The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who helped oust Claudine Gay as Harvard president in a scandal over alleged plagiarism and campus antisemitism, is “completely losing it” over stories in which Business Insider said his wife, the academic Neri Oxman, “plagiarised some passages” in her own dissertation.
So said Adib Sisani, communications director for Axel Springer, the German company that owns Insider, in comments to the news website Puck.
Responding to Ackman’s claim that the Insider stories about Oxman were motivated by antisemitism, Sisani said: “That’s a very hard red line. Those are accusations that we’re going to make triple-sure are outrageous and not based in reality. Most people underestimated the way that Bill Ackman is completely losing it.”
Axel Springer previously announced an internal review of the stories about Oxman, reportedly stirring anger among employees of Insider.
Sisani told Puck: “The outcome of the review is pretty clear. We believe in our own editorial standards. Of course there’s not a bias in the sense that his wife is Jewish – that’s so far out there. What remains is: did we give him and his wife enough time to comment? I’m sure there’s an email trail that’s easily reviewed. Could there be an outcome where maybe we give them an hour extra?”
Ackman did not comment.
His comments about Gay are widely seen to have played a central role in forcing her resignation, which came weeks after a hearing on Capitol Hill in which Republicans aggressively questioned four college presidents about alleged antisemitism among students protesting the Israel-Hamas war.
The president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned shortly after the hearing. Hit with plagiarism accusations, Gay was at first supported by Harvard but eventually quit too, though she remains on faculty.
Ackman, who went to Harvard, mounted his campaign to oust Gay largely through social media. The campaign in part stemmed from how “officials at his alma mater, to which he’s donated tens of millions of dollars, and its president, Claudine Gay, [had] not heeded his advice on a variety of topics”, according to the New York Times.
After Gay resigned, Ackman posted a 4,000-word essay on X that mentioned “racism against white people”; universities’ efforts to increase diversity; and accusations that student groups were “supporting terrorism”.
“We have a lot more work to do,” he concluded. “Let’s get at it.”
