Plagiarism Checks Are the New McCarthyism: Bill Ackman, Claudine Gay, and a Wicked Case of Karma

Any college student writing a thesis or grad student writing a dissertation — and I don’t care how accomplished they become 30 years after they graduate — likely faced a deadline at some point. They probably had 100-300 pages of academic text sitting on a laptop in front of them, a floor strewn with scores of library books, dozens of citations to finish, and 24 hours left until the deadline. Invariably, that person is going to miss a citation or two or forget to put quotation marks around the cited text, not out of nefariousness but out of hurriedness or sloppiness.

Thirty years later, however, that 24-year-old who was trying to finish her doctoral dissertation while teaching a college intro class, grading papers, and maybe even working at a coffee shop while going through a breakup, is now being judged on her sloppy citation work in 1992. It doesn’t matter how accomplished she is, how many times she’s proven herself to be brilliant, or even if she’s the President of Harvard University. Some asshole arguing in bad faith is going to call her a “plagiarist” and try to ruin her career because she said something that a billionaire didn’t like.

I’m not crazy about the fact that former Harvard President Claudine Gay wouldn’t call out antisemitism in front of Elise Stefanik during a Congressional hearing, but I do understand why. I don’t agree with it, but I do understand it. I didn’t believe it was cause for termination. But that is neither here nor there because Claudine Gay was forced to resign not because of that Congressional hearing but because people like Bill Ackman — a billionaire hedgefund manager — spearheaded an effort to force her out over bad-faith accusations of plagiarism. Gay eventually relented and resigned because of the pressure that Ackman applied by poring over all of her past work in an effort to find mistakes, no matter how trivial.

Did Gay’s sloppy citation work thirty years ago have anything to do with her ability to run the University? It did not. But Bill Ackman fucked around with bad-faith plagiarism accusations, and now he’s finding out that karma is a real asshole.

To wit: Business Insider reported that Neri Oxman — the wife of Bill Ackman — “plagiarized” parts of her doctoral dissertation in ways similar to the ways that Claudine Gay “plagiarized” her dissertation. Basically, Oxman did the same thing that Gay did (plus quoted a bunch of Wikipedia pages without attribution). But when Ackman’s wife was accused of doing the exact same thing, Ackman changed his tune, arguing on Twitter that what his wife did was mere sloppiness.

It is “a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers,” Ackman wrote. “Some plagiarism is due to the laziness of the author. Laziness is not a great excuse for a member of the faculty, but it does not seem like a crime to me. It is more a reflection of the competency and motivation of the faculty member. In the real world, employees can be fired for being lazy, but this can be challenging to do under the tenure system.”

But the story, alas, doesn’t end there because billionaire hedge fund managers do not simply concede defeat. Bill Ackman, instead, has accused Business Insider of antisemitism (his wife is Israeli) for reporting on these allegations and is threatening to bankrupt the company. Ironically, BI is owned by a German company, Axel Springer, which is the opposite of antisemitic: Employees are actually required to sign a document acknowledging the existence of Israel to work in the German offices.

Because of how sensitive Axel Springer is to accusations of antisemitism, it’s undertaking a review of the piece on Ackman’s wife, not because it’s factually inaccurate, but over the motivations. “While the facts of the reports have not been disputed, over the past few days questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting — questions that we take very seriously.”

In other words, Axel Springer caved to a billionaire and is selling its writers out. Ackman is using his money — and threats to bankroll plagiarism checks — to effectively chill free speech. The man literally wants to fund an AI to root out bad citation work. Plagiarism checks are quickly becoming the new McCarthyism, except that it’s only applicable to academics and journalists. It’s a neat little trick that billionaires, conservatives, and billionaire conservatives are utilizing to bully their critics into silence.

Background: WashPo