![The New Weaponization of Plagiarism [PATREON UNLOCKED] - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/RTvKr6fA)
So last week we did an episode about doctor Claudine Gay residing from Harvard University, and after we published it on Friday, the story really continued. Bill Ackman, that billionaire donor to Harvard who was calling for doctor Gator resign while his wife was also accused of plagiarism, their connection to Jeffrey Epstein resurfaced, and really Bill Ackman just had
a meltdown about the entire thing. I could not stop thinking about it, and I have a lot more to say, so I did a video run down on the aftermath of Gay's resignation in the Patreon over the weekend. The story has continued, so I wanted to unlock that Patreon episode with everybody here in the main feed to y'all.
This story is a wild one.
I cannot stop thinking and talking about it, So please let me know what you think. You can hit me up via email at Hello at Tangoti dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet.
As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Hey, it's Bridget.
It's Sunday, January seventh. It's about ten o'clock at night Eastern time. I'm here with some herbal tea because I'm getting my dry January on. Thank you for being here, Okay, so let's get into it. We did an episode this week in the main there are No Girls on the Internet feed about doctor Claudiin Gay, the first black woman and black, first black president of Harvard who basically stepped down. She did resign earlier this week after right wing education
activist Chris Rufo surfaced plagiarism accusations against her. So in the episode, first of all, I just have to say I was pretty emotional, So thank you to everybody who listened. I'm sure that was a bit of a departure from the kind of content that you're used to from me. I am not terribly emotional on Mike most times, and so just genuinely thank you for letting me feel like I can really bring my full self to these conversations. And in case you're wondering, like I am, okay, I
am fine that conversation. We taped it during a particularly weird and emotional time for me, like the holidays are weird. Coming back from the holidays is always weird for me. So it was a time, I just felt like I had a lot going on emotionally to quote mean girls, I had a lot of feelings. So thank you for giving me space to be so vulnerable and yeah, I'm doing great. So in that episode we broke down Christopher
Rufo's campaign against doctor Gay. Ruffo had this like very gleeful like victory lap he was doing after Gay resigned, and he was openly taking credit for her resignation, and pretty explicitly in my book said that the reason why he was going after Gay and why he wanted to force her to resign was race related, right, Like he explicitly said in that political article that we were talking about,
it was about or diversity, equity, and inclusion. So like, regardless of how you feel about it or what you think about it, it is pretty clearly about race. And so from his own admission, he wanted to push out this woman at of her job because of race. So we talked in the episode about one of the people that he worked with to accomplish that, Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who was also a donor to Harvard.
It basically sounds like Acman had his own unrelated beefs with Harvard before doctor gay ever even was at the Helm there as president, and that he used this scandal, I used, had in air quotes, deep air quotes, this scandal around her to finally have the opportunity to push her out because of like long existing beefs that probably didn't have a lot to do with her.
Although I do.
Think that even if he had these long standing beefs, I think having a beef with a university that has a black woman at the Helm probably hit differently for him. I just know the energy when someone feels like because you are a black woman, you owe them something or that you were going to be differential to them in some way as a default.
And from all my time on.
This earth as a black woman, I suspect that had something to do with it. So since we put out that episode on Friday, this story has really continued to evolve, So I had to revisit it and fill y'all in on some of the new updates and some of the new stuff that frankly, I have learned stuff that's been out there, but I only recently was like, oh, that was them oo yikes.
So let's get into it.
Basically, Ackman's wife is doctor Neery Oxman, who I actually had never heard of before this whole situation. Doctor Oxman is a designer who studies things like three D printing, art and fabrication. She was born in Israel and graduated with a PhD in architectural design and computation from MIT in twenty ten. That detail is going to be important
in a moment. So I have to say, if doctor Oxman, Ackman's wife had not been connected to this larger situation with Ackman pushing out a black woman from her position at Harvard, I probably would have thought that doctor Oxman was like kind of a cool person, maybe question mark, or maybe that means I would have been like susceptible to a glamour media campaign that is meant to make people like me think that people like doctor Oxman are
really cool. There's this New York Times profile about her work, and the vibe of the profile is like.
Oh, who is this woman? She's so cool in artsy like.
The article is about how she worked with Byork, and I talked about how maybe she was.
Dating Brad Pitt.
So it is hard to describe it, but you know
it when you see it. Doctor Oxman just has this sort of personal or public persona that just sort of reads like cool, techie, artsy woman, like lots of images of her, like looking slightly off camera or gesturing with her hands while wearing like a black blazer, and like one of those microphone headsets, you know, just someone who like she's someone who I think does a good job of signaling and taking a kind of photo that is meant to signal like I am an interesting person who does interest in.
Work fast, is my take.
Like your mileage may vary on that, but if you have any sense of like what I'm describing, it is exactly.
What you're imagining. So here is the problem.
In the wake of her husband, Ackman his crusade against doctor Gay for these sloppy citations in her PhD and during her academic record at Harvard, which he says is plagiarism and like proof that she is unqualified and proof that she should not be in leadership at Harvard, Business Insider looked into his wife, doctor Oxman's history while she was at MIT, and.
It sounds like the results were kind of not great.
We talked about this in the last episode, but like, I'm not an academic, I don't have a PhD. I don't do academic writing, so you know, what the hell do I know about what is or it is not plagiarism. However, one of the big issues that Business Insider found is that apparently it appears as if doctor Oxman lifted entire sections of her doctoral dissertation from Wikipedia. So I'm not an academic currently, but before I dropped out of my PhD program, I taught.
Many, many, many, many, many college courses, mostly.
One oh one and one of two, like introduction to composition or rhetoric courses. I've got a lot of that in my career, and in the training that I received for doing that, we were taught specifically to tell students to not use Wikipedia as a source because it's just
not a reliable source. Anybody can edit it, all of that, and so instead the party line was to tell these students that, like, they should scroll down to the bottom of whatever Wiki entry they were looking at, check out the sources links there, read those, and cite them if those sources are legit, rather than citing Wikipedia.
That was like a big glaring no no.
But even if you were to cite Wikipedia properly, it was still a big no no for like undergrad one oh one students, So certainly it will be a big no no for somebody who is trying to submit a PhD dissertation. And again she's being accused of not citing the passages that she copied from Wikipedia. So using Wikipedia at all bad. Using Wikipedia and then not even sighting it and passing it off as your own doubly bad.
Let's take a quick break at our back.
Acman is kind of having a meltdown about this whole thing on Twitter, and I feel like his tweets are very telling, So let's talk a little bit about those. So by the time you listen to this, whenever you're listening to this, I know that he will have tweeted quite a bit more because he's having one of those kind of like tweet storm. He has been just tweeting
NonStop all weekend. I mean this, like very literally, the longest tweet I have ever seen in my entire life, Like longer than I ever thought that you would be able to tweet. In one tweet, I am going to be honest and say that one hundred percent did not read it. And I don't know a single soul who would read that tweet. Unless they were being paid for it, or if it was their job or something.
But then for as.
Long as that tweet is like you scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. At the bottom it still says tweet continued below, which like, yeah, you know that meme that's like sorry that happened to you or happy for you. But I am not reading all of that. I am not reading all of that end of story period. So I will give you a couple of the sect of what he is tweeted. I didn't read his whole like novel, but I did read some of his shorter tweets.
So he says, how can one defend oneself against an accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia for a dissertation written fifteen years ago in two thousand and nine. Isn't the whole point of Wikipedia? That is a dynamic source of info that changes minute by minute based on edits and contributions from around the globe. So no, Acman, that is not act truly, hell, Wikipedia works like Wikipedia has a very clear edit history with like timestamps and dates of when it was edited.
Sometimes it even tells you who edited it.
So it really is like really easy.
For anybody to tell when an entry on Wikipedia was edited or edited. So it sounds like maybe Acman is suggesting that somebody could have edited the Wikipedia entries to match his wife's dissertation after the fact, but you would know that, and the Business Insider reporter who wrote this story has already confirmed that she checked, because it's really easy to know, So sorry, Acman.
No.
He also asks is Wikipedia even copyrighted? Which, like, the reason why it is not cool to copy and paste bits of Wikipedia into your PhD dissertation with out citations is not because it's breaking copyright law. It's like breaking academic norms, like he because completely is like grasping at things to prove that this is fine. He also objects to the fact that Business Insider reached out to his wife on Friday night, right before Shabbat. I will just
say this. It is really clear that he sees this as a direct attack on his family. He tweets, it is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on.
My family, and this is my thing.
Doctor Gay also has a family, and it sounds like when he is looking into the academic records of people like doctor Gay, that is him like taking legitimate actions to protect academic integrity or whatever, but when someone looks into the academic record of his wife, now that's an
attack on his family. It also needs to be said that doctor Gay in her resignation that she published in the New York Times, her letter about what happened, she says that she has gotten more racial slurs and death threats. And I actually read that her house has been put under police surveillance because of so many attacks that she's gotten and threats that she's gotten. And so it's pretty telling to me that Acman is not necessarily seeing those as attacks against Gay. The only person here who is
being attacked in his book is his family. He defends his wife saying, what makes my wife human is that she makes mistakes, And again, like why is his wife allowed to make mistakes in her academic writing and doctor Gay is not? And it's telling that like he sees his wife as human, then what does he see doctor Gay as like not human, not allowed to make mistakes.
And I think it really comes down to that dynamic that we were talking about in that episode, like it's bad when you do it, but it's different when I do it. I get to surveil the behavior of other people to make sure.
That their behavior is on the up and up.
But if someone dare tries to do the same to my behavior, then that's an attack. Because it all comes down to who is seen as a rightful person belonging in a space and who is automatically looked at or treated with suspicion, and also who gets to act like the authority of who belongs and who doesn't, who deserves to be surveiled and who doesn't, Who gets to be looked at with suspicion.
And who doesn't. You know, when people like Acman and Rufo and Jason from.
The All In podcast to boy, did I have a mouthful for him in that episode, I know when they say things like, oh, we need to return to like a colorblind, merit based society, I think what they're really saying is that we need to make sure that we have a society where the things that people like me and people who look like me get are not questioned or challenged, while the things that people who are not me and people who do not look like me are
always viewed with suspicion. Like Bill Ackman clearly sees himself as the authority at Harvard, a place where he has no real connection other than like donating a pretty small amount of money, Yet he still thinks that he should have the ultimate say and how these places are run.
And all of that said, though this might be a.
Little bit of an unpopular opinion, and I genuinely do want to know, like if you're listening, what you think. But I am actually not thrilled about what is happening to doctor Oxman. I know, I get it. I don't want to be a wet blanket here, and like I'm also not above enjoy the memes and the tweets and all of that. I think there's some real kind of karma. What goes around comes around stuff happening here, which I love. I enjoy that too. However, I know that it's super
hard to resist the lure of all of that. But I am worried about this idea of what happens when weaponizing plagiarism accusations becomes a thing, you know, where accusations are not coming from peers or academic colleagues, but just like Randos with an axetra grind, obviously, like I'm not crying too many tears because Acman definitely started this and like can certainly dish it out but doesn't seem to
be able to take it. But ultimately I think that what is going to happen is that academia is going to suffer. The institution of like education is going to suffer. This is not what academia is about. And so many of our institutions have just become these way to these
weapons to hurl at each other. And I, legit do not know if Acman's wife has any kind of connection to this doctor game other than being having the misfortune of being married to a man like Acman, Like was she beating the drum for gay to resign alongside her husband or like what she genuinely had nothing like said nothing about it publicly, and like now is all mixed up in it?
I don't know.
And I also know that like with the plethora of AI tools like turn it in that are used to sort of check for plagiarism but are routinely very janky and specifically like return false positives for cheating when a writer or plagiarizing when a writer is a non native speaker, like, they're much more likely to flag writing by somebody who
has learned English as a second language as having been plagiarized. Right, So it just seems like a really scary precedent When all these tools are everywhere, They're so janky, and I just feel like it will definitely if weaponizing plagiarism in this way becomes the norm, it will definitely harm people who are already marginalized.
And so I don't like any of it.
I understand why people are making it about Akman's wife's plagiarism record, but like, I don't think it sets a good precedent. It doesn't feel good to me. It feels kind of icky. I don't like where this will ultimately end up. So again, Acman is kind of going scorched earth here. He is vowing to use his vast wealth like he is a billionaire to investigate every faculty member at MIT and a business insider to see if they ever wrote anything that.
Could be considered plagiarism.
And it just seems like he is somebody who can really only direct outward, like anger and suspicion can only be directed from me to others. It will never be directed inWORD to examine his own behavior, for instance.
It is always.
Someone else who has done something wrong. And yeah, it's just like a very weird situation. I saw this tweet. I think it might have been deleted by now. That really summed it up nicely, which is like, imagine if you had plagiarized your dissertation from Wikipedia, had gotten away with it for like fifteen years, went on to become an academic celebrity, and then flung your work into the national spotlight because he was on a separate crusade about DEI like, how.
Pissed would you be? H? Yeah, I would be pretty angry.
More after a quick break, let's.
Get right back into it.
So even beyond these new plagiarism accusations against Ackman's wife, doctor Oxman, even more like wild than that is their connection to Jeffrey Epstein, which, like it's just really something. So heads up, this might get a little a little tough because we're talking about Epstein. So you might have listened to the episode that we did in our very first season back in twenty twenty with former MIT student Ottawa Umboya.
She was a.
Grad student at MIT and she was actually the first person to call for joy Eto, who then was the head of MIT's media Lab. To step down after it was revealed that Joi Eto had taken donations from Epstein after Epstein was already a convicted child sex predator. Epstein pled guilty in two thousand and eight to a sex crime involving a child, and his donation records to MIT continued until like twenty seventeen, so well after he had already pled guilty and been convicted of a crime involving
a child. So yeah, a child sex predator. So in that episode we talked about how that year the organization Me Too in STEM won MITS Media Labs Disobedience Award. The Disobedience Award is a pretty big deal. It is a two hundred and fifty thousand, no strings attached prize for recognizing individuals and groups who engage in the website says responsible ethical disobedience aimed at challenging norms, rules or laws that sustain societies injustices. So the physical award is
this like glass Orb sculpture and that gear. When me Too and STEM won the Disobedience Award for calling out sexual abuses in the sciences, Jeffrey Epstein also got a replica of the Disobedience Award that Glass Orb because he donated to the Media Lab. I remember this being like a viscerally disgusting, enraging detail about the coziness that MIT had with somebody who had already been convicted and plugged
guilty to a sex crime against a child. Like that is just something that I remember to being that episode that like sticks with me. And it turns out that Acman's wife, doctor Oxman, was the one who was in charge of like having that award made and presenting it
to Epstein. And because she ran the Mediated Matter group at MIT's Media Lab, and she her organization that she ran within the lab got out one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars donation from Epstein after he had been convicted, which she says that she was required to keep confidential by the university because he was a tex criminal. So Doctor Oxman, like I thought it, it's so much worse
she didn't physically make and deliver the award herself. It really sounds like she kind of forced her grad students to do it on her behalf. One of them, according to reporting from The Boston Globe, actually sent her an email with a paper trail that was like, Hey, this guy is super sketchy. Are you sure you want me to do this? Are you sure you want to be
connected with them? So yeah, I really feel bad for the grad students who were sort of forced into doing this by doctor Oxman, and it sounds like they really had like registered some objections and didn't want to do it.
So after MIT's connection to Epstein was finally all coming to light, but before joy Eto resigned from the media lab, it sounds like there was media interest in reporting on who did what as it pertains to Epstein at NT and doctor Oxman's husband, Bill Ackman was the you know, the one beating the drum against doctor Gay at Harvard was sending like vaguely threatening emails to joy Eto, basically saying that he better keep his wife's name out of this if he knows what's good for him.
I have to give it to Akman here.
He is a man who can write the fuck out of a threatening email, like it is clear what is being threatened here. But he never outright comes out and says like, hey, joy if you include my wife's name in this.
I will blow up your spot.
But he communicates that that as the intention very well without ever saying it.
Clearly. So here's a little bit of what I mean.
So this is an email that Bill Ackman wrote to the head of the MIT media lab, joy Eto, about his wife's connection to Epstein.
Mariy forwarded your email to me.
I would please ask that you copy me on all Epstein related communications going forward, as I and members of my legal and communications team are working to help her, and Neery already has enough on her plate breastfeeding a three month old baby, a very beautiful one, mud I add, without a baby nurse until early September. So, first of all, I hope I never find myself using the line please copy me on all Epstein related communications. God also that
little detail she's breastfeeding without a baby nurse. Can you imagine no baby nurse? My God, what a saint. So he goes on the same are I mean, this is how you know that, like they are very privileged people. The fact that he would throw that in there, the way that like a billion women have to breastfeed and take care of their children every single day, she's doing it without a nurse. The fact that he has to throw that detail in there is very telling to me.
So he goes on the same our advice on handling the recent press request. I would suggest that, on background that you let the press know that Epstein did not receive a obedient Disobedience award, but he, like other donors to the lab, donor A, B, C, D, et cetera, received a gift from the Media Lab of a unique
design object. So here's subtle threat number one. I don't think it is necessary for you to say that it was at your request, which I understand it was in this case, but it is very important that you don't Mentionneri's name or otherwise get her involved, or she will have to issue her own statement to protect her reputation, explaining why it was sent and at whose request, who else received similar gifts, how she met Epstein, and who else at MIT received funding from Epstein, why she declined
to attend meetings and dinners with Epstein's and which other faculty members attended. This will, of course blow this entire thing up even more. We would certainly not let to see that happened. The fact that Mariy, as the designer of the Media Lab, was asked to produce nearly all, if not all, physical gifts for donors using her students' time and resources at either of your Rafael's office, Nina's and Jess's requests is not a good reason for NII to be outed as a supplier to Epstein.
Because of nii's.
Profile, her upcoming MoMA show, and the large amount of recent media attention around her, she would be an appealing target for the press.
As I'm sure you.
Understand, like ten out of ten as far as vaguely threatening emails go. I hope that nobody ever has to write this level of vaguely threatening email on my behalf, but ten out of ten on this one.
And so here's another thing that I want to say.
If you knew that there were emails out there, like if like I'm just trying to think, like, if I knew there were emails out there about me trying to obscure my partner's connection to Jeffrey Epstein comma literal sex criminal, literal like child sex abuser, I would probably have like
really turned down my public profile. I certainly would not be picking like national front page fights with other national public figures, and I especially would not be doing it the very same week that a trove of documents about Epstein is unredacted and I guess like that is my point, that these people do not operate in the same realities that you and I operate in. You know, I was thinking, like, Wow, this person really is not self aware. Acman really has no self awareness.
Wow.
But I don't think that's it.
Like, I just think that they think that their behavior is always above reproach and it always will be. Surveillance and screw is for other people's behavior, not his behavior. Dare I say that surveillance and scrutiny is for black women's behavior, not for behavior of white billionaires like Bill Ackman.
Anyway, I really.
Want to know what you think. Let me know what you're thinking in the comments. Also, Happy New Year. I hope that folks had a happy holiday or a mary holiday, whatever you celebrate, I hope you had a good one. I help you out a good New year. How's it going? What do you want to hear about? Where are you at, what are your thoughts? Don't be shy, tell me how it's going.
Thanks for listening.
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach just at Hello at tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts for Today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Kari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host,
bridget Toad. If you want to help a grow, rate and review.
Us on Apple Podcasts.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.