Originally Posted by
BCR
Yes, and now Ackman is tilting his face off on Twitter.
He typed up the longest Twitter post I've ever seen (no exaggeration), in a weird rant which didn't make much sense. The basic mesage of the rant was that pretty much every academic has plagiariazed at least a little bit, and he's going to have every professor at MIT examined and show this.
But that's dumb. First off, I have to imagine that most of the professors at MIT didn't plagiarize -- or they published very few research papers. Some disciplines are not research-focused. Second, it's a weird turnaround to go from the (correct) position of "serial plagiarizers like Claudine Gay should not be president of Harvard" to "all professors at MIT plagiarized the same way or worse than my wife did".
Instead of going on this bizarre campaign, Ackman should just say, "Yeah my wife accidentally didn't attribute some quotes to Wikipedia, but it was only one paper, and Wikipedia is different than a research paper. So yeah, she messed up a little, but let's not lose focus on the bigger picture here that Harvard was trying to protect a serial plagiarizer because she was president of the university. And let's focus on getting DEI out of universities, as it's a plague."
The "everyone's doing it and I'm gonna prove it" defense is not landing well.