Unfortunately, nothing will change until the system that produced this changes too. No doubt she will retain her tenured position.
Students chanting “from the river to the sea” while cheering on a terrorist attack may be the shark jump that prompts a systemic change. (Note: there is a huge difference between advocating for Palestinians and supporting Hamas. There is a huger one between supporting Hamas and supporting the October 7th attacks.)
Why? What work has she done to deserve tenure?
But you didn't get to be the president of Hardvard, did you?
The only reasonable conclusion is she was hired solely for her skin color, which is both discriminatory and racist of Harvard in the first place.
It was established that she has a skimpy record, and nearly every one of those contains near-duplication of text without attribution. How could you ever trust an academic after it was exposed that they did that (intentionally)?
It's hard to be an academic but not plagiarizing is rule #1 or #2.
[1] https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10780874156200... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121593?seq=12
But don't pick one allegation- consider all of them. When considered in whole, it's seems fairly clear her modus operandi is to 'copy-paste' entire sections of text and then change small numbers of words. And I suspect she had the intent- to do less work to create text that would get published. But I'm not 100% certain and I don't know what mechanism the plagiarism occurred by.
I dojn't think arguing that identical/similar text describing a different analysis is a good line of argument, either- wouldn't text describing charts that were completely different be.... much more different?
More generally, "the large numbers of incidents" here is exactly what I'd expect if someone ran a text detector, but didn't do any quality control to see if the result actually represented theft of original research.
False positives in plagiarism detection is a problem but my inspection of the examples found roughly 3-4 examples of directly copied sentences, usually with just one word changed, from a paper that she explicitly cites elsewhere in the document. Under my understanding (I'm an ex-academic with published papers) this counts as real plagiarism, and since it's repeated throughout multiple works, I think it's safe to conclude she did this intentionally and just thought she wouldn't get caught. I could be wrong.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/claudine-gay-and-my-scholarship...
Many of the people she plagiarized thought it was "OK" that she did so (not sure why).
There are very specific guidelines laid down, it's not about whether the person you copy "cares" or not. All of my training around plagiarism made it quite clear: the research misconduct officer will look at all the examples and exclude the ones that appear to be legitimate mistakes and false positives.
I cannot see these examples as legitimate mistakes or false positives.
I am disappointed by all the people whose understanding of plagiarism is limited to some mechanical set of rules enforced by a University research officer. Academic rules on plagiarism exist for specific reasons, and anyone in this field should be able to articulate those reasons or work them out from first principles. Once you understand why the rules exist, you’ll also understand why we take certain types of misappropriation much more seriously than others, and why in some cases violations can be addressed with a correction.
(It goes without saying that we don’t tell students this. We tell students that if they forget to cite a six-word sentence fragment, they’ll be put in the electric chair and given 20,000 volts.)
Do you truly think she did not intend to plagiarize or thought that what she wrote was totally OK? I've informally polled my larger academic community and by and large, they think that once the full set of examples was shown, that it rose to the level of "a person analyzing this text with the 'first principles' and 'reasons for plagiarism rules' would conclude it was career-ending.
ALso I'd like to say that I really don't like you saying "understanding of plagiarism is limited to some mechanical set of rules enforced by a University research officer". I had several classes when I was a grad student and we discussed all this in detail, as well as going over these sorts of things with other students and my advisor. We really did put a lot of thought into this, it's clearly not just applying the rules of the integrity officer.
FWIW, her career has not been ended, only her presidency at Harvard. She's still a tenured faculty member there, and there's a decent chance she'll end up as an administrator at a different institution someday.
I understand the desire to break down the differences between different types of plagiarism, but when we're talking about the president of a top institution, is it really too much to ask that the individual not have engaged in any of them, dozens of times?
Amusingly, now it's come to light that Bill Ackman (who played a big role in getting Gay out) is married to an MIT researcher who also may have plagiarized text in her thesis. I am curious how that plays out.
First, about 3/4 of the academics that have weighed in on this looked at the text and considered it to be plagiarism (because direct textual copying is misattribution of substantive ideas).
Also, I think you're being a bit condescending- why should we belief that your experience with plagiarism and discipline at your instutition provides a generalized view of how it's dealt with.
Next, her career is NOT ended. She returns to her faculty position with a nearly million dollar salary. my only hope would be that she is made to teach a class "Plagiarism: how not to do it and how not to get caught if you do". Or maybe the board could sue her, and revoke her tenure and remove her job.
As scientist who took pains to be excruciatingly correct in my publication record, only to see less qualified individuals write crap that made people happy go on to great success, I can say that I think I understand the incentives that science relies on (and concluded that I would be far happier as a computer engineer than a biophysical scientist).
Swain researches the "representation of African Americans in Congress." Gay's work was "on black congressional representation, electoral districting and descriptive representation." Any work on those questions will require voicing politican opinions; the work is deeply political.
You don't need to be politically active to do political research and you don't need to be religious to do religious research. Though, the correlation in both cases is likely high.
My guess is that she had an outside offer (probably Harvard or Yale) and that pressured Stanford to put her up for tenure. I can't imagine an assistant prof with zero books published going to her department after 4 years and asking to be put up for tenure.