00:03:52.320And pretty explicitly in my book said that the reason why he was going after Gay and
00:03:57.420why he wanted to force her to resign was race-related, right?
00:04:01.860Like he explicitly said in that political article that we were talking about, it was
00:04:05.800about DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:04:08.200So DEI, like regardless of how you feel about it or what you think about it, it is pretty clearly about race.
00:04:15.300And so from his own admission, he wanted to push out this woman out of her job because of race.
00:04:21.560So 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.
00:04:31.220It basically sounds like Ackman had his own unrelated beefs with Harvard before Dr. Gay ever even was at the helm there as president and that he used this scandal, I use that 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.
00:04:54.140Although I do think that even if he had these longstanding beefs, I think having a beef
00:05:00.680with a university that has a Black woman at the helm probably hit differently for him.0.96
00:05:06.680I just know the energy when someone feels like because you are a Black woman, you owe
00:05:12.080them something or that you are going to be differential to them in some way as a default.
00:05:16.040And from all my time on this earth as a Black woman, I suspect that had something to do
00:05:19.500with it. So since we put out that episode on Friday, this story has really continued to evolve.
00:05:26.420So I had to revisit it and fill y'all in on some of the new updates and some of the new stuff that
00:05:30.720frankly I have learned. Stuff that's been out there, but I only recently was like, oh, that was
00:05:35.240them? Yikes. So let's get into it. Basically, Ackman's wife is Dr. Neary Oxman, who I actually
00:05:42.800had never heard of before this whole situation. Dr. Oxman is a designer who studies things like
00:05:48.0403D printing, art, and fabrication. She was born in Israel and graduated with a PhD in architectural
00:05:53.800design and computation from MIT in 2010. That detail is going to be important in a moment.
00:06:00.000So I have to say, if Dr. Oxman, Ackman's wife, had not been connected to this larger situation
00:06:07.400with Ackman pushing out a Black woman from her position at Harvard, I probably would have thought
00:06:13.580that Dr. Oxman was like kind of a cool person, maybe question mark, or maybe that means I would0.76
00:06:19.120have been like susceptible to a glamour media campaign that is meant to make people like me
00:06:25.040think that people like Dr. Oxman are really cool. There's this New York Times profile about her work
00:06:30.060and the vibe of the profile is like, oh, who is this woman? She's so cool and artsy. Like the
00:06:35.520article is about how she worked with Bjork and they talked about how maybe she was dating Brad
00:06:40.060Pitt. So it is hard to describe it, but you know it when you see it. Dr. Oxman just has this sort
00:06:46.340of personal or public persona that just sort of reads like cool, techie, artsy woman, like lots0.98
00:06:54.360of images of her like looking slightly off camera or gesturing with her hands while wearing like a
00:07:00.560black blazer and like one of those microphone headsets, you know, just someone who like she's
00:07:06.700someone who I think does a good job of signaling and taking a kind of photo that is meant to signal
00:07:12.040like, I am an interesting person who does interesting work. That's just my take. Your
00:07:16.740mileage may vary on that, but if you have any sense of what I'm describing, it is exactly what
00:07:21.760you're imagining. So here is the problem. In the wake of her husband, Ackman, his crusade against
00:07:28.640Dr. Gay for these sloppy citations in her PhD and during her academic record at Harvard,
00:07:33.420which he says is plagiarism and like proof that she is unqualified and proof that she should not
00:07:40.060be in leadership at Harvard, Business Insider looked into his wife, Dr. Oxman's history while
00:07:46.940she was at MIT. And it sounds like the results were kind of not great. We talked about this in
00:07:52.740the last episode, but like I'm not an academic. I don't have a PhD. I don't do academic writing.
00:07:56.860So, you know, what the hell do I know about what is or is not plagiarism? However, one of the big
00:08:02.400issues that Business Insider found is that apparently it appears as if Dr. Oxman lifted
00:08:08.400entire sections of her doctoral dissertation from Wikipedia. So I'm not an academic currently,
00:08:15.640but before I dropped out of my PhD program, I taught many, many, many, many, many college
00:08:21.280courses, mostly 101 and 102, like introduction to composition or rhetoric courses. I've done a lot
00:08:27.800of that in my career. And in the training that I received for doing that, we were taught specifically
00:08:33.860to tell students to not use Wikipedia as a source because it's just not a reliable source. Anybody
00:08:38.940can edit it, all of that. And so instead, the party line was to tell these students that they
00:08:44.160should scroll down to the bottom of whatever wiki entry they were looking at, check out the sources
00:08:48.360linked there, read those, and cite them if those sources are legit. Rather than citing Wikipedia,
00:17:01.780However, I know that it's super hard to resist the lure of all of that.
00:17:05.600But 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 axe to grind.
00:17:21.160Obviously, like, I'm not crying too many tears because Ackman definitely started this and, like, can certainly dish it out but doesn't seem to be able to take it.
00:17:30.180But ultimately, I think that what is going to happen is that academia is going to suffer.
00:17:35.620The institution of, like, education is going to suffer.
00:17:40.520And so many of our institutions have just become these weapons to hurl at each other.
00:17:46.140And I legit do not know if Ackman's wife has any kind of connection to this Dr. Gay thing, other than having the misfortune of being married to a man like Ackman.0.62
00:17:56.600Like, was she beating the drum for Gay to resign alongside her husband?
00:18:00.960Or, like, was she genuinely had nothing, like, said nothing about it publicly and, like, now is all mixed up in it?
00:18:07.900And I also know that like with the plethora of AI tools like Turnitin 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?
00:18:34.440So 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 Ackman'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.
00:19:02.780So again, Ackman 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 Business Insider to see if they ever wrote anything that could be considered plagiarism.
00:19:18.460And it just seems like he is somebody who can really only direct outward.
00:19:23.140Like, anger and suspicion can only be directed from me to others.
00:19:27.840It will never be directed inward to examine his own behavior, for instance.
00:19:31.880It is always someone else who has done something wrong.
00:19:34.880And yeah, it's just like a very weird situation.
00:19:37.820I saw this tweet, I think it might have been deleted by now, that really summed it up nicely,
00:19:41.360which is like, imagine if you had plagiarized your dissertation from Wikipedia,
00:19:45.320had gotten away with it for like 15 years,
00:19:48.900went on to become an academic celebrity,
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00:20:55.780iheartadvertising.com if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your
00:21:01.060personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club,
00:21:08.460part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride
00:21:12.700and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week
00:21:17.880we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't
00:21:22.380stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling
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00:21:50.640society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts see you between the
00:21:56.820pages. Let's get right back into it. So even beyond these new plagiarism accusations against
00:22:08.920Ackman's wife, Dr. Oxman, even more like wild than that is their connection to Jeffrey Epstein,
00:22:16.820which like, it's just really something. So heads up, this might get a little tough because we're
00:22:22.260talking about Epstein. So you might have listened to the episode that we did in our very first
00:22:26.740season back in 2020 with former MIT student Ottawa Mboya. She was a grad student at MIT and she was
00:22:33.420actually the first person to call for Joy Ito, who then was the head of MIT's Media Lab, to step down
00:22:39.280after it was revealed that Joy Ito had taken donations from Epstein after Epstein was already
00:22:45.200a convicted child sex predator. Epstein pled guilty in 2008 to a sex crime involving a child
00:22:53.280And his donation records to MIT continued until, like, 2017, so well after he had already pled guilty and been convicted of a crime involving a child.0.98
00:25:10.400And it sounds like they really had like registered some objections and didn't want to do it.
00:25:14.380So after MIT's connection to Epstein was finally all coming to light, but before Joy Ito resigned from the media lab, it sounds like there was media interest in reporting on who did what as it pertains to Epstein at MIT.
00:25:27.080And Dr. Oxman's husband, Bill Ackman, was the one beating the drum against Dr. Gay at Harvard, was sending like vaguely threatening emails to Joy Ito, basically saying that he better keep his wife's name out of this if he knows what's good for him.
00:27:03.020The fact that he has to throw that detail in there is very telling to me.
00:27:05.360So he goes on to say, 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 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.
00:27:23.280So 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 mention Neary'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.
00:27:44.000Who else received similar gifts? How she met Epstein? And who else at MIT received funding
00:27:49.260from Epstein? Why she declined to attend meetings and dinners with Epstein's and which other faculty
00:27:54.520members attended? This will, of course, blow this entire thing up even more. We would certainly not
00:27:59.800like to see that happen. The fact that Neri as the designer of the Media Lab was asked to produce
00:28:04.220nearly all, if not all, physical gifts for donors using her students' time and resources at either
00:28:09.240of your Raphael's office, Nina's and Jess's requests is not a good reason for Neri to be
00:28:14.180outed as a supplier to Epstein because of Neri's profile, her upcoming MoMA show, and the large
00:28:19.760amount of recent media attention around her. She would be an appealing target for the press,
00:28:24.040as I'm sure you understand. Like 10 out of 10, as far as vaguely threatening emails go,
00:28:30.280I hope that nobody ever has to write this level of vaguely threatening email on my behalf,