Bill Ackman ramped up his campaign against Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, saying he will begin checks on the work of all of the school’s current faculty members for plagiarism.
The move, announced Friday in a post on X, comes after Business Insider expanded its allegations of plagiarism against Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor. The billionaire investor said that faculty members, including Kornbluth and MIT board members, will be subject to checks using MIT’s own plagiarism standards.
“We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency,” Ackman said, adding that “it is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.”
Kornbluth has faced calls for her firing since a Dec. 5 congressional hearing over antisemitism, in which she and two other university presidents provided narrow legal responses to a question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews is against university policy.
She is the last of the three to remain in her seat; University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill resigned days after the hearing, while Harvard University’s Claudine Gay quit earlier this week.
Harvard alum Ackman had been one of the most outspoken critics of Gay — first for her handling of campus antisemitism after Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, and then for her scholarship, which came under scrutiny amid allegations of plagiarism.
Gay acknowledged using inadequate citations in some of her articles and said she would fix them. Ackman also suggested that she was chosen to lead the school because of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
