It’s tempting to laugh all this off, but when a transparently hypocritical and utterly misguided complaint about press coverage is attached to $4 billion, which is Ackman’s net worth (according to Forbes), it’s going to make waves. Ackman’s complaint that Business Insider displayed anti-Zionist behavior hit a raw nerve at Axel Springer, a German company whose German employees are required to pledge fealty to Israel. (Yes, that’s overkill. There’s some history behind it.) In a public statement, Axel Springer said it would take “very seriously” allegations “about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting.” According to Ackman, an Axel Springer director has already told him “I agree with you” that plagiarism is defined too broadly.
Meanwhile, Ackman, convinced that Business Insider obtained the plagiarism evidence on Oxman from someone at MIT, declared a sort of Plagiarisageddon against the university (whose president he was already trying to get fired for her congressional testimony about anti-Semitism on campus):
Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others.
Never mind that one month before Ackman argued that Claudine Gay’s plagiarism demanded attention because it represented an exceptional violation of academic standards. Now Ackman was saying “They all do it,” and he meant to demonstrate that, not only at MIT, but also at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Dartmouth. Indeed, Ackman argued, “the most productive and important scholars” were the most vulnerable “because the more papers and pages you have written, the greater the probability that you missed a citation or some quotation marks.” By this logic, Harvard shouldn’t have accepted Gay’s resignation as president. It should have given her a raise.