- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
After Claudine Gay was ousted amid accusations of plagiarism, Neri Oxman was accused of copying from Wikipedia in dissertation
The wife of Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire who accused Claudine Gay of being a plagiarist and led calls for her resignation as Harvard president, is now facing allegations of plagiarism herself.
Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has apologized after Business Insider identified multiple instances in which she lifted passages from other scholars’ work without proper attribution in her 2010 dissertation. She also pledged to review the primary sources and request the necessary corrections.
Business Insider on Thursday initially labeled four passages of Oxman’s dissertation as plagiarized – without any attribution – from Wikipedia entries. But by Friday, the outlet had found at least 15 such passages, a turn of events that was similar to that which led to Gay’s ouster from the Harvard presidency.
Business Insider also identified research papers written by Oxman that contained plagiarism, including a 2007 paper – titled Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry – and a 2011 paper named Variable Property Rapid Prototyping.
Here’s the thing: Most of these people aren’t plagiarizing in the traditional way we think of it. They’re paying poor college students from less prestigious colleges to write the research papers for them, and then slap their name on it. It’s actually not surprising the poor student might drop some plagiarized stuff in there, because they’re not really getting paid what they are worth. Deep down they know they are helping build a world where they will never get ahead because they’re literally being paid to do the research that will give someone else far better credentials than they will ever have.
This has been going on for fucking decades. You just find some poor smart schmuck who doesn’t have the financial ability to get their education in order, and offer them the finances they need in exchange for essentially giving a rich kid a fake prestigious degree, based on the fact a lot of the rich kids “original research” was done by someone else entirely.
All these rich twats have been faking their credentials for decades, that’s why the mask has so visibly come off in the last few years: they don’t even realize the “rules” of the game they are playing, and now we’re officially back to a world where the aristocracy thinks they’re better than the rest of us by simply just existing. They have zero functional reason to believe this, especially when they pay others to do their work and jobs for them, because they’re far too painfully incompetent. The thing is, they don’t think they are incompetent, and they won’t take no for an answer, so they’ve slowly gotten rid of all the competent people at the top, as well, because they can’t have people questioning their vision. (Elon Musk has done a great job of showing how thin their skin is and how ready he is to eject anyone from his workplaces who question him.)
If you think any “elite” person whether at Harvard or post-Harvard in the business world hasn’t partaken in this, you’re kidding yourself. Yale and Harvard fucking exist to crank out these “elite” people who go on to become billionaires. Bill Ackman is a Harvard graduate himself and his wife was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There is no we here. That is a false construction projected to add authority to the entire following wall of text.
People aren’t farming out their dissertations to other grad students (usually). Yeah, once a person is a PI, their grad students do most of the actual writing, but anything written in their dissertation or as a grad student or post-doc is almost certainly all them, especially if they are the first author.
And even once they are a PI or even a department chair or university president, anything they write where they are listed as the first author is 100% their responsibility.
Your post just reads like you don’t really understand how academia works.
From the downvotes, I’m guessing most people aren’t aware of the cottage industry existing around paid dissertations
I can’t speak for everyone, but I am aware of it, and I’m also aware it’s tiny minority of dissertations, especially in STEM fields. You can’t get around the fact that in scientific fields, you need the right equipment for the research your group is working on.