as far back as November 2004.
One of the fifteen instances in which BI discovered Oxman copying text from a Wikipedia article for her dissertation was her cribbing from the
“Weaving” article. She mostly selected technical articles from them, such as “Functionally graded “Material,”
“Constitutive equation,” and “Manifolds.” since a person with even a basic understanding of algebraic topology could construct their sentence.”
Stealing text from books, websites, and scholarly publications
Oxman has coined the term “material ecology”
to characterize her area of expertise, which lies at the nexus of design and natural sciences. She once discussed growing iPhones from nature in a podcast.
Her MIT Media Lab team successfully induced silkworms to construct sculptures.
She also used organic materials, such as cellulose and chitin, which is a substance present in shrimp cells, to create flowing structures.
However, she also wrote long, in-depth research papers, sometimes with other writers and other times by herself, just like other academics.
BI discovered most of the plagiarism in her dissertation, which is over 300 pages long.
She cited more than just Wikipedia without giving credit for it in the doctoral dissertation.
In a footnote, she defined a “Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline” using 54 terms in a row that she lifted verbatim from the website of the design software manufacturer Rhino.
She did not cite Wolfram MathWorld, the website from which she obtained technical information about tessellations.
Before and after receiving her Ph.D. in 2010, she was a plagiarist.
Plagiarism was found in two of the three peer-reviewed papers that BI reviewed:
“Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry” from 2007 and “Variable Property Rapid Prototyping” from 2011.
The majority of the more than 100 words in the 2011 paper were taken verbatim from Oxman’s 2005 book “Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age,”
without any citation or quotation marks added. She took information from M.Y. Zhou’s 2004 paper,
“Path planning of functionally graded material objects for layered manufacturing,”
but she neglected to include it in her bibliography.
Additionally, even though the work is mentioned in her bibliography, she included two sentences taken verbatim from the 1999 book “Functionally Graded Materials: Design, Processing and Applications”
without using quotation marks or an in-line citation.
Words defining tensors, an algebraic notion that includes scalars and vectors, were taken from the 2007 “Get Real” paper and published in the “CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.”
Another example of Oxman’s plagiarism was discovered in a 2010 nonpeer-reviewed paper titled
“PerFormative: Towards a Post Materialist Paradigm in Architecture,”
where the publisher Da Capo Press used passages from Bruno Zevi’s “The Modern Language of Architecture” description.
A request for comment sent outside of regular business hours was not answered by MIT.
A spokesman for Ackman and Oxman said that they declined to comment when BI asked them to.
However, following BI’s email to Oxman with its results,
Ackman responded on X, promising to review MIT’s leadership’s work for plagiarism.
“It is regrettable that these attacks on my family have resulted from my efforts to address issues in higher education. “I want to spare all news organizations the headache of doing plagiarism reviews because of this experience,”
He wrote in a message to his one million followers.
He promised to use MIT’s plagiarism standards to thoroughly examine Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT,
all MIT faculty, board members, and other MIT Corporation officers for signs of plagiarism.
“We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency,” he stated.
To correct: January 6, 2024 — This story originally listed the wrong school as the workplace of math professor Rick Norwood. Not Eastern Tennessee, but rather East Tennessee State University
However, Oxman never said that he had taken inspiration from Wikipedia.
She didn’t merely copy words either: Additionally, she used an illustration from the article for “Heat flux”
Without giving credit to the original author, even though the image’s Creative Commons license required it.
That Oxman refused to give Wikipedia credit in her doctoral dissertation is not shocking: Even though Wikipedia is generally accurate,
Anyone can edit it, so educators frequently advise students not to cite the website as a source of authority.
“It’s a shame,”
expressed Rick Norwood,
an East Tennessee State University math professor who revised the Wikipedia entry on manifolds, which Oxman cited in her study.
“I find it inconceivable that someone would do that,
