by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke
 
Friday, January 5, 2024

This is my take:

Neri Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, the billionaire fund manager, who until 2021 was a tenured professor at MIT, has been accused recently of being a plagiarist, just like Claudine Gay, the now disgraced former president of Harvard University. Oxman’s husband is one of the chief architects of Professor Gay’s fall from grace, who poses as a freedom fighter against plagiarism, as well as anti-Zionism, which he equates with anti-Semitism.

Oxman is Jewish like Ackman, while Gay is Black, of Haitian ancestry. Gay is married to a systems analyst in health at Stanford University, Christopher Afendulis, who is white.

Looking beyond the lens of America’s gendered racism, of which Gay was a victim, there is the indisputable fact that for some time now there has been a general dumbing down of US education and educational standards right across the board; and now manifesting even in the highest echelons of America’s educational powerhouses. This was not the case five or so decades ago. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that plagiarism is a growing phenomenon, though not openly observed and denounced until now, within the ranks of a number of both white and Black American scholars—though this is rather rare in other educational systems such as those in Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia and the Caribbean.