I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay's Getting Off Easy

    In order to protect the author from retaliation, and because the proceedings of the
    Harvard College Honor Council are sensitive and confidential, we made the decision to
    grant this author anonymity.

Lets see how long that lasts...

As an academic, the real surprise for me is how thin her publication record is. At my institution someone with only 11 papers would be considered early career, not president material. (I do realize that different fields have different metrics of success.)

I dunno. I was in academia for a while and wrote some papers, and in my field at least, the literature review was worthless and really only there to give other people in your field citations. Which is to say that it was not an area of great originality and if you’re citing somebody else’s literature review, you’re really just citing the grammatical structure of the sentence because there’s nothing original in what you’re saying. So I’m not especially bothered by copying a few sentences from there. It just seems a bit sloppy and a bit lazy to me. Which isn’t to say that I’m much of a fan of Gay. And it does seem like the much bigger deal is the thin publication record. Although, at the same time, isn’t administration the natural place for people who don’t like research to go?

Has anyone got a link to a list of the alleged plagiarisms? The two alleged examples I saw shared on Twitter were not plagiarism. One alleged example was clearly referenced to the original author.

What exactly did she plagiarize and where? Politics doesn't influence the severity of plagiarism.

> When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year.

It would also help if the author or someone could give examples of specific instances and their punishments including this one (with the student anonymous and assignment vague enough that it's not identifying).

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Accidental plagiarism is real plagiarism, but in practice, not a big deal. Even a few instances like "two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation", over a 100+ page dissertation and 11 journal entries, seem OK to me. I'm in academia, still I probably don't know very much, but my understanding is that individual violations like this often end up with lost points, not even a 0 on the assignment. The author mentions that repeat violations carry harsher penalties, but doesn't mention that the next violation is usually made after the student has been cited for the previous one.

On the other hand, just because someone went out of their way to hunt down an instance of plagiarism, doesn't mean it should be downplayed. If she ever intentionally plagiarized, then I agree with the author. Or even if she only accidentally plagiarized, but it was several egregious instances like paragraphs copied verbatim, I'm also inclined to agree (then she's not malicious, but incompetent).

> Omitting quotation marks, citing sources incompletely, or not citing sources at all constitutes plagiarism according to Harvard’s definitions.

If anyone is curious what Harvard's plagiarism definitions are, they seem to be in this: https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what-constitutes-plagia...

Another interesting read, from "the most read" section: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/29/steinberg-weap...

Why flagged @dang?

Is it feasible to generate comprehensive plagiarism analyses for most or all published works?

In the end, this is hurting equality.

Clearly, Claudine Gay does not represent academic excellence. She is personifying the 'diversity hire' and providing a true-life example that will set equality back decades.

Harvard can and should do much better.

It's time to do the right thing, fire Claudine Gay and find a worthy replacement.

> 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.

Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:

> After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.

> In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.

> Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.

> But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...

If you screw up parallel parking while taking a driver’s test, you won’t pass. You won’t get a driver’s license. It’s a very harsh treatment. By contrast if you screw up parallel parking in the real world, the police (probably) won’t arrest you and take you to jail for messing up on your first few tries. There’s a reason for this, and it’s related to the reason we have very different standards at the undergraduate and professional levels.