Claudine Gay Resigns as Harvard President
Repeated academic integrity violations led to her forced ouster.
NYT (“Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations“):
Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, announced her resignation on Tuesday, after her presidency had become engulfed in crisis over accusations of plagiarism and what some called her insufficient response to antisemitism on campus after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.
In announcing she would step down immediately, Dr. Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and the second woman to lead the university, ended a turbulent tenure that began last July. She will have the shortest stint in office of any Harvard president since its founding in 1636.
Alan M. Garber, an economist and physician who is Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer, will serve as interim president. Dr. Gay will remain a tenured professor of government and African and African American studies.
[…]
In a letter announcing her decision, Dr. Gay said that after consulting with members of the university’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, “it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
At the same time, Dr. Gay, 53, defended her academic record and suggested that she was the target of highly personal and racist attacks.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.
[…]
Dr. Gay’s resignation came after the latest plagiarism accusations against her were circulated in an unsigned complaint published on Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks.
The complaint added to about 40 other plagiarism accusations that had already been circulated in the journal. The accusations raised questions about whether Harvard was holding its president to the same academic standards as its students.
Lawrence H. Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary who resigned as Harvard president under pressure in 2006, suggested that Dr. Gay had made the right decision. “I admire Claudine Gay for putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an agonizingly difficult moment,” he said in an email.
[…]
On Harvard’s campus, some expressed deep dismay with what they described as a politically motivated campaign against Dr. Gay and higher education more broadly. Hundreds of faculty members had signed public letters asking Harvard’s governing board to resist pressure to remove Dr. Gay.
“This is a terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Republican congressional leaders have declared war on the independence of colleges and universities, just as Governor DeSantis has done in Florida. They will only be emboldened by Gay’s resignation.”
[…]
In a statement on Dec. 12 saying that Dr. Gay would stay on, the board acknowledged the accusations and said it had been made aware of them in late October. The board said it had conducted an investigation and found “a few instances of inadequate citation” in two articles, which it said would be corrected. But the infractions, the board said, did not rise to the level of “research misconduct.”
It is simultaneously true that Gay has been the target of a vicious, politically-motivated smear campaign and that she has committed multiple violations of the basic norms of academic integrity and was therefore not fit to serve as the leader of what is arguably the foremost institution of higher learning in the United States. Indeed, that she will remain as a tenured member of Harvard’s faculty is highly problematic.
As the scandal has unfolded, I’ve been dismayed to see the academics who have spoken out on the matter (mostly on social media) almost universally back Gay, dismissing her plagiarism as manufactured. As loathsome as I find The Daily Beacon, Christopher Rufo, and others behind the attacks, the evidence is the evidence. To be sure, the critics did themselves no favors by citing things like boilerplate fluff in the Acknowledgements of her dissertation as examples of plagiarism. But the other examples were legion. Almost all of which them would have earned a freshman at most colleges and universities in the country a failing grade and placed before an academic review board.
Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he was previously Dean, made that point forcefully in The Atlantic (“Harvard Has a Veritas Problem“) a few days back:
I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.
[…]
Harvard then took plagiarism seriously—and in one way still does, disciplining dozens of students every year for this gravest of academic sins. Even transgressions falling short of plagiarism could still constitute “misuse of sources,” for which a year’s probation and suspension from participation in extracurricular activities were the usual response. Plagiarists, meanwhile—those who had lifted someone else’s language without quotation marks or citation—were bounced from the college for a year, during which time they were required to work at a nonacademic job (no year-long backpacking trip) and refrain from visiting Cambridge. They would be readmitted after submitting a statement that examined their original misdeed and reflected on it.
The senior tutor was the one who received any initial complaint from a faculty member, some of whom were (or feigned to be) shocked when they learned that plagiarism could have material consequences. They would assemble the dossier, counsel the student, and present the case to the administrative board, composed of all the senior tutors and a few faculty and deans, about 20 people in all. The senior tutor would present the student’s case to his or her colleagues, and we would deliberate.
If the board voted to rusticate the offender, the student could make a personal appeal, which was surprisingly rare. After long conversations with their senior tutor, most of the students understood that they had gone seriously astray, and left with a feeling of, if not relief, then catharsis. They could return to school with the slate wiped clean, and with much greater maturity and sense of purpose. This was, in part, because most plagiarists are not depraved or even lazy, but simply insecure. They came back as much more independent and self-reliant characters, which was what we wanted.
It was a very good system. Harvard’s approach to plagiarism then rested on the notion that even a disciplinary process should be educational. At its heart was the importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. It was not enough to correct the errant document; it was necessary to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “I did this, and it was wrong.” I believe that this approach was rooted in Harvard’s lingering mission of developing leaders of integrity and courage.
[…]
The members of the administrative board were predominantly teachers and scholars, not administrators, and that was crucial. We did not bring in lawyers. We did not hire expensive plagiarism experts as consultants. We read the materials carefully (the dossiers could be quite thick), deliberated, and made a decision. If a senior tutor got carried away defending a student from their house, their colleagues would gently but firmly nail the case to the undisputed facts. And when faculty members tried to intercede, they were equally firmly told that they were responsible for the grading side of the education, and we were covering the disciplinary side.
It is undisputed that Claudine Gay used other scholars’ language, often with the slightest modification or none, and occasionally without even a footnote acknowledgment. Were that not so, she would not have recently requested corrections to work dating back to her dissertation. I have looked at the evidence presented in various places, none of which has been controverted, and it is clear to me that this is plagiarism.
[SPECIFIC EXAMPLES SHOWING COMPARISONS OF GAY’S WORK AND THAT OF THE WORKS SHE PILFERED]
Even if, in the most tolerant and sympathetic of readings, this and similar copying merely constitute “misuse of sources,” it is disqualifying for a position of leadership at any university. Her failure to accept responsibility in stark and unqualified terms makes matters worse.
The Harvard Corporation has stood by President Gay, even as scandal has mounted. The New York Post reports that when it first raised the plagiarism accusations with Harvard, the response was not a comment on the evidence, but a 15-page letter from Harvard’s defamation lawyer. Instead of standing up for Harvard’s motto, Veritas (“truth”), the corporation has hunkered down.
Students have a keen scent for the stink of hypocrisy; they understand Gay’s original misdeeds and the evasions of the Harvard Corporation. They may even realize that something has gone deeply awry with the university when a Harvard professor dismisses the claims as a right-wing attack and tellsThe New York Times, “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting [the accusations] some credence,” as though the facts depend on the politics of those who point them out.
I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so.
President Gay is in a tough spot. The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot, because it has betrayed the values that the university once cherished and that it still proclaims. In both cases, the remedy indicated is the one we senior tutors applied to many a student years ago: fess up, withdraw, and reflect.
An Undergraduate Member of the Harvard College Honor Council, granted anonymity for fear of reprisal, wrote an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson earlier this week titled “I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting off Easy.” Apparently, not much has changed since Cohen’s day (his stint on the Harvard faculty was 1982-1985).
In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.
[…]
Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.
A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.
Omitting quotation marks, citing sources incompletely, or not citing sources at all constitutes plagiarism according to Harvard’s definitions.
In my experience, when students omit quotation marks and citations, as President Gay did, the sanction is usually one term of probation — a permanent mark on a student’s record. A student on probation is no longer considered in good standing, disqualifying them from opportunities like fellowships and study-abroad programs. Good standing is also required to receive a degree.
What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive.
She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.
According to the Honor Council’s procedures, the response to a violation depends on the “seriousness of the infraction” and “extenuating circumstances, including the extent to which a student has had similar trouble before.” In other words, while a single lifted paragraph could be blamed on a lapse in judgment, a pattern is more concerning.
In my experience, when a student is found responsible for multiple separate Honor Code violations, they are generally required to withdraw — i.e., suspended — from the College for two semesters. Since the Council was established in 2015, roughly 16 percent of students who have appeared before us have been required to withdraw.
It is a serious thing for the Council to render this judgment, and I have never taken any such vote lightly. Voting to suspend a peer with whom I might share a dorm, club, or class is not easy. We have even voted to suspend seniors just about to graduate.
But strict sanctions are necessary to demonstrate that our community values academic integrity. Cheating on exams is not okay. Plagiarism is not okay.
It may be true that the plagiarism allegations against President Gay fall short of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ interim policy on research misconduct. She may not have “intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly” tried to represent the work of her doctoral advisor and others as her own. And there is no evidence that any of her arguments posited as original contributions were plagiarized.
But President Gay’s pattern of mistakes is serious, and the Harvard Corporation should not minimize these allegations of plagiarism, as it has readily done.
In a Dec. 12 University-wide letter, the Corporation described the alleged plagiarism as “a few instances of inadequate citation.” The letter lauded President Gay for “proactively” correcting her articles by inserting citations and quotation marks.
By definition, Gay’s corrections were not proactive but reactive — she only made them after she was caught. And that the Corporation considers her corrections an adequate response is not fair to undergraduates, who cannot simply submit corrections to avoid penalties.
When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation “unanimously stand in support of” her.
There is one standard for me and my peers and another, much lower standard for our University’s president. The Corporation should resolve the double standard by demanding her resignation.
Brooks B. Anderson and Joshua A. Kaplan, Crimson editorial writers agree with the anonymous contributor but, it must be noted, were in the minority on the editorial board.
They mix in Gay’s other stumbles in their argument. And, as perhaps befitting their youth (they are in their junior and sophomore year, respectively) get a bit petty.
Our doubts began in the wake of Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7. Without question, Gay botched her public response to the crisis. She sent out-of-touch email after out-of-touch email to the student body, which totalled five in the end. She bungled her testimony before Congress, to international criticism. Now, on top of these blunders, it has surfaced that Gay plagiarized portions of multiple academic papers. The situation seems to worsen with every passing week.
Still, the Editorial Board today makes peace with Gay’s series of slip-ups, opposing her resignation even after dozens of allegations of academic misconduct, including, bafflingly, two sentences in the acknowledgements of her dissertation.
Because our peers avoid reckoning with the severity of Gay’s failures, dismissing instances of explicit plagiarism as insufficient to warrant her resignation, we respectfully dissent.
[…]
We are tired of reading about Harvard’s failures every time we check the news. We are sick of reporters hassling us for interviews in the Yard. We don’t want to return home for break and get pestered by friends and family, asking what is happening on campus or how we’re holding up in this awful environment. Our classes and our studying should not be interrupted by noisemakers and megaphones. Signing an affirmation that we will follow the Harvard College Honor Code before we take our final exams should not feel like a farce.
Students are not the only ones frustrated. Faculty are concerned with her academic misconduct too, though many refuse to go on the record, perhaps for fear of the consequences (a fact the Board’s opinion notes but seems not to take to heart).
[…]
President Gay may be a good person. She may even be a praiseworthy scholar, despite the allegations. But that isn’t enough to remain president. The leader of the world’s foremost university must be held to a higher standard, one that Gay has unfortunately failed to meet.
They are not wrong.
I take no pleasure in drawing this conclusion. Gay is a rough peer. She’s four years younger than me and earned her PhD three years after I did. She has, in every conceivable way, been a more successful scholar than I have.
At the same time, there’s simply no way she didn’t understand the rules of the game. I had them drilled into me in high school and, certainly my undergraduate days at decidedly unprestigious institutions. I can’t imagine that she didn’t get the same at Phillips Exeter, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard.
UPDATE: I see that retired Naval War College professor Tom Nichols addressed the matter in his Atlantic newsletter.
Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents.
[…]
Despite the results of an investigation commissioned by the Harvard Corporation last month that found cases only of “inadequate” citation, new charges about her work include episodes of what most scholars would recognize as academic misconduct, including plagiarism. Experts consulted by CNN consider the recent excerpts to be plagiarism, and I agree: I was a professor for almost 35 years, at multiple institutions, including Harvard, where I taught courses for their continuing-education and summer programs for 18 years. I have referred students for varying punishments based on similar misconduct; I have also sat on boards that adjudicated such claims.
There is no way around the reality that the person responsible for Claudine Gay’s predicament is Claudine Gay.
Perhaps in a few instances, Gay forgot to attribute a source or place a footnote. But that’s not the issue. All of us who write academic works (I’ve written seven books, five for university presses) could probably get called out for some clunky paraphrasing or a few bad footnotes. And sure, maybe her dissertation committee and her later peer reviewers and editors might have been too forgiving (or inattentive). No scholars carry a full compendium of their field’s works in their head; spotting plagiarism or poor attribution is difficult even with advanced software, and it was a lot harder to do before such technological innovations.
But these new revelations about Gay’s work seem to show a pattern that is too damning to ignore and transcends excuses about sloppiness or accidents. Any scholar—to say nothing of any student—with this many problems in their work would be in a world of professional trouble. And in the end, Gay’s name is on her dissertation and her published papers. She, like every author, is ultimately responsible for the integrity of her work. (Gay has defended her scholarship, but her letter announcing her resignation makes no mention of any of the various academic accusations regarding her work.)
[…]
Stefanik and Rufo did not write Gay’s dissertation, and they did not co-author her scholarly articles. Feel free to deplore the messengers, their vulturine creepiness, and their gleeful opportunism. Their own failings still do not make what they found any less true. In the real world, truth sometimes comes from terrible people with dishonorable motives; if we were to purity-test the motives of every defector who handed us documents during the Cold War, we’d have had to shred incredibly valuable information on the silly grounds that the people who gave it to us weren’t very nice.
Some of Gay’s defenders, especially in academia, have nevertheless taken the bait from right-wingers who always wanted to make Gay’s very existence as Harvard’s president into a larger debate about diversity and race on campus. Gay herself, in her resignation letter, speaks of racist attacks against her. (Gay has been subjected to harassment and threats since the moment she appeared on the Hill—and likely a lot earlier—and certainly before anyone had even bothered to look at her published work.)
But none of that is relevant to the charges themselves. Look, there is a term for the particular kind of plagiarism discovered by racists and other bad people:
Plagiarism.
Quite.
During grad school, I tripped across several instances of plagiarism. One was another grad student. For half of his thesis, he copied from another scholar’s work, verbatim. When caught, he took the Marxist defense that intellectual property was theft. It was a couple of weeks before he left the program. He was not disciplined directly by the university.
As a TA, I often ran across instances of plagiarism. In one case, the student copied an article from a different professor at the university than the one teaching the class in question. In that case, as well as others I encountered, there was a consistent pattern: the professor teaching the class did everything possible not to flunk, expel, or otherwise deliver swift justice to the plagiarist.
I can’t speak to how typical this experience was, compared to other campuses, at other times. However, it seemed clear that the professors involved were very conflict averse. Plagiarism presents just the sort of administrative challenge that I imagine many academics don’t want to face.
P.S. One of my favorite excuses for plagiarism was, “I was up late working on the paper, and in my sleep-deprived state, I could not tell the difference between my notes and the words of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.” That student was allowed to drop the class, instead of being flunked.
Here’s a column that expresses it much better than I could.
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-campaign-to-remove-the-president
She committed plagiarism. Had there been one example, I think that would have been a harder case, especially if it came from a dissertation. Gay spared everybody by doing it a lot. And it’s hard to believe that deep down she was unaware of what she was doing.
That said, man the virtue signaling. People go after the left, correctly, for this. But come on–Harvard has a veritas problem. You mean truth? Is that what you mean? The pomposity of it all is just a joke, and it seems like it’s a salve for very broken and corrupted people. There are real issues in academia, from superstar frauds like Dan Ariely to budget cuts at the schools which are not in the Ivy Leagues or covered by the 5000-deep roster of the NYTimes Academia beat. This is just a sideshow for people take themselves incredibly seriously, or whatever the Greek or Latin term for that is.
@Assad K:
The fact that a person is singled out and targeted does not, in itself, invalidate the accusations made. It seems she committed plagiarism. She had a vulnerability and her enemies exploited it.
I’ve thought of getting more directly involved in politics, perhaps working for a campaign. I don’t for a very simple reason: “Candidate X, were you aware that your second assistant media consultant was a criminal?”
Gay committed what, in the self-serious world of academia, is a serious misdemeanor if not a felony. She pissed someone off, that someone exposed her ‘crime’, and now she’s ‘doing time.’ I’d venture a guess that half the people at Harvard who excoriate her committed the same ‘crimes’, but that’s the way of world.
@Kingdaddy:
I can top that. I once had a student who plagiarized an entire paper on Henry VIII from the Encyclopedia Britannica, apparently acting on the supposition that I myself had never tapped that vein of scholarly inquiry.
@Assad K: @Michael Reynolds: As noted in the OP, I hate that the revelations were made by right-wing hacks with an agenda that has nothing to do with academic integrity. But, yeah, they had the goods on her and the instinct of Harvard to minimize her misconduct while threatening those pointing out the truth did not enhance their reputation.
@CSK: @Kingdaddy: I had a student four or five years ago copy and paste an entire article about Russia, substituting every instance of “Russia” with “North Korea” and every instance of “Putin” with “Kim,” and submit it. I almost didn’t detect it because he was sufficiently subpar as a student that I just assumed poor analysis. But I had to submit him to an academic review board because he failed the class and my colleague figured out what had happened. He was dismissed from the program.
@Assad K:
Anti-DEI is doomed to fail. Nobody likes bureaucracy and the amped-up version one gets in fancy colleges is pretty appalling. That said–the anti-DEI people are basically Bari Weiss, and Bari Weiss has spent her life failing as a hack around her peers while appealing to rich men. This is a great idea if you are Bari Weiss and need money and have no ethics whatsoever. But it is not how you build anything or even a real audience which doesn’t harbor the same resentments.
The anti-DEI side lacks the ability to write actual books and to teach actual classes and to do actual work. Most academics who struggle to survive have some love for what they do. It’s not just a grift or an angle or propaganda reimbursed by a hedge-fund billionaire or whatever.
One of my favorite plagiarism stories (and I have quite a few) is about the person who cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia, including the slightly different background color from the source.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I know someone who ghosted first drafts of op-ed pieces for a very famous professor. Some of her writing appeared, verbatim, in the NYTimes.
One thing that has changed in my life is that wokeness (and the market) has made this type of behavior much less acceptable. Not that it was acceptable to have a student ghostwrite drafts for you, but it was acceptable to accumulate power over others and to use it.
@James Joyner: @Steven L. Taylor:
I see I have some strong competition. 😀
Another egregious example: I was a TA for a visiting professor. A student copied a scholarly article on international affairs, without even bothering with a citation. When I informed the professor, he said it would be OK if the student re-submitted the paper, with just a footnote explaining the source of the plagiarism.
Again, conflict averse to a fault.
It’s said Mark Twain once approached the officiant after a church service, and told him, “You know, Reverend, I’ve a book that contains every word of the sermon you gave today.”
Indignant, the reverend demands proof.
Next day Twain presents him an unabridged dictionary.
It’s a little easier in STEM because as long as you give footnotes and references to the original idea, no one’s going to try to claim IP over an equation. And as for the rest, my knee-jerk reaction has been to use footnotes galore whenever I thought I might be paraphrasing someone else’s work, even if I wasn’t directly quoting.
(And now? Good lord. It’s often easier for me to find a piece of prior art to refer to rather than get into a ding-dong argument about whether a certain physical relationship is “known in the art”.)
What’s missing is how someone gets to be in this position without discovering this plagiarism. It’s not like it was difficult for Rufo to find. Clearly, Harvard needs a much better vetting process – or a minimal vetting process.
At the very least, academics who are up for senior positions ought to at least have the brains or introspection to check their past work to ensure there aren’t any issues. Thanks to the internet, checking for plagiarism is much easier than it used to be.
There’s nothing missing. Neil Gorsuch was caught doing the same thing, and it was dismissed as inconsequential. Not only was it dismissed, but it was basically forgotten. And it’s not like he will have to resign, or face calls for his resignation from the perpetually-outraged. It will be a blip for a day and then vanish.
The only reason she had to resign was that the same cynicism that excused Gorsuch was used to go after her.
@Michael Reynolds: “The fact that a person is singled out and targeted does not, in itself, invalidate the accusations made. It seems she committed plagiarism. She had a vulnerability and her enemies exploited it.”
And when a Republican has a problem, they all circle the wagons and protect their injured colleague. But when it’s someone on the left, all thoughtful Democrats stroke their chins and say “Despite the fact that we know this was a bad-faith attack brought for reasons that have nothing to do with the issues, we must all distance ourselves from our wounded associate and maybe even help stick knives in. Because deep down we know there’s nothing more appealing than weakness in the face of an attack.”
@Modulo Myself:
For your WhatAboutism.
plagiarism and copyright does not apply to legal filings.
Sad day here as the “right-wing hacks with an agenda” True the Vote election intimidation case was thrown out.
@wr:
WhatAboutism: Bob Doran, George Santos and “Convicted Felon” Ted Stevens.
@Steven L. Taylor: If the student didn’t claim to have written the Wikipedia article, they weren’t trying hard enough.
@Andy:
The reality is that this type of vetting is still relatively new and is, to some degree, an aspect of the growth of AI and LLMs that allow for this type of checking. There have been anti-plagiarism tools for years, but the corpus they draw from keeps getting larger (in terms of the available documents to check against). What we’ve seen in this case wouldn’t be possible a few years ago.
That said, I have no idea as to whether or not Academic Journals currently do routine checks of submitted articles are part of the peer review process. I expect that this may now start to be part of the vetting for senior positions where publications were expected.
I’m holding off on commenting in general. I think this was shoddy scholarship. That said, I also understand how it could happen (especially having just had a paper published recently). I also expect that if we were to start doing a review of all tenured faculty and published administrators, we’d find this type of plagiarism (lack of transformation of a foundation-setting text) extremely common.
The development of automated plagiarism checks is not dissimiliar to the growth of linked computerized background checking that arose post-9/11. It’s honestly not something we’re well set up as a society to know what to do with at the moment.
* – Honestly, I’ve wanted to run my recent paper through plagiarism software to see if I had transformed some of my underlying foundation-building quotes enough to pass muster. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to those sources (and ironically, the one I tried flagged that the text as a 100% copy of itself).
Not too long ago I found a story of mine posted to somebody’s website.
It still had my name on it but the website had it down as the work of somebody else.
After two messages to the website owner got no response, I contacted their web host. The story was down in less than a day.
I don’t care for people who rip off other people’s writing.
@wr:
If you’re wishing to join the GOP, I imagine they’d let you.
Circling the wagons regardless of the facts is an identity politics reaction, one of the reasons I dislike identity politics. Most liberals still believe in principles – the rule of law, one person one vote, the right of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, innocent until proven guilty, control of one’s body, all that stuff. Ideals unite; identity politics balkanizes. Identity politics supersedes and thus weakens ideals. That’s the white identity game. That’s MAGA.
Identity politics with its knee-jerk rejection of any and all criticism means the group will inevitably be defined by its worst representatives. See: Marjorie Taylor Greene, et al. Idealism challenges all of us to unite behind common principles and to support those who best exemplify those ideals. Identity politics is small, narrow and defensive. Idealism is large, wide and optimistic.
What you seem to be suggesting is that we abandon our principal that the law – or in this case what passes for law at Harvard – be abandoned so that we can uncritically rally behind someone who does represent an ‘identity’ but does not represent our beliefs or our aspirations.
The Democratic Party is a coalition held together by common beliefs, common ideals: justice, equality, etc… Had Professor Gay been supporting a common ideal I would have supported her, regardless of her position on a specific issue like Gaza. Had this been about her right to express her opinion, I’d be with her. But hypocrisy is not a common ideal, and, as a woman who presided over the punishment of students and potentially faculty who committed plagiarism, she is a hypocrite.
@Modulo Myself:
What the hell does Neil Gorsuch have to do with anything? He is not an academic, much less a university president.
@Modulo Myself:
It’s always easy to find cases of unfairness in the world, where principles and standards were not sufficiently upheld. Either one has principles and standards and believes they should be upheld, or one doesn’t. What are we to do with examples like Gorsuch exactly?
@Matt Bernius:
That’s interesting info, thanks. I had assumed more scrutiny was going on, considering how seemingly prevalent internet archaeology is and how things like checking people’s social media history are increasingly common.
I also bet you’re right that there is probably a lot of hidden, common plagiarism out there. Add in AI, and I don’t envy anyone who has to check and verify academic work going forward.
My favorite plagiarism story had a student downloading a web advertisement for plans for making a Blackbox payphone device with the thesis that because the phone company is rich, people should steal as much long-distance service as they need. The opening paragraph was the only original element in the paper. And the only essay-like one, too. The kid carefully pasted the text from the ad as it appeared on the web page with no recognizable attempt to make the text look like paragraphs at all.
@wr: You’re forgetting. The left always needs to reach out to the moderates. As a consequence, the left–particularly the “hard-core liberals” of the left center–are always on the lookout for who is available to throw under the bus. And somebody has to go under the bus–it’s kind of a “code of the West” thing.
NPR this morning featured a somewhat spittle-flecked interview with a Harvard faculty member (Richard Kennedy?) who repeatedly characterized the reaction as “making a mountain out of a molehill”. When asked to describe the molehill, he was unable or unwilling to do so, other than to dismiss it as “trivial”.
I’m sorry, serial plagiarism in academia is not “trivial”. Quite the opposite. I agree with the OP and others who note that, just because the campaign against you arises from discreditable motives, that’s not a free pass on past conduct.
@wr:
I thought we were talking about a university President.
I once gave a computer programming assignment and had several students submit exactly the same program, but with search-and-replace applied to the variable names. Most of them didn’t bother to change the formatting/indentation, and none of them noticed that they all shared exactly the same bug…
And no, my chairman had no interest whatever in pursuing any action against those students.
@Michael Reynolds:
In the past you have expressed a very different belief regarding Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. That they are being held to a higher standard due to antisemitism, and we should judge them not by our standards (where they would be found lacking) but relative to Hamas (where they would be found exemplary).
Sure, Michael.
Can anyone point me to someplace where the actual plagiarism is described? Because more than once I’ve seen academics express outrage about plagiarism and when I looked it up it was so far from the “copy paragraph of another researcher’s work and present it as your own” that I felt it wasn’t plagiarism at all, in any meaningful sense of the word.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Well certainly, any fringe political fraction has to reach iut and compromise with other partirs more numerous in voting unless your plan is to realise the stunning electoral success of say Mr Corbyn, But then one rather suspects tribal excuse making and whataboutism is more emotionally comfortable than dirty pragmatism
@Andy:
Part of the issue is also the fragmented nature of academic publishing where so much of it is firewalled (in the case of journals) or in books (that hopefully have electronic versions). So anti-plagiarism tools need to capture a lot of text and then make them easily searchable. To some degree it’s a computer power issue and to some degree its an archival issue.
I also think there is a broader issue going on with humanities and social science texts traditionally requiring a lot more foundation building than scientific texts. To be honest, often that process starts with copying and pasting the citation text and then doing your best to alter it (even though it’s usually pretty well stated), Granted I didn’t finish my PhD, but I always struggled with how much of that text you can paste into the body of the paper as a quote and how much you need to paraphrase. And then once you get down the paraphrase path, what constitutes a significant enough rephrasing?
@MarkedMan: It’s not really plagiarism, but there was that one case involving a pundit-pretending-to-be-a-scholar who wrote an entire book as a screed against the Victorians because of the “death sentences” handed down against gays. It was only a few weeks before the book was to be distributed that someone finally had the wits to check in with an actual historian….to discover that the so-called “death sentences” were in fact never carried out and were the legal equivalent of shaking a finger and saying “you’ve been a VERY NAUGHTY BOY!!”.
Total collapse of said pundit’s reputation (I mean, if you’re writing about X in time period Y and you yourself don’t have a specialization in that area, shouldn’t the first thing you do go check in with some historians of that period?), and interestingly enough, also the collapse of the academic printing house’s reputation. I guess the feeling was that they should have done their own internal checking at the beginning and waiting until the last moment….was just irresponsible.
@MarkedMan: This may be a “varies according to the situation” problem. Twenty years ago when I was teaching a writing from sources class, the textbook that I used provided 3 different standards for establishing what could constitute plagiarism. It noted that a technique taught at the time in the MLA handbook–creating a paraphrase by reversing the syntax and replacing key terms when possible–was not a suitable paraphrasing technique in all cases.
Over the last 20 or 30 years, I hope that definitions and standards have become more finite. Your comment would seem to suggest my hopes are in vain.
@Lounsbury: I’ve always been a “let your yes be yes and your no be no; everything else is from the devil” kind of guy. I’m also a “perfect is the enemy of good” guy. One of the things that caused me to leave the right behind (I grew up in a Buckley/National Review/Goldwater Republican family) is that I got tired of the shifting standard for many issues depending on whose team was in power at the time. I have no dog in this particular fight, but I can still see the double standard being exercised.
I’d rather see both Gay and, for example, Gorsuch (since he was mentioned) dismissed for dishonesty, but that’s not gonna happen. Singling out one because of “the need to compromise” seems equally dishonest, but that’s just who I am (refer to paragraph one).
@Paul L.: “WhatAboutism: Bob Doran, George Santos and “Convicted Felon” Ted Stevens”
They fought like hell to keep Santos in Congress until the report came out that made it impossible. They’re still screaming about how thug Ted Stevens was framed by meanies on the left. And I don’t know who “Bob Doran” is, but if you mean Dornan he was embraced by the Republicans in congress until he was voted out in a district that had become more democratic.
So in other words, either you are completely ignorant or you’re a baldface liar, or you just type shit not giving a damn if it’s true or not.
@Michael Reynolds: “What you seem to be suggesting is that we abandon our principal that the law – or in this case what passes for law at Harvard – be abandoned so that we can uncritically rally behind someone who does represent an ‘identity’ but does not represent our beliefs or our aspirations.”
No, what I’m suggesting is that next time some Republican operative states publicly that he is going to start destroying universities, and he’s going to do it by feeding dirt to right-wing media, knowing they’ll repeat anything he says and then it will get absorbed into the mainstream media, maybe once those stories start coming out instead of simply accepting the framing — for instance, everyone across the country suddenly being an expert on plagiarism and university administration — we actually question why this attack is being made and what the real purpose is.
Or maybe you still believe that not only were Republicans seriously concerned about proper email management practices by Hillary Clinton, but that the mainstream media was right to spend just about all of 2016 howling about it. If so, I hope you will point out exactly what changes to these practices and the laws about them the Republicans passed, or even proposed, after the election.
You think you’re being tough and individualistic because you are always eager to help destroy anyone who agrees with you. The Soviets had a different thought about people who behaved like this. They were called “useful idiots.”
@DrDaveT: “I thought we were talking about a university President.”
To Christopher Rufo, that means she’s a lefty. Also, she’s black, she’s female, she’s in a position of power. All those make her left, and all those mean she must be destroyed.
@James Joyner: “What the hell does Neil Gorsuch have to do with anything? He is not an academic, much less a university president.”
Right! Why should a supreme court justice be held to the same level of standard as someone as important as a university president. After all, we now know that the only job of the current supreme court is to cash the checks and do what they’re paid for.
@wr:
I thought “B1” Bob Dornan got convicted of bribery guess it was Duncan Hunter.
No, I am not going to drop “Convicted Felon” Ted Stevens “lie” even when the DOJ/FBI has silenced Congress on their whitewashed misconduct. I still like to remind Democrats of the forged Bush TANG memos.
@Grumpy realist: That pundit was former lefty Naomi Wolf who, after being outed for this embarassing mistake realized the best place for her now was in MAGA-world, where she now spends her time raising money by hustling conspiracy theories. If you’re curious, you might want to check out Naomi Klein’s book “Doppelganger.”
@Paul L.: “I thought “B1” Bob Dornan got convicted of bribery guess it was Duncan Hunter.”
Duncan Hunter was convicted because he was guilty. And while he was forced to resign his committee assignments after receiving 60 federal criminal indictments, the Republicans never moved to expel him from Congress.
So what this has to do with my point is, well, zero. Which is about as far as it goes to proving your bullshit “whataboutism” charge.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: you should compare like to like – the legal world and humanities academe are entirely different things. I have no particular opinion about either of Gay or Gorsuch, but the work product of jurisprudence is utterly different than the work product of PhD academia (of which there is no pretence, indeed rather the opposite, to originality in legal writing, contra academic writing). Gay’s case should be compared to another orange, not to a carrot – the carrot may well be quite rotten, but isn’t an orange. Not that I would hasard the opinon that there are not right-side academics that can’t be caught in this, it is rather more the nasty style of the modern American Right to play such attacks than it is of the Left, who will rather tend to go on about identarian or about moral items (as like Thomas’ ethical challenges, if one can say challenges for complete and utter indiffernce I suppose).
The generally predictable tribal reactions are rather boring and uninteresting, very boring, predictable
@Matt Bernius:
Just out of curiosity, why isn’t this unlimited? FWIW, this exact thing came up in a White Paper I coauthored with three people, two of whom had PhDs. We were citing text and formulas from a 1960’s era paper and they were very uncomfortable with the length of the citation even though we very clearly attributed it to the original authors. In this case I won out because a) it was a White Paper and not a journal submission, which mattered to them but not me, and b) I pointed out that the whole business purpose of the white paper was to refute charges we were making stuff up or misinterpreting pre-existing science, so citing a foundational paper that hadn’t been refuted in 60+ years was much better than paraphrasing, as we couldn’t be accused of spinning it.
But in the end, I couldn’t understand the academic point of view. I can’t see why there is any limit to the length of quoting another paper (except maybe copyright?). It seems much more honest to me than trying to sum up someone else’s work.
@wr:
But why not all three?
Another plagiarism story: A colleague of mine once flunked a student for buying his term paper from a mill, and the kid’s father, who was some sort of big deal in business, or at least he fancied himself to be one, stormed into my colleague’s demanding to know why his sonny boy was being so cruelly punished.
“He didn’t write his term paper. He someone else did,” my colleague explained.
“So?” the father raged. “He used a consultant. I do that all the time.”
I read through all of the 50 claims on the NY Post site. I thought a number of them were not plagiarism and quite a few were iffy. However, that still left quite a few that probably met the criteria. I think the issue is more about what constitutes a proper penalty. None of the examples involved stealing central ideas or claiming data as her own. There isn’t any bright line I can find on what constitutes adequate paraphrasing. I think her losing any kind of admin position seems pretty reasonable.
Query- I have been chair of a semi-academic program for a long time. I dont think we are quite as fussy as it sounds like you are. Would you say that some areas of academia are more jealous about the use of specific words than others? If a med student copies whole papers or entire paragraphs it’s bad. If the paraphrasing isn’t perfect in a couple of places we generally dont crucify them but may ask them to do a better job.
Steve
@Matt Bernius:
My academic work was limited to a BS and half of a Master’s. The standards at the time were that paraphrasing was fine as long as you were clear about who and what you were paraphrasing.
I started and quit my Master’s in the middle of my intel career and just continued my professional habit and training of explicitly separating my sources from my own analysis. Paraphrasing was primarily used as a way to condense a longer idea or quote in the interest of brevity and would be appropriately footnoted.
Am I the only one who thinks that Harvard somehow looms much larger in our national discourse than is justified?
I get it, that it is a highly influential school training the elite for positions in government and commerce.
But still. If this was a story about any other university, would it have occupied such a large amount of screen space on the nations paper of record?
It just seems like there is quite a bit of unwarranted fixation with all things Harvard, like it is the avatar of a certain group.
Look, there is a term for war crimes and ethnic cleansing called out by antisemites and naïve people.
War crimes and ethnic cleansing.
@Michael Reynolds:
True, it’s why innocent Palestinians are currently defined by Hamas’s 7 Oct barbarism and the good people of Israel are currently defined by thugs like Netanyahu and terrorists like Itamar Ben-Gvir.
What kind of politics is it when Israel’s label people who criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank as antisemites and Hamas-supporters? Smells like identity politics to me. But to your credit, you merely write that you dislike identity politics, not that you are above deploying them.
But when suggesting Israel be held to its professed democratic standards, we’ve been told idealism, principles, the rules of war, justice etc are “moralistic” and hopelessly naïve. Have we turned over a new leaf in the new year?
Lol too easy.
@Chip Daniels:
No sir, you are not alone. Much ado about nothing. This is a nïche story, not a national one.
@Lounsbury: Clearly, you and I disagree on how morality works. But know in your heart that your rightie posturing and qualification/classification is just as tiresome.
You happened to catch me on a slow day. Most other days, I don’t even read your musings anymore.
I’m suddenly inspired to start singing “Lobachevsky” by Tom Lehrer. (“…index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory…”)
@MarkedMan: To the extent that I understood and taught about the topic, the issue seems to focus on achieving balance between sources and the new author’s new ideas/material. The question of balance is highly subjective, though, which, at least in my mind, makes fighting over content and balance a key part of high-level paper/credential chasing.
@CSK: That parent’s question was the subject of a journal article while I was teaching in Korea. The author came down on the side of the parent, noting that most advanced degree holders are more likely to work as consultants than as scholars/teachers and it was time for the academy to admit this and adjust.
@just nutha:
Okay. But how does paraphrasing someone’s work make it qualify as the author’s?
@just nutha:
This was a freshman class for undergrads at a truly crappy college. My first job. I got the hell out of there tout de suite, or as soon as I got a job offer from a far superior institution.
@MarkedMan: It doesn’t. But it is considered superior to quoting the source directly. It’s less “cut and paste”y.
@CSK: I never had much choice about where to work, but I started teaching in the late 90s.
@wr:
Sigh. We judge academics by the standards of the academy and judges by the standards of the judiciary. Plagiarism is a cardinal sin in the academy.
Legal scholarship, for a variety of reasons, has evolved different practices. Gorsuch’s dissertation, which he turned into a book, is well-regarded. He closely paraphrased a couple of paragraphs describing medical technicalities and cited the original source rather than the secondary source. Not only did his dissertation advisor claim this was standard practice but the woman whose secondary source he’s accused of lifting is befuddled by the whole thing, wondering how else he’d have gone about describing said procedures.
It’s perfectly reasonable to hold Clarence Thomas and others to the standards we expect of judges. I’m unaware of allegations of Gorsuch’s improprieties on the bench. It’s just absurd to bring him up in a comparison with someone violating the standards of her profession, repeatedly and grossly.
@MarkedMan:
It doesn’t. Paraphrasing is used to shorten explanations and put the writing in the author’s voice. The ideas and information must still be cited.
Actually, in the case you describe, where your intention is specifically to refute one piece of scholarship, heavy quotation makes sense.
As a general rule, however, stringing together a lot of long quotations with some commentary is considered “undigested research” and frowned upon in scholarly work.
While OTB isn’t a scholarly venue, I have long since adopted a practice of extensively block-quoting most of the stories I’m commenting on. That evolved over time, as it wasn’t my practice in the early years of the blog. It comes down to quoting being faster and easier, preserving the original for posterity (linkrot is a real problem with news articles and blog posts), and an understanding the readers and commenters tend not to follow the link and therefore aren’t getting the context. Aside from the first, these problems tend not to exist in scholarly writing.
@DK: Is it your contention that Tom Nichols is using straw man arguments with regard to the Israel-Gaza war? Otherwise, that seems to be a non sequitur.
@Matt Bernius: I believe you are correct about the problem being more noticeable in the humanities and social sciences. When I decided that completing my Ph.D. wasn’t worth the additional cost (this was in 1975), I sent my first two draft chapters to a fellow grad student with the notation that he could use any or all of it in finishing his doctorate (properly credited). But in the hard sciences, there’s a greater corpus of hard facts.
@CSK: SMH
I once had a student copy a webpage and submit it (with some formatting preserved) as her own work. Even for an EFL student, that was egregious.
@Steven L. Taylor: I had a student do that. She copied her entire presentation script from the Wikipedia page on Hitler’s downfall, and her PPT contained pictures from the same article. And then she chose Springtime for Hitler from The Producers as background music. I feel bad that I started laughing, but I just couldn’t help it.
@James Joyner:
100% this. Just to be clear, I always try to cite. I think part of the challenge is–especially if you start with grabbing a quote and then modifying it, what constitutes enough of a change.
Exactly this. It gets challenging for me when you are referencing well-established theories or writings. I’m never sure how much when I discuss something like the concept of “self” I need to do the foundational work to define it through paraphrases and scholar checks and when I can simply use “see, e.g. Goffman” and then move on.
Also, from what I’ve seen with a lot of more scientific and engineering scholarship, because the articles are far shorter, you can get away with just calling out the paper and moving on. Again, in my experience, I find that isn’t the case with qualitative social science writing–and I think it’s not necessarily helping the field.
@James Joyner:
I’ve definitely noted that evolution in your writing. And it makes sense. I find one of the things that limits my output is the desire to do the paraphrasing to avoid long quotations and the amount of time that adds to the drafting process.