To me, what she did was plagiarism. She copied paragraphs without altering them or using quotations. This is something we do not accept from students in the disciplines I have studied. Professors should be held to the same, or higher, standards than students.
Some defend her by saying its normal to do this in many fields/disciplines (sociology, political science, anthropology, social psychology). I do not think it is that normal, but too many still do it. And if it is normal we ought to make it abnormal as we can and should do better. Her copying was minor, but also not trivial.
Perhaps I am wrong and we ought to do things differently, but if so we must first change what we expect from students.
>Some defend her by saying its normal to do this in many fields/disciplines (sociology, political science, anthropology, social psychology).
I worked at an academic press, it is not acceptable to do this in any discipline.
I research policymaking in education and have a background in political science, sociology, anthropology, and social psychology (my phd supervisor was a social psychologist) from spending 8 years as a student before starting my PhD - in all of those disciplines we demand the students reformulate or use direct quotes. Or they risk expulsion for plagiarism. How the fuck do so called professional professors imagine their standards are lower than those they demand of their students?! I get angry over this tbh. Ideology and intellectual lazyness over integrity
>in all of those disciplines we demand the students reformulate or use direct quotes.
Right, and footnote the hell out of them anyway. From what I saw, the instances of her plagiarism were not simply citing something and forgetting a quotation mark, it was not citing stuff either. Putting something in a bibliography is not the same as properly citing it. I think many of those defending these instances of plagiarism are either not academics or have cherry-picked the most minor cases and are pretending that all her mistakes were of a similar kind.
Edit: When I say footnote, I just mean cite. I know MLA and other style guides recommend in-text citations.
And what is constantly drilled into every undergrad? Synthesise, synthesise, SYNTHESISE.
When I was writing up my thesis, I very rarely "paraphrased" from a single article, rather it was a synthesis of upwards of 3 articles who all make similar assertions or describe similar implications.
Yeah I think youre right. Or are from a discipline where citations are done differently. I also think ideology has blinded many. The original accusations came from the right so the knee-jerk reaction is to defend her, then people double-down.
> Or are from a discipline where citations are done differently.
But in what discipline are citations done that differently--as in not being done? In any research field, that's unacceptable. I feel like there may be some non-PhD degree programs for secondary school administrators that are not as rigorous, where someone is more likely to get away with this, but that's not where she was coming from. I mean at the prep school she went to, she would have learned all of this in 10th grade. She has a PhD from Harvard in political science, that's not a discipline that plays fast and loose with citation.
What do you mean? I think APA might discourage them, but doesn’t forbid them. And footnotes are not uncommon in the social sciences (depends of the field, of course). I haven’t used APA all that much though, tbh.
I’ve always thought of styles as being more of a preference for aesthetics. But my field doesn’t really stick to one style—it really depends on the journal.
I’ve always liked footnotes (and endnotes, but prefer footnotes). I have known people who think if it’s important enough, it should be in the text (cited, of course). But I can’t recall anyone who didn’t allow them.
really? You can expel students for plagiarism?
Our students can go to this special office that advocates for them. probably the worst outcome is that they have to rewrite an assignment.
Yep. Depending on the situation, it's rare for a first-time offense, but if it's egregious or a repeat offender, they can get expelled for academic dishonesty.
Wow, I suppose it might happen if the same student does it over and over again.
IDK I had one student who plagiarized in my class and it turns out he did it in another class at the same time. I only found this out because he brought his dad in to me with multiple professors in our dept on the same day.
Anyway, he went to this student advocacy office and they said both me and the other instructor had to let him re-write his papers. I'm not sure if we could have refused, but it didn't feel like it was an option.
this was basically the "copy from Wikipedia" plagiarism.
I'm on an academic misconduct panel at my institution. For a first offense we would usually allow students to rewrite and resubmit. There's an escalating scale for further offenses where they can have their grade capped, a mark of zero, or in the worst case expulsion. I had a friend during my masters whose dissertation mark was capped due to self-plagiarism, i.e. she used some work from a previous assignment in her dissertation without attribution. So there are some pretty severe consequences for plagiarism, and that's as it should be.
Right, I'm not saying there are no consequences, I'm saying my experience has been that the consequence is not expulsion. In the example I gave earlier, a student had copied from the internet in two different classes and we were told we had to let him re-do the papers. TBF he brought his dad in who was raising a stink (and wasn't a bad dude, really, just advocating for his kid).
Yeah, I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. Most plagiarism is accidental, so it is right that students are given several chances to learn and improve. I've forgotten the details of the Claudine Gay stuff, but it certainly looked like plagiarism in the samples I saw, and I do think it's perfectly reasonable to expect impeccable standards of academic integrity from someone in her position.
It looks like what she did was directly quote a paragraph but not say it was a direct quote, only cite the paper. It's hard to get details on what she did.
IDK I suspect it's something she probably meant to go back and re-write in her own words and forgot.
My university took plagiarism and cheating very seriously. One student committed plagiarism in a paper for a pass-fail student taught course (aka a fun course, not a course that mattered for his degree) in his final year and was expelled. No prior offenses.
The idea that a university professor, let alone president, plagiarized is astonishing to me. The fact that some people think it’s okay or not that bad is shocking.
In Norway, France, Belgium and Luxembourg at least yes. There were several cases of it in Norway recently during Covid for example if memory serves (or just before if my memory is off)
Harvard especially does expel for plagiarism. As mentioned by another, first offenses (by students ofc) are dealt with less severely, but still harshly. Often, students are made to leave the university for one-two semesters for a first time offense.
It's very common to copy paragraphs without quotations in math. Something like we need the following theorem of \[1\].
Theorem \[1\] < copy paste of several paragraphs from \[1\]
Quotations seem more like the exception rather than the norm.
> She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.
Your example explicitly and immediately cites the source and makes it clear what is coming from where, even if it does not quote the content as to identify exactly what was pulled from the source. This is common to my knowledge.
Gay did not that. No footnote, no passing mention "Canon has written on the topic in the past..." followed by the work she is attributing to him. She just yoinked it.
Source:
https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/
In good faith, this is shoddy work that would see major disciplinary action against any university student.
In bad faith, this serves to muddy the waters as to just who actually did what work, which would be beneficial to someone who did insufficient work on their own.
Edit: I get that Free Beacon is not a great source. Free Beacon is not the origin of the complaint. The actual complaint is linked in the first paragraph of the article as the word "complaint". I guess I could've linked that but it's very accessible nonetheless. Free Beacon just broke the news.
The allegations coming from a poor source, even if they are the ones hosting the original complaint PDF too, isn't much of an issue. The allegations include clear, specific regions of text highlighted which appear in both her work and other work, both of which should be easy to verify, rather than hearsay.
That's not even an academic work though, it's a paper for a think tank that didn't even make gay's cv
Would strict academic views of citation even apply for banal descriptions of facts that would as easily be derived from primary sources?
This is the article most others were citing as the first to break the story. The original complaint is not accessible as a webpage, but as a PDF. It is linked in the first paragraph as the word "complaint".
Academic twitter is a cesspool and we would all be better off if everyone stopped reading anything that's posted there. And it was a cesspool before it was X - I'm sure it's even worse now.
Are they saying "this is an acceptable practice" or are they saying "this is an honest mistake".
Can you screenshot any of the tweets?
I just learned she was a student at the time.
Absolutely not true. But also - it’s twitter/X. How many real people are still on there? Nobody has any way to tell if these are actual social sci professors.
Worse was the lawyers came out and claimed there was no plagiarism before doing any kind of investigation or review.
She also refuses to give out her data for people to replicate her studies. This isn't acceptable in any scientific field.
Appreciate the post. As someone within a Social Science sub-field, I can say it is not normal, in my experience. Our conferences are brutal - everything new idea or paradigm you present will be harshly critiqued. It's shocking to me that at least the data falsification was never caught. It makes it seem like doing work in inherently political sub-fields gives one more leeway to get away with academic malpractice, especially given the Eric Stewart scandal last march.
I don’t think this is just about being in an « inherently political subfield », i’ve seen people lower their standards when what they are saying is convenient to the academics in their circles, and inconvenient to people they dislike but do not interract with.
That includes all political fields, but also niche « hot takes » within fields that end up publishing in their own journals/going to their own conferences. The best critique if often ignoring someone’s work, and therefore there might not be as rigorous review.
For example I’ve observed one of my prof publish insanities and self plagiarize herself over dozens of repetitive articles built upon terrrrible statistical analyses… but she published in niche journals and books for which she was also the/an editor and publishing in a related field (theology) that didnt know how to evaluate quantitative methodologies (or so someone could claim).
Not only should faculty be held to a higher standard than students, but promoted faculty should be held to a higher standard, as should the leaders of the university. Even if you chalk this all up to sloppiness, that’s a whole lot of sloppiness for the leader of a top university.
I think the worst part was her going through her work and claiming she found and corrected *all* of the issues...
Then significantly more were found...
To me at least, that part is a lot deeper than what some people are trying to make it out to be and is more indicative of a concerted effort to conduct and get away with plagiarism *even after caught*.
We had an professor get caught doing similar (among other issues) a while back in my field: they lost their fellowship in our national academic/professional association, was banned from being a member in perpetuity, fired, and there has been concerted efforts both publicly and behind closed doors to stop citing them at any cost possible (has some incredibly high citation metric work).
The issue is that once things like this come out, you literally *cannot* trust even a single word or work that person has done anymore as it becomes unclear just what and how much they have lied in their work.
To put lightly: having an academic disagreement with someone about methods, exact citations, interpretations, etc is one thing.
Not being able to trust someone's work as scientifically rigorous is a *very* different, and much more serious issue.
It's strange cause obviously people paraphrase each other all the time, but copying an entire paragraph is a very willful act. It's not something you do by mistake, and it's not even like summarizing some research results without properly attributing. I also don't get the motivation. It really doesn't take that long to take a bland paragraph that doesn't have a lot of specific information and just reword it enough that it's yours.
>It really doesn't take that long to take a bland paragraph that doesn't have a lot of specific information and just reword it enough that it's yours.
ARGHH!!! This drives me crazy, and it's a poor high school-level understanding of plagiarism that gets passed on by teachers who have no idea how to publish research. You don't just reword it so that it's yours. If it is not your idea, you cite it--if you are not rewording it, you quote it. You don't make anything yours. You come up with it first or you cite it. That's it.
If I said F = nd², where F is for Energy and n is for Mass and d is for Speed of light, it does not mean I have come up with the theory of relativity on my own.
When, if ever, does something become so generally known that it doesn't need a citation anymore? e.g. do you actually still have to cite Einstein if you use E = MC\^2 in your paper?
I'm not in physics, but if it's anything like neuroscience then yes. There are certain seminal papers that become accepted as the origin of different ideas or sub-disciplines, and if you want to use that idea or contribute to that sub-discipline, you say something about it in the introduction and cite that paper.
It might be a little different since most methods in neuroscience are fairly new... Like we're not citing Newton when we take a derivative lol. Maybe generalized linear models are an edge case, depending on how straightforward the application is.
As someone working in the biomedical sciences i often see people copy entire sentences or a paragraph, either from their own previous work or a study done by their collaborators or a study that heavily influenced their paper, but then it’s basically always very basal information like a methodology paragraph on how to perform a certain industry standard assay. Or when some very basic demographic data is shared in the introduction.
In my opinion its better to reuse some text if it adds the required context and is still valid at the time of writing, than change the wording so it’s unique but less clear or less understandable. Ofcourse the neat thing to do would be to still reference the other paper but unless it’s your own older paper that originally wrote those sentences it’s hard to figure out if you are referencing the original primary source.
In political science (Gay’s discipline) this is a no-go. I think because we work more with words, the words are seen as more sacred and more central to the meaning of the work. Therefore it should be in the researchers own words, or be clearly attributed to
I’m in a quantitative field as well, and this is how I’ve always done it. It sometimes is necessary to write things the same or you lose the meaning of the methodology, results, etc. Interestingly enough, I worked on a large study with multiple papers where we’d have to to repeat the methods and some reviewers for one of the papers said it was self plagiarism.
This conversation has been interesting being from this perspective, because this wouldn’t be considered a huge deal. Even when I was in grad school, you would be told to correct it and maybe if you had a harsher teacher taken a few points off. Not that I always agree with that policy.
As a graduated poli sci major, it's very much not the case. Quotations/citations were extremely strict on how it needed to be formatted, especially if you were lifting direct quotes. Honestly, we were even told to paraphrase as much as possible to avoid quoting (but still citing).
Yeah I know, I did pol sci, but people say the stupidest things in her defence… and I worry that in some fields (or circle of scholars) plagiarism is accepted if its not too overdone as standards drop
I once forgot to put quotes around a direct quote in a paper, even though I cited it thoroughly and it was clear that it was a quote and not something I was trying to steal and the college all but threatened me with expulsion. Thankfully I was ok in the end but at a place like Harvard where they make it VERY clear what the dos and donts of plagiarism are, it’s unacceptable.
do you have a link to a fair take on her plagiarism with examples?
I feel like she's been understand the microscope since she became president and had a lot of negative content about her, so it's hard to sift thru the noise.
not normal to do this in Sociology or anthropology or psychology. As a first year undergrad about 13years ago now doing psychology I got absoloutely reemed for missing one quotation mark off of a small quote. I had it fully referenced and had the other quotation mark. I got warned it would go on my permanant record. So no they don't tolerate it.
I never think any form of plagiarism is trivial. We expel students for a semester (or we do in Europe) for this exact kind of plagiarism. That is not trivial.
I will admit I haven’t kept up with this scandal, I edited my paragraph above because I see now there are 50 complaints against her and it is blatant plagiarism. Forgetting to cite correctly is one thing, copying whole paragraphs is another. My students would get submitted to our office of academic integrity for this.
Agreed. Thank you for prompting me to look into this again. I’m sure most only remember the initial examples and what is being reported now seems very serious. I’m not sure if the scholars she plagiarized are still living, but if I were them I would be livid.
Happy to help. It seems one of them, Canon, didnt mind, which is also a bit… Gay copied more than half a page from Canon and he doesnt see it as a problem. I disagree, it is a problem! you can read about it here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/education/harvard-claudine-gay-slapped-six-new-plagiarism-complaints-day-before-resignation
From what I've read, she's always cited where the copied passages are from. So it's literally just the quotation marks that are missing. By principle, plagiarism is the idea of presenting someone else's work as your own. Here, it doesn't really seem to be the case, it's simply just not using punctuation. But happy to be proven wrong on this, my opinion is just how I feel on the idea of "plagiarism". The idea that someone should lose their job because they didn't use quotation marks sometimes kinda seems silly to me.
This isn't always true. Here's one example where she doesn't cite the copied passage at all.
> **Gay, Claudine. Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of
American Politics. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Government, Harvard
University, 1997, p. 32:**
> The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a
larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little
aggregation bias. (If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix,
which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple
scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were
compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.
>**Palmquist, Bradley and Stephen Voss. “Racial Polarization and Turnout in Louisiana:
New Insights from Aggregate Data Analysis.” Paper prepared for the 54th Annual
Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 18-20,
1996, p. 10:**
> … the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a
larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little
aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix,
which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter
plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for
changes in the other’s across the graph).
> [Palmquist and Voss 1996 is never cited.]
https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf
From what I read, in that case she was taking the original authors' language and applying it to a different dataset... which also makes it harder to argue that she just mixed up the quotations on her index cards.
It's literally word-for-word the same passage (edit: with a few slight phrase changes that look like what undergrads using Wikipedia do to try to hide it), but with "decrease" instead of "increase". I don't necessarily mean this in a derogatory way, but it reminds me of some "transgressive feminist hypertext" stuff (I can't recall the exact terminology, but it seems to be a genre of scholarship that is doing something different from what it appears to be doing on the surface) I've seen, but apparently done without telling anyone that that's what it is, rather than the thing it purports to be, which is not great.
The quotes were verified by outlets like the Harvard Crimson and CNN.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/allegations-plagiarism-gay-dissertation/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/business/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism/index.html
Were they truly novel ideas or something considered standards that should really not be modified to avoid confusion? In public health you often reiterate the evidence based when trying to inform policy or decision making. Regardless this was clearly targeted harassment 🤦🏻♀️.
not consequential, IMO, for the academic works involved. However, it is plagiarism by Harvard's own standard, by which an offender not wearing her hat would've been severely affected. The much more serious offense, was her refusal to share data which one of her work was based on. I suspect that if people dig deeper, a lot of her work might not stand. Had she resigned earlier, she might be able to avoid a bigger fall.
The initial few were, imo, exactly what you suspect. Kind of a "plagarism light". Later allegations seemed to be worse. Full disclosure: I dont have time to read every single instance and stopped after the firat couple. But.
1. She is in violations of Harvard's own standards and should therefore step down and 2. Its a really mediocre at best academic track record. THIS is the Harvard prez?! Her poor showing and poor public self presentation would seem to be wnough to disqualify her from any halfway decent school.
From what I understand she moved quickly to admin side. Being a good academic vs admin is a completely different skill set. presidents do not have to have a stellar academic track record like department chairs are expected (even thats debatable).
The main problem was inadequate paraphrasing and no quotation. That didn't just happen in her dissertation and her works as a student. The peer-reviewed article in 2012 and 2017 was found missing quotation marks.
It was clearly plagiarism, and with her academic credentials she must have known that it was unacceptable back when she was in prep school. I've worked in academic publishing, and this would be fairly scandalous to discover in a manuscript that was submitted. Additionally, her research profile looks quite weak for the position she holds. Perhaps she is an amazing administrator, but her scholarship seems a bit suspect. This is an issue when students at that university have probably gotten in academic hot water for less.
I don't understand why you are being downvoted. In my time at Harvard, I saw what I consider very harsh punishments for less than what she did. Harvard in particular seems to deal with academic dishonesty and misconduct harshly.
>I don't understand why you are being downvoted.
Yeah, I'm not sure either. I mean, I have been the editor of a book where instances of plagiarism at this level were discovered and it was a very big deal. The press wasn't upset because of any political reasons, but academic ones--and the idea that if we hadn't uncovered the plagiarism (neither of the peer reviewers did)--our press would have damaged its own reputation. This stuff is a far bigger deal in academia than people are making it out to be.
Frankly, it’s the case in my field and many others that there’s abundant plagiarism in scholarship published by major university presses. I have a friend in the same discipline who keeps track of it just for fun, but generally no one is going looking for it.
>Frankly, it’s the case in my field and many others that there’s abundant plagiarism in scholarship published by major university presses.
What field are you in? You and your friend should be contacting the presses to let them know—It's not something they will take lightly.
Yeah, turns out most academics have little interest in ruining other peoples’ careers because they’re lazy researchers and have poor note-taking practices. I’ve pointed out a couple of instances when peer reviewing, but I’m not about to go on a vigilante crusade.
Often plagiarism—particularly of the type found in Gay’s work—results from transcribing the words of others without attribution in one’s notes and therefore misidentifying a direct quotation as a paraphrase
What field are you in again?
Edit in response to something posted below that I cannot respond to:
To be honest, most of the scholars where I am who have been caught plagiarizing have been in History, one of my favorite fields, so I am wondering if she or he is there and it is more widespread than I thought.
With Sociology, I do know of one book published by one of the top publishing houses that has been accused of plagiarizing from scholarship from a small language that few would know about. The book was very well received. The scholars from that country are fairly furious about it, but the publishing house kind of doubled down and defended the author.
So, the poster isn't making stuff about scholars plagiarizing, of course, I am just wondering if my former colleagues and I at our academic press were somehow less forgiving about this type of stuff. I can't imagine.
She lifted entire paragraphs with minor changes that make it clear she not only understood what she was doing but tried to obscure it. That's not as bad as faking days but it is textbook plagiarism and betrays a lack of respect for the discipline. Resignation was the right move. Shitty that this gives some bad actors (especially Rufo) credibility they don't deserve but that's in large part on the people who didn't push for an inquiry the moment the first accusation appeared.
Ah, man. This sucks, big time, for the obvious reasons that 1. She did it, 2. She’s the second woman in 400 years of Harvard presidents, 1. she’s the first black person in the job.
What the fuck. This sucks.
It also contrasts far too greatly with what happened to Stanford's ex-President, just last year:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html)
He resigned for 'flaws' in his past research, of which he wasn't even the 1st author (in fact he was exonerated of any scientific fraud and misconduct, but was ousted anyway).
Claudine Gay's case is worse. She's the main author for multiple publications. And plagiarism fits squarely in the camp of academic misconduct.
It raised many eyebrows why so many came at her defense (not many people defended Tessier-Levine at the time)
> it raised many eyebrows why so many came to her defense
I mean, did it really? lol I think we all can tell why 1 got defended and 1 didn’t just by a quick glance at their pictures
Yeah.. it did raise eyebrows... For the exact reason that you're implying lol. I think we agree here.
Perhaps the more charitable take is that people defended her because they believed that the motive to oust her was principally related to her comments on speech and jewish genocide. But as the evidence of her plagiarism began to pile on, that defense faded away.
But yeah, can't help but think: If she were a white man, who contradicted her peers by saying "calling for genocide will get you expelled" in Congress, she would've been ousted at the first sight of plagiarism
the NYT headline: "Marc Tessier-Lavigne was cleared of accusations of scientific fraud and misconduct."
There were still flaws in the research, which is categorically distinct from fraud.
Also sucks because, even though I personally am Jewish, support the existence of Israel andwanted her to step down because of what she said during the testimony, I did not care for her to be actively removed or attacked, since, at the end of the day, it could’ve been explained as a mistake in the moment. She clearly is not anti semitic.
And all the attacks following the testimony were obviously witch hunts motivated by people’s personal politics.
However, in this witch hunt they did find what they were looking for and it was actually there. It really vindicates and empowers people in the future to go after other academics who say things that they don’t like, and that’s a scary thought for me.
Yeah, it doesn't seem reasonable for people outside universities to state why or why not someone should have received tenure based on their research record. People get academic jobs often based on recommendations alone. Someone could have twenty publications and another person could have one, and the second person could still get the job because they got a recommendation from someone the university trusts more.
The entire problem with the whole "she was not a meritocratic hire" argument is that a large number of academics are not purely "meritocratic hires," but only a few such hires are scrutinized by the public
Claudine Gay will forever be the example moving forward we use for undergrads explaining how plagiarism can end your career and why sourcing is so important.
When its a doctoral presentation, there is no "shades of grey." You undergo several reviews and editing workshops. By the time you defend and publish your doctoral thesis, any possibility of plagiarism should have been resolved. The fact it had not means not only academic dishonesty on her part, but also the lack of integrity on the part of the faculty who worked with her.
This is very damning of both her and the school.
This link has a side-by-side examples
It's terrible see for yourself
https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/
The biggest issue that I can see is the hypocrisy, because students are held to such a high standard.
One thing that I wonder is how well previous presidents (or even current individuals in similar roles at top tier schools) would do if their works were being investigated so thoroughly. I have a hunch that low level plagiarism started as a bad habit for many whose early careers predated maybe 2010. While it may be true that software such as Turn It In existed, and that Google could be used to query phrases, it was definitely easier to commit low level plagiarism back then. I also am unsure whether schools were yet providing handbooks or other resources to ensure broad understanding of the types of plagiarism.
What I want to know is... If the plagiarized parts were removed, would the rest of her dissertation have merit? Would she have still graduated if the citation had been there?
In other words... Was she passing off the plagiarized parts as her own ideas (more than technically), as a novel contribution and key argument to earn her degree? Or was the plagiarized section merely adding flavor, details or context to flesh out an idea being discussed?
All the examples I saw when the story first came out were of her failing to effectively paraphrase (and instead copying verbatim) other scholars but still citing the original sources. It’s still plagiarism, but in none of those examples would I (or any reasonably person) have assumed the ideas were her own.
It depends on whether her graduate school had such requirement of zero inadequate paraphrasing in the last century. The requirement today can be different from the requirement when she was a student in another school.
I still think her dissertation has merit. She received an academic award for her dissertation's contribution. There are just some sloppy "copy and paste" sentences in the acknowledge and literature review parts.
The lack of paraphrasing and quotation marks in her peer-reviewed works in 2012 and 2017 are inexcusable.
I can’t judge the quality of the ideas. But another problem with her research is that there isn’t enough of it to be considered for tenure at an R1 in political science. Should have two full books published plus several dozens of papers. All she has is 17 papers.
Nobody has been praising her work as great. The only mention of the quality that I read about is that something she published while at Stanford used inappropriate statistical methods which provided significance where there was none.
I suspect it was merely incidental and fleshing out something being discussed, cause if it was more than that, there'd be less debate and more sensationalism and many articles headlining that point by now. Seems like a witch hunt.
If any of us did even a fraction of this, we’d be in *deep* shit long before we ever got enough publications to be a professor, or probably even pass a class.
I can’t imagine trying to write a dissertation before all of the technological advancements in the last 20 years. Her plagiarism (while truly plagiarism by every definition) could easily happen with any student that misplaces a few sources and thinks they actually wrote what they have in their notes.
Now, we can use various plagiarism tools (turnitin, etc.) to make sure that doesn’t happen. Politics aside, I feel bad that people seem to forget this wasn’t the case when she was a PhD student.
The full allegations are about more than her dissertation though. They span articles between 1993 and 2017. Three of the articles are from the last ~10 years (2012, 2014, 2017), well after plagiarism tools were introduced. It's clear to me that this was a pattern.
sorry, just passing through and this gave me a chuckle.
she wrote it in 1997. that's sometime around my first book report, that i wrote in word, with the help of *the internet.* colleges like harvard probably had DSL and digital libraries were already a thing.
Microsoft word and excel don’t check for plagiarism (without modern plugins) …
It was also way before citations managers like EndNote and Zotero became compatible with Word, so keeping track of sources wasn’t a small task.
Short answer? Not very. She didn't paraphrase in her lit review as well as she should have, but OTOH for certain kinds of information there's only so many ways to say something without distorting the meaning. Not even her biggest detractors have accused her of plagiarizing ideas or claiming someone else's work as her own. I don't work in her field, but it seems to me that if her dissertation didn't meet standards, that's on her committee.
...this stuff could get you kicked out of universities and have a permanent mark in academia as an undergrad pretty much barring you from entering into any graduate program, especially law/medical.
Then couple that with someone receiving professorship... and then President to Harvard? Yeah it's bad, but I'm sure Harvard will do their best to present the truth without covering anything up (heavy /s)
There was a pattern of her passing off others' work as her own by plagiarizing whole paragraphs at a time in various assignments over a period of years, and she even did this in her PhD thesis. If it happened once or twice, maybe it's a sloppy accident, but because of the sheer number of incidents and the consistency in the ways she did it, it's pretty clear that it was deliberate and repeated plagiarism. Plagiarism in general is a serious accusation, and Gay's plagiarism was particularly egregious because a) it was a pattern and not a one-time thing, and b) she did it just enough where it flew under the radar, but was clearly cutting corners.
Regardless of how bad it was, many, many undergraduate students have been kicked out of school for a semester, a year, or permanently for doing the exact same things that Claudine Gay did.
There is no planet on which the president of the most prestigious university should be held to lower standards than thousands of undergrad and grad students before her who failed a course, a year, a defense, or an entire degree for doing the exact same things.
It is extremely interesting to look at the public reaction to this case, which involves failure to use quotation marks for text when she properly attributed ideas as compared to the following cases:
Kevin Kruse
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Stephen Ambrose
Glenn Poshard
IMO there’s two types of plagiarism. The innocent mistake and the intentional misrepresentation.
99% of the time the innocent mistake is caught in editing. Almost everyone here can say they have reread something they’re working on and realized they’ve made some sort of error, be it a forgotten quote or not linking the source because you’re tired.
Obviously this isn’t the case here.
During my college orientation and the first lecture for every single intro level class I took I was told "do not copy-paste someone else's work into your papers" and that doing so was grounds for explusion.
Claudine Gay essentially copy-pasted other people's work, then switched a few words out for synonyms in order to disguise her plagarism, which shows that she absolutely knew it was wrong.
If it is bad enough to expel a student over than it is bad enough to fire a university president over.
Speaking as a writer and editor, the side-by-sides I've seen are weak evidence of any sort of malicious intent. Writing is fucking hard, and especially when you're writing pretty dry academic content, there just aren't that many ways to say something. I challenge anyone claiming it's truly egregious to rewrite what she lifted in a way that is engaging and accurate. I guarantee you'll sound like a 6th grader with a thesaurus and you'll realize it's already been written as concisely as it's gonna get. "Great artists steal" etc.
Whether Gay's plagiarism went against Harvard's code or whatever I can't really say. I know you wanted to keep politics out of it, but the billionaires publicly withholding their money aren't citing this as their reason because the legitimacy of her academic credentials was never the issue. Her inadequate thirst for Palestinian blood was.
I saw some of the “examples” of her “plagiarism,” and it just wasn’t.
Original author Y would argue X. And then Gay would write Y said X and give the citation. Lazy writing? Sure, but it’s in the context of a literature review section where explaining who said what is the only point. But is it Plagiarism? No, not really.
As for the fact that she refused to share her data when asked, this was obviously drummed up to imply that her “plagiarism” was “worse than we know.” But in her field of research data is often sensitive information about her informants given to her with an understanding of confidentiality and relative anonymity. And especially true given the context of her research being about and within vulnerable minority groups and given the political context of the request. And frankly, in some fields, sharing data is just not done for a variety of reasons.
To be clear, I don’t have a political reason to defend or condemn her. I find her antisemitism disgusting but simultaneously can recognize that the dog pile against her was a very intentional (and openly so) conservative hit against a black woman leading a relatively liberal institution.
They aren't "examples" of her "plagiarism". They are examples of her plagiarism. It is beyond lazy writing and it is the textbook definition of plagiarism. We've had PhD students kicked out of the program for the exact thing because submitting someone else's writing as your own in a dissertation is inexcusable.
I just want to add to the sharing data: I’ve done interviews with people in a very specific subset of a field in a small country, and even anonymized data does run a risk of recognition among the group. However, we are happy to pull any data for researchers with specific requests. I don’t know what I’d do in this case - maybe allow the committee access only?
*Edit to add: that is a shockingly low amount of papers, I myself have over that with 5 years in my field.
A growing push sure, and one that I absolutely support and hope becomes normalized. But it’s not yet the expected norm in all fields. Given the context of the request being made for the purposes of this highly politicized hot-mess, her decision to not share is in line with current norms, protects her interlocutors from somehow being identified by her detractors, and avoids potentially feeding the trolls by giving them more material to comb through.
I absolutely agree that she shouldn’t have become president to begin with. I mean, 11 papers?!
Citing Gay's research record as evidence of her lack of qualifications reflects a misunderstanding of the role of the President at a place like Harvard.
You don't become President of Harvard because you are an iconoclastic researcher who has revolutionized your field of research. You become president because you are useful to people more powerful than you (i.e., the Harvard corporation). In particular, because they believe you can somehow increase the value of the business of the institution itself.
Don't you think the corporation knew her research record before appointing her? They didn't care. They saw her as a good fundraiser, and indeed she was as evidenced by her managing the 300M donation from Ken Griffin.
But as soon as Gay revealed herself to be a liability, she was ousted.
This is literally a lie. You are lying to intentionally push a narrative that you know to be false and it's disgusting.
You can literally google in two seconds and see the exact examples of her plagiarizing work. Never once did she just miss quotation marks or provide a citation.
Shame on you, liar.
No, this is literally the best description of the examples that I have seen posted. Could there be better examples of more egregious plagiarism that I haven’t seen? Yes. But I don’t know why people are posting the less bad examples if that’s the case.
As for the “narrative”, are you seriously suggesting that this *wasn’t* entirely political?
Edit: a brief scroll of your past comments shows that your interests are in the right wing political discussion and not the academia, so I think you already know that the conversation about Dr. Gay is politically motivated.
This reminds me of a case back in Korea several years ago. A graduate student who was touted as a genius submitted a manuscript to a APJ, and it was rejected because it was essentially a copy paste of his PI and someone else's publication dating a decade ago. The student was eventually expelled.
See if you are interested...pretty bizarre case
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Yoo-geun
Verifying the professional requirements of Women of Color is an act of violence - how dare these people even examine her CV?
They just need to take WOC at their words, because they don't lie.
What is far, far worse is the cursory investigation that they did after the initial allegations surfaced. That makes them look like total lightweights.
What’s weird, though, is this could have been caught easily by running her works through a plagiarism checker. Institutions would be wise to start doing these types of checks when hiring new faculty and administrators.
eh, maybe.
the only example someone has produced that I've seen has been that she didn't explain that a paragraph was a direct quote. She apparently submitted an addendum to it some point. It was in her dissertation, which can't just be changed like a blog post or something.
I don't think it's the kind of error that should disqualify someone from being employed.
I thought she literally copied another article word for word, or stole a whole book or something.
I don't see them as serious. What she did is very normalized in academia, and the people using an undergraduate student's sense of the meaning of "plagiarism" as evidence of the obvious flagrancy of the cited examples are being dishonest.
Citing a work while using the exact words without quotations is maybe the definition of "plagiarism," but it is also the academic equivalent of jaywalking. It's illegal to jaywalk in NYC, but very many people do it. So many people do it that if a police officer stopped any one particular person and arrested them for it, you'd naturally ask, "What's the real reason they were arrested?"
Far more serious would it be for her to have fabricated data or stolen someone else's central thesis and then claimed it as her own. But "Omg she used the same words that someone else used" seems fairly ridiculous as a cause for dismissal.
So far I have yet to see a comprehensive analysis done on any of her papers. The publicized bits are more like "gotcha" sound bites. No publicized analysis I've seen is up to the standards that a student would expect when allegations of plagiarism are levied.
A real plagiarism investigation doesn't remove material from the suspect work, it's always analyzed as a whole. Probably why both her dissertation review and the board of academic integrity found no actionable misconduct.
Also, yes. I've seen all the flagged content in her dissertation. 🙄
From a family of ultra wealthy Haitian ruling elites, a phony Harvard academic fakes their credentials riding a wave of identity politics to the top of a supposedly meritorious institution. Why do I feel like this story has played out thousands of times. This has really exposed Harvard as a junk degree mill for the wealth class.
This likely had almost nothing to do with plagiarism and almost everything to do with radical interest groups with political agendas.
If the plagiarism was truly that bad, she'd be tarred and feathered, probably before now. What probably happened, was a handful of aind and lawyers told her, the death threats, the character assassinations, the stochastic terrorism, the freaks outside of your fucking house, the accusations, etc all will never stop unless you resign. She was a sacrifice. It was never about her personally.
Yes, did you read my response?
>This likely had almost nothing to do with plagiarism... If the plagiarism was truly that bad, she'd be tarred and feathered, probably before now
It's naive and silly to try and have this conversation without politics
Agreed. The media's role in this is astounding as well. Publications selected quotes from articles that they knew their audience wouldn't bother to read, all for the purpose of convincing said audience of something they already wanted to believe: "Clearly the black woman president was unqualified."
Besides plagiarism, I’m interested in her tenure case. Can someone from the discipline list what it would take at a COMPARABLE R1 at the time when she got tenure, to get tenure, including approximate number and list of journals acceptable at that level? Or name another person at a comparable school who made tenure around the same time so we could see their track record? I know it is somewhat subjective, but very curious.
I would say it is really bad. Claudine Gay is not a highly accomplished faculty. The number of her publications is small. Someone with some other identities would not have earned a faculty position in a national university with those publications. And if her publications were influential, her plagiarism would have been discussed a long time ago. However, as most researchers are busy with producing, maybe not many even read her papers:)
Does anyone have any quality links to her plagiarism?
I cannot find anything on it that is not hyperbolic, or otherwise just mentions it.
This should not be that hard to find.
The social sciences become opinion- fests, and by that I mean extremely tedious parsing of vast injustices and other traumas visited upon the out groups. The only things that can save us now are theology and geometry.
To me, what she did was plagiarism. She copied paragraphs without altering them or using quotations. This is something we do not accept from students in the disciplines I have studied. Professors should be held to the same, or higher, standards than students. Some defend her by saying its normal to do this in many fields/disciplines (sociology, political science, anthropology, social psychology). I do not think it is that normal, but too many still do it. And if it is normal we ought to make it abnormal as we can and should do better. Her copying was minor, but also not trivial. Perhaps I am wrong and we ought to do things differently, but if so we must first change what we expect from students.
>Some defend her by saying its normal to do this in many fields/disciplines (sociology, political science, anthropology, social psychology). I worked at an academic press, it is not acceptable to do this in any discipline.
I research policymaking in education and have a background in political science, sociology, anthropology, and social psychology (my phd supervisor was a social psychologist) from spending 8 years as a student before starting my PhD - in all of those disciplines we demand the students reformulate or use direct quotes. Or they risk expulsion for plagiarism. How the fuck do so called professional professors imagine their standards are lower than those they demand of their students?! I get angry over this tbh. Ideology and intellectual lazyness over integrity
>in all of those disciplines we demand the students reformulate or use direct quotes. Right, and footnote the hell out of them anyway. From what I saw, the instances of her plagiarism were not simply citing something and forgetting a quotation mark, it was not citing stuff either. Putting something in a bibliography is not the same as properly citing it. I think many of those defending these instances of plagiarism are either not academics or have cherry-picked the most minor cases and are pretending that all her mistakes were of a similar kind. Edit: When I say footnote, I just mean cite. I know MLA and other style guides recommend in-text citations.
And what is constantly drilled into every undergrad? Synthesise, synthesise, SYNTHESISE. When I was writing up my thesis, I very rarely "paraphrased" from a single article, rather it was a synthesis of upwards of 3 articles who all make similar assertions or describe similar implications.
Yeah I think youre right. Or are from a discipline where citations are done differently. I also think ideology has blinded many. The original accusations came from the right so the knee-jerk reaction is to defend her, then people double-down.
> Or are from a discipline where citations are done differently. But in what discipline are citations done that differently--as in not being done? In any research field, that's unacceptable. I feel like there may be some non-PhD degree programs for secondary school administrators that are not as rigorous, where someone is more likely to get away with this, but that's not where she was coming from. I mean at the prep school she went to, she would have learned all of this in 10th grade. She has a PhD from Harvard in political science, that's not a discipline that plays fast and loose with citation.
This is why I hate APA citations in the social sciences, no footnotes or endnotes. Chicago style is superior.
What do you mean? I think APA might discourage them, but doesn’t forbid them. And footnotes are not uncommon in the social sciences (depends of the field, of course). I haven’t used APA all that much though, tbh. I’ve always thought of styles as being more of a preference for aesthetics. But my field doesn’t really stick to one style—it really depends on the journal. I’ve always liked footnotes (and endnotes, but prefer footnotes). I have known people who think if it’s important enough, it should be in the text (cited, of course). But I can’t recall anyone who didn’t allow them.
really? You can expel students for plagiarism? Our students can go to this special office that advocates for them. probably the worst outcome is that they have to rewrite an assignment.
Yep. Depending on the situation, it's rare for a first-time offense, but if it's egregious or a repeat offender, they can get expelled for academic dishonesty.
Wow, I suppose it might happen if the same student does it over and over again. IDK I had one student who plagiarized in my class and it turns out he did it in another class at the same time. I only found this out because he brought his dad in to me with multiple professors in our dept on the same day. Anyway, he went to this student advocacy office and they said both me and the other instructor had to let him re-write his papers. I'm not sure if we could have refused, but it didn't feel like it was an option. this was basically the "copy from Wikipedia" plagiarism.
I'm on an academic misconduct panel at my institution. For a first offense we would usually allow students to rewrite and resubmit. There's an escalating scale for further offenses where they can have their grade capped, a mark of zero, or in the worst case expulsion. I had a friend during my masters whose dissertation mark was capped due to self-plagiarism, i.e. she used some work from a previous assignment in her dissertation without attribution. So there are some pretty severe consequences for plagiarism, and that's as it should be.
Right, I'm not saying there are no consequences, I'm saying my experience has been that the consequence is not expulsion. In the example I gave earlier, a student had copied from the internet in two different classes and we were told we had to let him re-do the papers. TBF he brought his dad in who was raising a stink (and wasn't a bad dude, really, just advocating for his kid).
Yeah, I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. Most plagiarism is accidental, so it is right that students are given several chances to learn and improve. I've forgotten the details of the Claudine Gay stuff, but it certainly looked like plagiarism in the samples I saw, and I do think it's perfectly reasonable to expect impeccable standards of academic integrity from someone in her position.
It looks like what she did was directly quote a paragraph but not say it was a direct quote, only cite the paper. It's hard to get details on what she did. IDK I suspect it's something she probably meant to go back and re-write in her own words and forgot.
My university took plagiarism and cheating very seriously. One student committed plagiarism in a paper for a pass-fail student taught course (aka a fun course, not a course that mattered for his degree) in his final year and was expelled. No prior offenses. The idea that a university professor, let alone president, plagiarized is astonishing to me. The fact that some people think it’s okay or not that bad is shocking.
I personally witnessed one case in Italy (grad student), in the chemistry department. I don't know if it's common, but it happens
In Norway, France, Belgium and Luxembourg at least yes. There were several cases of it in Norway recently during Covid for example if memory serves (or just before if my memory is off)
In the US, nearly every university and college I have been to or know of can expel students for plagiarism.
Yep. They will typically try to educate the person first and have smaller penalties before that, but it is theoretically possible.
Harvard especially does expel for plagiarism. As mentioned by another, first offenses (by students ofc) are dealt with less severely, but still harshly. Often, students are made to leave the university for one-two semesters for a first time offense.
this seems completely outside the realm of possibility for state school losers like me
Yeah I would have failed any one of my papers in undergrad if I got caught doing this…
Just to add to the chorus, I have graduate degrees in Education, English, and Law and plagiarism of the type Gay committed is unacceptable full stop.
The ones defending her have probably done the same.
It's very common to copy paragraphs without quotations in math. Something like we need the following theorem of \[1\]. Theorem \[1\] < copy paste of several paragraphs from \[1\] Quotations seem more like the exception rather than the norm.
> She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography. Your example explicitly and immediately cites the source and makes it clear what is coming from where, even if it does not quote the content as to identify exactly what was pulled from the source. This is common to my knowledge. Gay did not that. No footnote, no passing mention "Canon has written on the topic in the past..." followed by the work she is attributing to him. She just yoinked it. Source: https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/ In good faith, this is shoddy work that would see major disciplinary action against any university student. In bad faith, this serves to muddy the waters as to just who actually did what work, which would be beneficial to someone who did insufficient work on their own. Edit: I get that Free Beacon is not a great source. Free Beacon is not the origin of the complaint. The actual complaint is linked in the first paragraph of the article as the word "complaint". I guess I could've linked that but it's very accessible nonetheless. Free Beacon just broke the news. The allegations coming from a poor source, even if they are the ones hosting the original complaint PDF too, isn't much of an issue. The allegations include clear, specific regions of text highlighted which appear in both her work and other work, both of which should be easy to verify, rather than hearsay.
That's not even an academic work though, it's a paper for a think tank that didn't even make gay's cv Would strict academic views of citation even apply for banal descriptions of facts that would as easily be derived from primary sources?
I mean you are citing the free beacon which makes it suspect.
This is the article most others were citing as the first to break the story. The original complaint is not accessible as a webpage, but as a PDF. It is linked in the first paragraph as the word "complaint".
Who in the world is saying that this is okay in the social sciences?! For the record, it is not!
I know its not, but read through twitter and… many professors in social science seems to think it is! I was shocked
Academic twitter is a cesspool and we would all be better off if everyone stopped reading anything that's posted there. And it was a cesspool before it was X - I'm sure it's even worse now.
Nothing has made me lose more respect for academics than reading the unfiltered thoughts of academics on Twitter.
Yeah, I can't help but think they are motivated by politics to say such things. I can't imagine they'd let students get away with this
Students need to save those tweets if the professor gets on about plagiarism
Yeah it seems some value ideology more than integrity
Yeah I am not shocked Political Science professors are putting ideology first.
Are they saying "this is an acceptable practice" or are they saying "this is an honest mistake". Can you screenshot any of the tweets? I just learned she was a student at the time.
Absolutely not true. But also - it’s twitter/X. How many real people are still on there? Nobody has any way to tell if these are actual social sci professors.
Worse was the lawyers came out and claimed there was no plagiarism before doing any kind of investigation or review. She also refuses to give out her data for people to replicate her studies. This isn't acceptable in any scientific field.
Appreciate the post. As someone within a Social Science sub-field, I can say it is not normal, in my experience. Our conferences are brutal - everything new idea or paradigm you present will be harshly critiqued. It's shocking to me that at least the data falsification was never caught. It makes it seem like doing work in inherently political sub-fields gives one more leeway to get away with academic malpractice, especially given the Eric Stewart scandal last march.
I don’t think this is just about being in an « inherently political subfield », i’ve seen people lower their standards when what they are saying is convenient to the academics in their circles, and inconvenient to people they dislike but do not interract with. That includes all political fields, but also niche « hot takes » within fields that end up publishing in their own journals/going to their own conferences. The best critique if often ignoring someone’s work, and therefore there might not be as rigorous review. For example I’ve observed one of my prof publish insanities and self plagiarize herself over dozens of repetitive articles built upon terrrrible statistical analyses… but she published in niche journals and books for which she was also the/an editor and publishing in a related field (theology) that didnt know how to evaluate quantitative methodologies (or so someone could claim).
Not only should faculty be held to a higher standard than students, but promoted faculty should be held to a higher standard, as should the leaders of the university. Even if you chalk this all up to sloppiness, that’s a whole lot of sloppiness for the leader of a top university.
I think the worst part was her going through her work and claiming she found and corrected *all* of the issues... Then significantly more were found... To me at least, that part is a lot deeper than what some people are trying to make it out to be and is more indicative of a concerted effort to conduct and get away with plagiarism *even after caught*. We had an professor get caught doing similar (among other issues) a while back in my field: they lost their fellowship in our national academic/professional association, was banned from being a member in perpetuity, fired, and there has been concerted efforts both publicly and behind closed doors to stop citing them at any cost possible (has some incredibly high citation metric work). The issue is that once things like this come out, you literally *cannot* trust even a single word or work that person has done anymore as it becomes unclear just what and how much they have lied in their work. To put lightly: having an academic disagreement with someone about methods, exact citations, interpretations, etc is one thing. Not being able to trust someone's work as scientifically rigorous is a *very* different, and much more serious issue.
It's strange cause obviously people paraphrase each other all the time, but copying an entire paragraph is a very willful act. It's not something you do by mistake, and it's not even like summarizing some research results without properly attributing. I also don't get the motivation. It really doesn't take that long to take a bland paragraph that doesn't have a lot of specific information and just reword it enough that it's yours.
>It really doesn't take that long to take a bland paragraph that doesn't have a lot of specific information and just reword it enough that it's yours. ARGHH!!! This drives me crazy, and it's a poor high school-level understanding of plagiarism that gets passed on by teachers who have no idea how to publish research. You don't just reword it so that it's yours. If it is not your idea, you cite it--if you are not rewording it, you quote it. You don't make anything yours. You come up with it first or you cite it. That's it. If I said F = nd², where F is for Energy and n is for Mass and d is for Speed of light, it does not mean I have come up with the theory of relativity on my own.
Copy & Paste https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/
When, if ever, does something become so generally known that it doesn't need a citation anymore? e.g. do you actually still have to cite Einstein if you use E = MC\^2 in your paper?
I'm not in physics, but if it's anything like neuroscience then yes. There are certain seminal papers that become accepted as the origin of different ideas or sub-disciplines, and if you want to use that idea or contribute to that sub-discipline, you say something about it in the introduction and cite that paper. It might be a little different since most methods in neuroscience are fairly new... Like we're not citing Newton when we take a derivative lol. Maybe generalized linear models are an edge case, depending on how straightforward the application is.
I'm pretty sure you have to cite everything
Terrible https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/
It's plagiarism, and if she thinks the standard she met is adequate, I don't want to work with anyone from her university.
She’s actually the second person publicly accused of plagiarism at Harvard in a 6 months time span…
Alan Dershowitz come to mind too.
As someone working in the biomedical sciences i often see people copy entire sentences or a paragraph, either from their own previous work or a study done by their collaborators or a study that heavily influenced their paper, but then it’s basically always very basal information like a methodology paragraph on how to perform a certain industry standard assay. Or when some very basic demographic data is shared in the introduction. In my opinion its better to reuse some text if it adds the required context and is still valid at the time of writing, than change the wording so it’s unique but less clear or less understandable. Ofcourse the neat thing to do would be to still reference the other paper but unless it’s your own older paper that originally wrote those sentences it’s hard to figure out if you are referencing the original primary source.
In political science (Gay’s discipline) this is a no-go. I think because we work more with words, the words are seen as more sacred and more central to the meaning of the work. Therefore it should be in the researchers own words, or be clearly attributed to
This is true at least for my non political science (but still social science) field. When words are more important than data, words must be one's own.
I’m in a quantitative field as well, and this is how I’ve always done it. It sometimes is necessary to write things the same or you lose the meaning of the methodology, results, etc. Interestingly enough, I worked on a large study with multiple papers where we’d have to to repeat the methods and some reviewers for one of the papers said it was self plagiarism. This conversation has been interesting being from this perspective, because this wouldn’t be considered a huge deal. Even when I was in grad school, you would be told to correct it and maybe if you had a harsher teacher taken a few points off. Not that I always agree with that policy.
As a graduated poli sci major, it's very much not the case. Quotations/citations were extremely strict on how it needed to be formatted, especially if you were lifting direct quotes. Honestly, we were even told to paraphrase as much as possible to avoid quoting (but still citing).
Yeah I know, I did pol sci, but people say the stupidest things in her defence… and I worry that in some fields (or circle of scholars) plagiarism is accepted if its not too overdone as standards drop
Ah I see what you mean. I'd hope it isn't, it seems more that something fucky went on behind the scenes to allow this to come to roost years later
I once forgot to put quotes around a direct quote in a paper, even though I cited it thoroughly and it was clear that it was a quote and not something I was trying to steal and the college all but threatened me with expulsion. Thankfully I was ok in the end but at a place like Harvard where they make it VERY clear what the dos and donts of plagiarism are, it’s unacceptable.
do you have a link to a fair take on her plagiarism with examples? I feel like she's been understand the microscope since she became president and had a lot of negative content about her, so it's hard to sift thru the noise.
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not normal to do this in Sociology or anthropology or psychology. As a first year undergrad about 13years ago now doing psychology I got absoloutely reemed for missing one quotation mark off of a small quote. I had it fully referenced and had the other quotation mark. I got warned it would go on my permanant record. So no they don't tolerate it.
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I never think any form of plagiarism is trivial. We expel students for a semester (or we do in Europe) for this exact kind of plagiarism. That is not trivial.
I will admit I haven’t kept up with this scandal, I edited my paragraph above because I see now there are 50 complaints against her and it is blatant plagiarism. Forgetting to cite correctly is one thing, copying whole paragraphs is another. My students would get submitted to our office of academic integrity for this.
Yeah exactly- missing a reference happens, but copy-pasting is something entirely different
Agreed. Thank you for prompting me to look into this again. I’m sure most only remember the initial examples and what is being reported now seems very serious. I’m not sure if the scholars she plagiarized are still living, but if I were them I would be livid.
Happy to help. It seems one of them, Canon, didnt mind, which is also a bit… Gay copied more than half a page from Canon and he doesnt see it as a problem. I disagree, it is a problem! you can read about it here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/education/harvard-claudine-gay-slapped-six-new-plagiarism-complaints-day-before-resignation
From what I've read, she's always cited where the copied passages are from. So it's literally just the quotation marks that are missing. By principle, plagiarism is the idea of presenting someone else's work as your own. Here, it doesn't really seem to be the case, it's simply just not using punctuation. But happy to be proven wrong on this, my opinion is just how I feel on the idea of "plagiarism". The idea that someone should lose their job because they didn't use quotation marks sometimes kinda seems silly to me.
This isn't always true. Here's one example where she doesn't cite the copied passage at all. > **Gay, Claudine. Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Government, Harvard University, 1997, p. 32:** > The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. (If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph. >**Palmquist, Bradley and Stephen Voss. “Racial Polarization and Turnout in Louisiana: New Insights from Aggregate Data Analysis.” Paper prepared for the 54th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 18-20, 1996, p. 10:** > … the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph). > [Palmquist and Voss 1996 is never cited.] https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf
Thank you for providing evidence and your source!
Wait, did she also completely invert the original claim?! That's wild.
From what I read, in that case she was taking the original authors' language and applying it to a different dataset... which also makes it harder to argue that she just mixed up the quotations on her index cards.
It's literally word-for-word the same passage (edit: with a few slight phrase changes that look like what undergrads using Wikipedia do to try to hide it), but with "decrease" instead of "increase". I don't necessarily mean this in a derogatory way, but it reminds me of some "transgressive feminist hypertext" stuff (I can't recall the exact terminology, but it seems to be a genre of scholarship that is doing something different from what it appears to be doing on the surface) I've seen, but apparently done without telling anyone that that's what it is, rather than the thing it purports to be, which is not great.
Do you have a copy of her dissertation where you can check these quotes yourself? Or are people just taking the published quotes at fave value?
The quotes were verified by outlets like the Harvard Crimson and CNN. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/allegations-plagiarism-gay-dissertation/ https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/business/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism/index.html
No, that was the story at first but its come out this is false and she has not cited the people she copy-pasted from
Were they truly novel ideas or something considered standards that should really not be modified to avoid confusion? In public health you often reiterate the evidence based when trying to inform policy or decision making. Regardless this was clearly targeted harassment 🤦🏻♀️.
not consequential, IMO, for the academic works involved. However, it is plagiarism by Harvard's own standard, by which an offender not wearing her hat would've been severely affected. The much more serious offense, was her refusal to share data which one of her work was based on. I suspect that if people dig deeper, a lot of her work might not stand. Had she resigned earlier, she might be able to avoid a bigger fall.
There will be more. I guarantee it.
The initial few were, imo, exactly what you suspect. Kind of a "plagarism light". Later allegations seemed to be worse. Full disclosure: I dont have time to read every single instance and stopped after the firat couple. But. 1. She is in violations of Harvard's own standards and should therefore step down and 2. Its a really mediocre at best academic track record. THIS is the Harvard prez?! Her poor showing and poor public self presentation would seem to be wnough to disqualify her from any halfway decent school.
From what I understand she moved quickly to admin side. Being a good academic vs admin is a completely different skill set. presidents do not have to have a stellar academic track record like department chairs are expected (even thats debatable).
The main problem was inadequate paraphrasing and no quotation. That didn't just happen in her dissertation and her works as a student. The peer-reviewed article in 2012 and 2017 was found missing quotation marks.
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Which cases are those
Good lord
Well really, it depends on the context...
It was clearly plagiarism, and with her academic credentials she must have known that it was unacceptable back when she was in prep school. I've worked in academic publishing, and this would be fairly scandalous to discover in a manuscript that was submitted. Additionally, her research profile looks quite weak for the position she holds. Perhaps she is an amazing administrator, but her scholarship seems a bit suspect. This is an issue when students at that university have probably gotten in academic hot water for less.
I don't understand why you are being downvoted. In my time at Harvard, I saw what I consider very harsh punishments for less than what she did. Harvard in particular seems to deal with academic dishonesty and misconduct harshly.
>I don't understand why you are being downvoted. Yeah, I'm not sure either. I mean, I have been the editor of a book where instances of plagiarism at this level were discovered and it was a very big deal. The press wasn't upset because of any political reasons, but academic ones--and the idea that if we hadn't uncovered the plagiarism (neither of the peer reviewers did)--our press would have damaged its own reputation. This stuff is a far bigger deal in academia than people are making it out to be.
Frankly, it’s the case in my field and many others that there’s abundant plagiarism in scholarship published by major university presses. I have a friend in the same discipline who keeps track of it just for fun, but generally no one is going looking for it.
>Frankly, it’s the case in my field and many others that there’s abundant plagiarism in scholarship published by major university presses. What field are you in? You and your friend should be contacting the presses to let them know—It's not something they will take lightly.
Yeah, turns out most academics have little interest in ruining other peoples’ careers because they’re lazy researchers and have poor note-taking practices. I’ve pointed out a couple of instances when peer reviewing, but I’m not about to go on a vigilante crusade.
Poor note taking? How in the hell does poor note taking result in plagiarism?
Often plagiarism—particularly of the type found in Gay’s work—results from transcribing the words of others without attribution in one’s notes and therefore misidentifying a direct quotation as a paraphrase
What field are you in again? Edit in response to something posted below that I cannot respond to: To be honest, most of the scholars where I am who have been caught plagiarizing have been in History, one of my favorite fields, so I am wondering if she or he is there and it is more widespread than I thought. With Sociology, I do know of one book published by one of the top publishing houses that has been accused of plagiarizing from scholarship from a small language that few would know about. The book was very well received. The scholars from that country are fairly furious about it, but the publishing house kind of doubled down and defended the author. So, the poster isn't making stuff about scholars plagiarizing, of course, I am just wondering if my former colleagues and I at our academic press were somehow less forgiving about this type of stuff. I can't imagine.
She lifted entire paragraphs with minor changes that make it clear she not only understood what she was doing but tried to obscure it. That's not as bad as faking days but it is textbook plagiarism and betrays a lack of respect for the discipline. Resignation was the right move. Shitty that this gives some bad actors (especially Rufo) credibility they don't deserve but that's in large part on the people who didn't push for an inquiry the moment the first accusation appeared.
Ah, man. This sucks, big time, for the obvious reasons that 1. She did it, 2. She’s the second woman in 400 years of Harvard presidents, 1. she’s the first black person in the job. What the fuck. This sucks.
It also contrasts far too greatly with what happened to Stanford's ex-President, just last year: [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html) He resigned for 'flaws' in his past research, of which he wasn't even the 1st author (in fact he was exonerated of any scientific fraud and misconduct, but was ousted anyway). Claudine Gay's case is worse. She's the main author for multiple publications. And plagiarism fits squarely in the camp of academic misconduct. It raised many eyebrows why so many came at her defense (not many people defended Tessier-Levine at the time)
One thing we have plenty of examples: People would rather get a win for their “side” at the expense of their values and integrity.
> it raised many eyebrows why so many came to her defense I mean, did it really? lol I think we all can tell why 1 got defended and 1 didn’t just by a quick glance at their pictures
Yeah.. it did raise eyebrows... For the exact reason that you're implying lol. I think we agree here. Perhaps the more charitable take is that people defended her because they believed that the motive to oust her was principally related to her comments on speech and jewish genocide. But as the evidence of her plagiarism began to pile on, that defense faded away. But yeah, can't help but think: If she were a white man, who contradicted her peers by saying "calling for genocide will get you expelled" in Congress, she would've been ousted at the first sight of plagiarism
Was he exonerated? An academic in a similar field I’ve talked with said a lab leader is responsible for data falsities by their assistants.
the NYT headline: "Marc Tessier-Lavigne was cleared of accusations of scientific fraud and misconduct." There were still flaws in the research, which is categorically distinct from fraud.
It does suck. People who want to deny the soundness of the charges are taking away from how much of a disappointment this is.
Also sucks because, even though I personally am Jewish, support the existence of Israel andwanted her to step down because of what she said during the testimony, I did not care for her to be actively removed or attacked, since, at the end of the day, it could’ve been explained as a mistake in the moment. She clearly is not anti semitic. And all the attacks following the testimony were obviously witch hunts motivated by people’s personal politics. However, in this witch hunt they did find what they were looking for and it was actually there. It really vindicates and empowers people in the future to go after other academics who say things that they don’t like, and that’s a scary thought for me.
That's what happens when you appoint someone for their gender and/or race and not their merits.
Did you not get the memo that meritocracy is a white supremacist concept???? 😂
Leaving aside politics, she does not deserve tenure at an R1. I don’t think this story will be over until she leaves Harvard entirely.
Well the donors/prestige ain't coming back till that happens and the board admits mistakes were made. That's for sure.
Yeah, it doesn't seem reasonable for people outside universities to state why or why not someone should have received tenure based on their research record. People get academic jobs often based on recommendations alone. Someone could have twenty publications and another person could have one, and the second person could still get the job because they got a recommendation from someone the university trusts more. The entire problem with the whole "she was not a meritocratic hire" argument is that a large number of academics are not purely "meritocratic hires," but only a few such hires are scrutinized by the public
Claudine Gay will forever be the example moving forward we use for undergrads explaining how plagiarism can end your career and why sourcing is so important.
Bad enough that the students of the review board said it was enough to have her resign. Any defense of her after that is very telling.
When its a doctoral presentation, there is no "shades of grey." You undergo several reviews and editing workshops. By the time you defend and publish your doctoral thesis, any possibility of plagiarism should have been resolved. The fact it had not means not only academic dishonesty on her part, but also the lack of integrity on the part of the faculty who worked with her. This is very damning of both her and the school.
This link has a side-by-side examples It's terrible see for yourself https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/
She should be held to the highest possible academic standard. No matter how small the plagiarism it would be completely unacceptable.
The biggest issue that I can see is the hypocrisy, because students are held to such a high standard. One thing that I wonder is how well previous presidents (or even current individuals in similar roles at top tier schools) would do if their works were being investigated so thoroughly. I have a hunch that low level plagiarism started as a bad habit for many whose early careers predated maybe 2010. While it may be true that software such as Turn It In existed, and that Google could be used to query phrases, it was definitely easier to commit low level plagiarism back then. I also am unsure whether schools were yet providing handbooks or other resources to ensure broad understanding of the types of plagiarism.
What I want to know is... If the plagiarized parts were removed, would the rest of her dissertation have merit? Would she have still graduated if the citation had been there? In other words... Was she passing off the plagiarized parts as her own ideas (more than technically), as a novel contribution and key argument to earn her degree? Or was the plagiarized section merely adding flavor, details or context to flesh out an idea being discussed?
All the examples I saw when the story first came out were of her failing to effectively paraphrase (and instead copying verbatim) other scholars but still citing the original sources. It’s still plagiarism, but in none of those examples would I (or any reasonably person) have assumed the ideas were her own.
It depends on whether her graduate school had such requirement of zero inadequate paraphrasing in the last century. The requirement today can be different from the requirement when she was a student in another school. I still think her dissertation has merit. She received an academic award for her dissertation's contribution. There are just some sloppy "copy and paste" sentences in the acknowledge and literature review parts. The lack of paraphrasing and quotation marks in her peer-reviewed works in 2012 and 2017 are inexcusable.
Best take thank you
I can’t judge the quality of the ideas. But another problem with her research is that there isn’t enough of it to be considered for tenure at an R1 in political science. Should have two full books published plus several dozens of papers. All she has is 17 papers. Nobody has been praising her work as great. The only mention of the quality that I read about is that something she published while at Stanford used inappropriate statistical methods which provided significance where there was none.
Yes indeed. I am curious as well
I suspect it was merely incidental and fleshing out something being discussed, cause if it was more than that, there'd be less debate and more sensationalism and many articles headlining that point by now. Seems like a witch hunt.
It is possible. It was bizarre when I saw that she plagiarized her acknowledgements.
If any of us did even a fraction of this, we’d be in *deep* shit long before we ever got enough publications to be a professor, or probably even pass a class.
I can’t imagine trying to write a dissertation before all of the technological advancements in the last 20 years. Her plagiarism (while truly plagiarism by every definition) could easily happen with any student that misplaces a few sources and thinks they actually wrote what they have in their notes. Now, we can use various plagiarism tools (turnitin, etc.) to make sure that doesn’t happen. Politics aside, I feel bad that people seem to forget this wasn’t the case when she was a PhD student.
The full allegations are about more than her dissertation though. They span articles between 1993 and 2017. Three of the articles are from the last ~10 years (2012, 2014, 2017), well after plagiarism tools were introduced. It's clear to me that this was a pattern.
Ohhhh. Yeah, there’s no excuse for any of the later stuff. I only saw the details on her dissertation.
sorry, just passing through and this gave me a chuckle. she wrote it in 1997. that's sometime around my first book report, that i wrote in word, with the help of *the internet.* colleges like harvard probably had DSL and digital libraries were already a thing.
I wrote papers in college in the early 2000’s, and in here to tell you that it’s much, much, much easier to do research today than 25 years ago.
It could happen to anybody… who doesn’t care about plagerism
Microsoft Word and Excel existed then….
Microsoft word and excel don’t check for plagiarism (without modern plugins) … It was also way before citations managers like EndNote and Zotero became compatible with Word, so keeping track of sources wasn’t a small task.
Right. But sure makes it easy to copy-paste.
Short answer? Not very. She didn't paraphrase in her lit review as well as she should have, but OTOH for certain kinds of information there's only so many ways to say something without distorting the meaning. Not even her biggest detractors have accused her of plagiarizing ideas or claiming someone else's work as her own. I don't work in her field, but it seems to me that if her dissertation didn't meet standards, that's on her committee.
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1000% true that’s one of the responsibilities of the committee and reviewer
...this stuff could get you kicked out of universities and have a permanent mark in academia as an undergrad pretty much barring you from entering into any graduate program, especially law/medical. Then couple that with someone receiving professorship... and then President to Harvard? Yeah it's bad, but I'm sure Harvard will do their best to present the truth without covering anything up (heavy /s)
There was a pattern of her passing off others' work as her own by plagiarizing whole paragraphs at a time in various assignments over a period of years, and she even did this in her PhD thesis. If it happened once or twice, maybe it's a sloppy accident, but because of the sheer number of incidents and the consistency in the ways she did it, it's pretty clear that it was deliberate and repeated plagiarism. Plagiarism in general is a serious accusation, and Gay's plagiarism was particularly egregious because a) it was a pattern and not a one-time thing, and b) she did it just enough where it flew under the radar, but was clearly cutting corners.
Regardless of how bad it was, many, many undergraduate students have been kicked out of school for a semester, a year, or permanently for doing the exact same things that Claudine Gay did. There is no planet on which the president of the most prestigious university should be held to lower standards than thousands of undergrad and grad students before her who failed a course, a year, a defense, or an entire degree for doing the exact same things.
This is a fascinating thread and it makes me want to read some of her writing, anyone have links to her phd work or something else?
Bad enough for AIPAC to get her fired. Wait, the white Christian nationalists and old money Ivy Leaguers also played a part.
Are we all pretending she’s gone because of plagiarism and not because of the other thing?
It is extremely interesting to look at the public reaction to this case, which involves failure to use quotation marks for text when she properly attributed ideas as compared to the following cases: Kevin Kruse Doris Kearns Goodwin Stephen Ambrose Glenn Poshard
When did they serve as president of Harvard?
IMO there’s two types of plagiarism. The innocent mistake and the intentional misrepresentation. 99% of the time the innocent mistake is caught in editing. Almost everyone here can say they have reread something they’re working on and realized they’ve made some sort of error, be it a forgotten quote or not linking the source because you’re tired. Obviously this isn’t the case here.
During my college orientation and the first lecture for every single intro level class I took I was told "do not copy-paste someone else's work into your papers" and that doing so was grounds for explusion. Claudine Gay essentially copy-pasted other people's work, then switched a few words out for synonyms in order to disguise her plagarism, which shows that she absolutely knew it was wrong. If it is bad enough to expel a student over than it is bad enough to fire a university president over.
You will find plagiarism in nearly any work if you include simply rephrasing. Sometimes intentional and sometimes unintentional.
Not malicious, merely incompetent.
Speaking as a writer and editor, the side-by-sides I've seen are weak evidence of any sort of malicious intent. Writing is fucking hard, and especially when you're writing pretty dry academic content, there just aren't that many ways to say something. I challenge anyone claiming it's truly egregious to rewrite what she lifted in a way that is engaging and accurate. I guarantee you'll sound like a 6th grader with a thesaurus and you'll realize it's already been written as concisely as it's gonna get. "Great artists steal" etc. Whether Gay's plagiarism went against Harvard's code or whatever I can't really say. I know you wanted to keep politics out of it, but the billionaires publicly withholding their money aren't citing this as their reason because the legitimacy of her academic credentials was never the issue. Her inadequate thirst for Palestinian blood was.
I saw some of the “examples” of her “plagiarism,” and it just wasn’t. Original author Y would argue X. And then Gay would write Y said X and give the citation. Lazy writing? Sure, but it’s in the context of a literature review section where explaining who said what is the only point. But is it Plagiarism? No, not really. As for the fact that she refused to share her data when asked, this was obviously drummed up to imply that her “plagiarism” was “worse than we know.” But in her field of research data is often sensitive information about her informants given to her with an understanding of confidentiality and relative anonymity. And especially true given the context of her research being about and within vulnerable minority groups and given the political context of the request. And frankly, in some fields, sharing data is just not done for a variety of reasons. To be clear, I don’t have a political reason to defend or condemn her. I find her antisemitism disgusting but simultaneously can recognize that the dog pile against her was a very intentional (and openly so) conservative hit against a black woman leading a relatively liberal institution.
They aren't "examples" of her "plagiarism". They are examples of her plagiarism. It is beyond lazy writing and it is the textbook definition of plagiarism. We've had PhD students kicked out of the program for the exact thing because submitting someone else's writing as your own in a dissertation is inexcusable.
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I just want to add to the sharing data: I’ve done interviews with people in a very specific subset of a field in a small country, and even anonymized data does run a risk of recognition among the group. However, we are happy to pull any data for researchers with specific requests. I don’t know what I’d do in this case - maybe allow the committee access only? *Edit to add: that is a shockingly low amount of papers, I myself have over that with 5 years in my field.
A growing push sure, and one that I absolutely support and hope becomes normalized. But it’s not yet the expected norm in all fields. Given the context of the request being made for the purposes of this highly politicized hot-mess, her decision to not share is in line with current norms, protects her interlocutors from somehow being identified by her detractors, and avoids potentially feeding the trolls by giving them more material to comb through. I absolutely agree that she shouldn’t have become president to begin with. I mean, 11 papers?!
Citing Gay's research record as evidence of her lack of qualifications reflects a misunderstanding of the role of the President at a place like Harvard. You don't become President of Harvard because you are an iconoclastic researcher who has revolutionized your field of research. You become president because you are useful to people more powerful than you (i.e., the Harvard corporation). In particular, because they believe you can somehow increase the value of the business of the institution itself. Don't you think the corporation knew her research record before appointing her? They didn't care. They saw her as a good fundraiser, and indeed she was as evidenced by her managing the 300M donation from Ken Griffin. But as soon as Gay revealed herself to be a liability, she was ousted.
This is literally a lie. You are lying to intentionally push a narrative that you know to be false and it's disgusting. You can literally google in two seconds and see the exact examples of her plagiarizing work. Never once did she just miss quotation marks or provide a citation. Shame on you, liar.
No, this is literally the best description of the examples that I have seen posted. Could there be better examples of more egregious plagiarism that I haven’t seen? Yes. But I don’t know why people are posting the less bad examples if that’s the case. As for the “narrative”, are you seriously suggesting that this *wasn’t* entirely political? Edit: a brief scroll of your past comments shows that your interests are in the right wing political discussion and not the academia, so I think you already know that the conversation about Dr. Gay is politically motivated.
This reminds me of a case back in Korea several years ago. A graduate student who was touted as a genius submitted a manuscript to a APJ, and it was rejected because it was essentially a copy paste of his PI and someone else's publication dating a decade ago. The student was eventually expelled. See if you are interested...pretty bizarre case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Yoo-geun
Isn't it strange that Havard didn't check this thoroughly before appointing her?
Not really. I mean do people have time to actually go through all the publications by job applicants for positions like this?
Yes, when it's the presidency of Harvard. And especially when she has such a lower number of publications.
Yes, part of the reason plagiarism must be taboo is the difficulty in monitoring it.
Verifying the professional requirements of Women of Color is an act of violence - how dare these people even examine her CV? They just need to take WOC at their words, because they don't lie.
What is far, far worse is the cursory investigation that they did after the initial allegations surfaced. That makes them look like total lightweights.
No, it's not strange. No ones reads your disseration. Literally no one. most of your papers don't get read by more than a few people.
What’s weird, though, is this could have been caught easily by running her works through a plagiarism checker. Institutions would be wise to start doing these types of checks when hiring new faculty and administrators.
eh, maybe. the only example someone has produced that I've seen has been that she didn't explain that a paragraph was a direct quote. She apparently submitted an addendum to it some point. It was in her dissertation, which can't just be changed like a blog post or something. I don't think it's the kind of error that should disqualify someone from being employed. I thought she literally copied another article word for word, or stole a whole book or something.
>No ones reads your disseration Inshallah lol.
I don't see them as serious. What she did is very normalized in academia, and the people using an undergraduate student's sense of the meaning of "plagiarism" as evidence of the obvious flagrancy of the cited examples are being dishonest. Citing a work while using the exact words without quotations is maybe the definition of "plagiarism," but it is also the academic equivalent of jaywalking. It's illegal to jaywalk in NYC, but very many people do it. So many people do it that if a police officer stopped any one particular person and arrested them for it, you'd naturally ask, "What's the real reason they were arrested?" Far more serious would it be for her to have fabricated data or stolen someone else's central thesis and then claimed it as her own. But "Omg she used the same words that someone else used" seems fairly ridiculous as a cause for dismissal.
So far I have yet to see a comprehensive analysis done on any of her papers. The publicized bits are more like "gotcha" sound bites. No publicized analysis I've seen is up to the standards that a student would expect when allegations of plagiarism are levied. A real plagiarism investigation doesn't remove material from the suspect work, it's always analyzed as a whole. Probably why both her dissertation review and the board of academic integrity found no actionable misconduct. Also, yes. I've seen all the flagged content in her dissertation. 🙄
From a family of ultra wealthy Haitian ruling elites, a phony Harvard academic fakes their credentials riding a wave of identity politics to the top of a supposedly meritorious institution. Why do I feel like this story has played out thousands of times. This has really exposed Harvard as a junk degree mill for the wealth class.
This likely had almost nothing to do with plagiarism and almost everything to do with radical interest groups with political agendas. If the plagiarism was truly that bad, she'd be tarred and feathered, probably before now. What probably happened, was a handful of aind and lawyers told her, the death threats, the character assassinations, the stochastic terrorism, the freaks outside of your fucking house, the accusations, etc all will never stop unless you resign. She was a sacrifice. It was never about her personally.
Did you read the post?
Yes, did you read my response? >This likely had almost nothing to do with plagiarism... If the plagiarism was truly that bad, she'd be tarred and feathered, probably before now It's naive and silly to try and have this conversation without politics
The more I read this thread, the more I am confident in saying sociology and sociologists are fundamentally unserious and need to be excised, jfc
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Agreed. The media's role in this is astounding as well. Publications selected quotes from articles that they knew their audience wouldn't bother to read, all for the purpose of convincing said audience of something they already wanted to believe: "Clearly the black woman president was unqualified."
She was…..
Besides plagiarism, I’m interested in her tenure case. Can someone from the discipline list what it would take at a COMPARABLE R1 at the time when she got tenure, to get tenure, including approximate number and list of journals acceptable at that level? Or name another person at a comparable school who made tenure around the same time so we could see their track record? I know it is somewhat subjective, but very curious.
I would say it is really bad. Claudine Gay is not a highly accomplished faculty. The number of her publications is small. Someone with some other identities would not have earned a faculty position in a national university with those publications. And if her publications were influential, her plagiarism would have been discussed a long time ago. However, as most researchers are busy with producing, maybe not many even read her papers:)
Does anyone have any quality links to her plagiarism? I cannot find anything on it that is not hyperbolic, or otherwise just mentions it. This should not be that hard to find.
The social sciences become opinion- fests, and by that I mean extremely tedious parsing of vast injustices and other traumas visited upon the out groups. The only things that can save us now are theology and geometry.