Plagiarism, a sin generally associated with underperforming undergraduates, has suddenly hit the academic elite. First came the news that Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard University, had copied sentences and phrasings in her dissertation and published articles without the requisite attribution.

As soon as billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman toppled Gay on these grounds, Business Insider reported that Ackman’s high-flying starchitect wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized her dissertation, lifting entire passages from Wikipedia. Furious, Ackman fired back, trumpeting that Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German company that owns Business Insider, copied parts of his own dissertation.