I had originally wanted to headline this column “The Oxman Cometh.” But then I did a search for this phrase, and saw that someone had used it before, 15 years ago on a Prague English-language radio station website. And I don’t want to be cancelled for plagiarism before I’ve even begun.
Why am I talking about plagiarism? And who’s the Oxman? Let me explain:
Since the dawn of time (I intentionally use the classical opener of a mediocre term paper), there has been this thing called antisemitism. No, it wasn’t always called that, but hating Jews? This has a long history. I know, I’m telling you something you don’t know here.
While antisemitism well predates the 1948 founding of the modern state of Israel, it often flares up when Israel is at war. That said, we were having rise of antisemitism discourse prior to Oct. 7, really since Donald Trump’s 2016 election as U.S. president. So, who knows. There’s a bunch of it about, as well as let’s say vibrant debates about what does and doesn’t count as such.
One such debate took the form of U.S. congressional hearings about campus antisemitism. The learned presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania found themselves outwitted by some plain-talkin’ Republicans. Whether this was meaningfully about Jews, or more like conservatives jumping on an overripe opportunity to bash academia, is another question. The point is, this is a thing that happened, and that was already tangentially related to the Middle East.
Then we get to the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. Harvard’s (then-)president was revealed to have done a bit of the copy-and-paste-without-attribution over the years, which was mega-awkward because for Harvard students (and for students generally), this is uh frowned upon. The New York Times has at this point run not just a (self-sabotaging?) op-ed by Gay herself, but also I believe it is 10 trillion additional articles about the scandal, as have other outlets, so if you want to dig deeper, have at it. The short version is that some U.S. conservatives were baseline mad at her for reasons that had nothing particular to do with Jews. The Harvard president was not just a Black woman but one who represented, to them, the D.E.I. turn in academia. The wokeness.
Or as Gay herself put it, “It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism.”
Now, let’s get to the drama.
Christopher Rufo, among those leading the anti-Gay campaign, turns out not to have been as pristine as all that himself. He had evidently been presenting himself as a Harvard grad, only to turn out to be an alum of something I had never heard of but now have several doctorates in: the Harvard Extension School. Cue the discourse on the difference between Harvard and this Harvard offshoot. Cue the counter-discourse on how painfully snobbish and credential-obsessed everyone insisting on this difference starts to look. The sneering about Harvard Extension School, paired with the politically-driven insistence from some progressives that Gay’s plagiarism didn’t count as such, didn’t help academia’s image.
But, wait for it.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager (whatever that is, sounds lucrative!), and a fellow charge-leader against plagiarism, antisemitism, and all the rot on campus, is married to a woman named Neri Oxman. Oxman, until recently-ish an MIT professor herself, is a spectacularly beautiful Israeli-American woman, an innovator in the design-and-materials sphere who has had good associations (Björk) and less-savoury ones (Jeffrey Epstein). This is a woman who Vanity Fair needed to clarify did not have a relationship with Brad Pitt. (Nor have I, yet the articles remain unwritten.)
A brilliant and glamorous woman married to a billionaire, Oxman has, per Business Insider, done her own share of the copy-and-paste. Was Oxman’s alleged sloppiness as bad as Gay’s or “worse“?
All of this has put Ackman in the awkward position of having announced a zero-tolerance plagiarism policy and needing to defend his wife. (Note: there’s nothing nefarious or billionaire-specific about defending your spouse, like that thing where you can’t be made to testify against a spouse in court.)
Ackman has produced some long needle-threading posts—he is posting through it—to that effect, one of which includes the unfortunate sentence, “Neri has yet to vet yesterday’s plagiarism allegations, but she will get to them when she has time to do so.” Unfortunate not because people shouldn’t get a minute to look at what they’ve been accused of, but because it suggests at a lack of urgency. It suggests that some alleged plagiarism is a world-stopping emergency while other alleged plagiarism can be dealt with when convenient.
(As I write, Ackman’s pinned post on X quotes none other than our own recent Bonjour Chai podcast guest, Acadia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, hashing all this out.)
Does anyone come out of this looking good? Not really. Academia seems like a bed of hypocrisy and subjective standards. Academia’s opponents offer no viable alternative for knowledge-production. The real plagiarism, antisemitism, whatever, is always whatever the other culture-wars side has engaged in.
Some say the plagiarismgate story is a load of nonsense unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which, look, true enough. This is the story of rich (even Claudine Gay, no billionaire, comes out more than OK financially), powerful, and in Oxman’s case extremely photogenic people’s fallibility. Of august institutions embarrassing themselves. Gossip, in other words. There are bigger issues at play—the fate of academia, of Israel, of the Jewish people. But there is also the deeply human attraction to a story that just keeps getting juicier, or maybe just more absurd.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on the website formerly known as Twitter. She also holds forth on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
