Bill Ackman: belief

Transcript context

…Can you tell me the saga of the accusations against Neri? So I did not actually surface the plagiarism allegations against President Gay that surfaced by Aaron and maybe Christopher Ruffo as well, or maybe Chris helped promote what Aaron and some anonymous person identified. But I certainly, it was a point in time where the board had said “We’re a hundred percent behind her,” and unanimously. And I really felt she had to go. So it didn’t bother me at all that they had identified problems with her work. So I shared, I reposted those posts. And then when the board, she ultimately resigned and she got a $900,000 a year professorship continuing at Harvard, I said, look, in light of her limited academic record and these plagiarism allegations, she had to go. I knew when I did so, I assumed I was actually a bit paranoid about that thesis I had written. I only had one academic work, but I hadn’t checked it for plagiarism. And I thought, that’s going to happen. Actually, I had someone, I did not have a copy on hand, so I got a copy of my thesis. And I remember writing it, Harvard at the time was pretty, they kind of gave you a lecture about making sure you have all your footnotes and quotation marks. I learned later that apparently they had a copy of my thesis at the New York Public Library, and a member of the media told me he was there online with a dozen other members of the media all trying to get a copy of my thesis to run it through some AI. They had to first do optical character recognition to convert the paper document into digital. But fortunately, through a miracle, I didn’t have an issue. I didn’t think about Neri of course, who has whatever, 130 academic works. And so we were just at the end of a vacation for Christmas break, and it was early in the morning for a vacation time. And all of a sudden I hear my phone ringing in the other room, or vibrating in the other room multiple times. I’m like, hm. I pick up the phone and saw our communication guy, Fran McGill. And he’s like, “Bill, Business Insider has apparently identified a number of instances of plagiarism in Neri’s dissertation. Let me send you this email.” He sent me the email, and they had identified four paragraphs in her 330- page dissertation where she had cited the author, but she had used the vast majority of the words, and that those paragraphs were from the author, and she should have used quotation marks. And then there was one case where she paraphrased correctly an author, but did not footnote that it was from his work. And so we were presented with this and told, they’re going to publish in a few hours. And we’re like, “Well, can we get to the next day? We’re just about to head home.” And they’re like, “No, we’re publishing by noon. We need an answer by noon.” And so we downloaded the copy of her thesis on the slow internet. And Neri checked it out and she said, “You know what? Looks like they’re right.” And I said, “Look, you should just admit your mistake.” d so we downloaded the copy of her thesis on the slow internet. And Neri checked it out and she said, “You know what? Looks like they’re right.” And I said, “Look, you should just admit your mistake.” And she wrote a very simple, gracious, yes, I should have used quotation marks. And on the author I failed to cite, she pointed out that she cited them eight other times, and wrote a several-paragraph section of her thesis acknowledging his work. And none of these were important parts of her thesis. But she acknowledged her mistake and she said, I apologize for my mistake, and I apologized to the author who I failed to cite. And I stand on the shoulders of all the people came before me, and looking to advance work. And we sort of thought it was over. We head home. In-flight on the way home, although we didn’t realize this until we got back the following day, a Business Insider published another article and said, “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarism.” Plagiarism, of course, is academic fraud. And this thing goes crazy viral. Oh, Bill Ackman the title is Bill Ackman’s Wife, Celebrity Academic, Mary Oxman. And they use the term celebrity because there are limits to what legitimate media can go after, but celebrities, there’s a lot more leeway in the media into what they can say. So that’s why they call her a celebrity. First time ever she’d been called a celebrity. And they basically, she’s admitting to academic fraud. And then they said … And then the next day at 5:19 PM, I remember the timeline pretty well, an email was sent to Fran McGill saying, “We’ve identified two dozen other instances of plagiarism in her work.” 15 of which are Wikipedia entries where she copied definitions, and the others were mostly software-hardware manuals for various devices or software she used in her work, most of which were in footnotes where she described a nozzle for a 3D printer or something like this. And they said, “We’re publishing tonight.” The email they sent to us was 6,900 words. It was 12 pages. It was practically indecipherable. You couldn’t even read it in an hour. And we didn’t have some of the documents they were referring to. And I’m like, “Neri, you know what I’m going to do? I think it’ll be useful to provide context here. I’m going to do a review of every MIT professor’s dissertations. Every published paper. AI has enabled this.” And so that was, I put out a tweet basically saying that. And we’re doing a test run now, because we have to get it right, and I think it’ll be a useful exercise. Provide some context, if you will. And then this thing goes crazy viral. And Neri is a pretty sensitive person, pretty emotional person, and someone who’s a perfectionist. And having everyone in the world thinking you committed academic fraud is a pretty damning thing. Now, they did say they did a thorough review of all of her work, and this is what they found. I’m like, sweetheart, that’s remarkable. I did 130 works, 73 of which were peer-reviewed, blah, blah, blah. And she’s published in Nature Science and all these different publications. That’s actually, it’s a pretty good batting average.…

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