Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.
Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.
It’s sad to me that simply bringing enough negative attention, whether it’s warranted or not, is enough to get organizations to cave. They had a third party investigate her writing and they found it didn’t fall to the level of plagiarism. The people she supposedly plagiarized all agree that the technical nature of what she was summarizing wouldn’t make it plagiarism. The majority of students support her and the work she was doing.
I’m curious if any other Harvard President has ever had this level of scrutiny on their work come years after the fact. Feels like it’s people dishonestly taking objection just because they want to see her removed and now they’ve succeeded.
I’m pretty sure the flimsy plagiarism matter is just the lever used to oust her after her poor handling of the students calling for genocide. That looked real bad for the school in the congressional hearing. That or a way to oust her without appearing to pick a side in that whole mess.
She simply refused to make a blanket statement that would exclude all nuance.
She essentially refused to agree to zero tolerance policies. Which, you would think that people would be against.
But it was trap, and the media successfully branded it as condoning hate speech, when that’s not at all what her refusal to take the bait was about.
Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
It wasn’t the media at all though; it was fucking Elise Stefanik deliberately interrupting her prior response to hide the fact that her response was the same with regard to student speech vis black people or Israel.
Michelle Goldberg did a great write up of it in the NYT.
But let me correct myself. The news media in general did blow it by not catching on to and calling out what Stefanik did, but it wasn’t universal as obviously some of us, including Michelle Goldberg, understood Stefanik’s intellectually dishonest fake-out.
I think all presidents handled it very poorly. They didn’t really push back much against the claim the students were calling for genocide. I think they agreed that the language was hateful, which, as far as I can tell, it was not. Considering their jobs, they should’ve handled it better. They should have protected their students from slander.
It only looked bad because the question itself was dishonest and meant to make the school look bad. The students did not openly call for genocide. They called for another “intifada” and repeated the “from the river to the sea” mantra (or whatever you’d call it). Both of these things would be protected by a free speech policy that, as she stated, requires things to be targeted and actionable.
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The word “intifada” means “rebellion”. It’s more a statement about Palestine defending itself than it is a call to violence.
Eh, us professors care pretty deeply about the plagiarism she did. Intent or even knowledge of plagiarism isn’t necessary for disciplinary action in plagiarism cases at major research universities. Any one of these examples would be enough for my university’s academic integrity committee to rule that plagiarism occurred:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html
And in the case of a dissertation, plagiarism is an automatic expulsion and degree retraction from my university. At the PhD level, students certainly know that what Dr. Gay did is plagiarism (a good rule of thumb is that five sequential words, even with paraphrasing, without citing the source, is plagiarism), and that plagiarism is completely unacceptable.
I already know of a student who made the argument that their plagiarism wasn’t as bad as Dr. Gay’s, so because Dr. Gay wasn’t penalized, they shouldn’t be penalized. Had she not stepped down, that line of argument likely would have snowballed out of control. The professors I know think her comments to Congress were out of touch, but all of us had been livid that she and Harvard were saying that she didn’t plagiarize–any professor who looks at those examples will tell you that she did.
Her students were not calling for genocide and the questions were a trap along the lines of “when did you stop beating your wife?”.
I think it’s fair to say that she did not handle it as well as she could have done - directly calling out the nature of the question would have been better. But her refusal to throw her students under the bus is to be commended.
It’s absolutely not flimsy- she’s only written a dozen articles and there’s been concrete examples of plagiarism in at least of a quarter of them. Here is one of 40+ examples of the plagiarism found:
Swain in her article:
“the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
Gay in her article:
"the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities.”
Swain in her article:
“Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent”
Gay in her article:
"Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%”
She never cited Swain in any way until she was forced to do so this year by the review board. If I pulled this in college in more then 25% of my essays I’d most certainly be in front of my department head in a very serious conversation, looking at suspension at least.
Edit: Lol, late breaking news! As of today plagiarism allegations now cover 50%! Half! of her papers as even more examples have come out literally a few hours ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html
And yet Swain seems to care about other things than the claimed plagiarism, which she didn’t even mention in her call to have Gay fired. No, she cares a lot more that Gay wasn’t vociferously pro-Israel and didn’t expel the students for their pro-Palestine speech.
It doesn’t matter one single bit what the people who she plagiarized think about her, if they’re upset by it or not, or if they think she’s a good person or not. That’s not what plagiarism is.
She directly took language from the work of others without prior permission and claimed it to be her own. That’s all the context that is taken for academic dishonesty- if I was accused of plagiarizing my friend’s essay by my department and countered with “but my friend thinks I’m such a good person”, I’d be laughed out of the room.
The examples you gave are also incredibly minor. I’ve taught students and dealt with plagiarism for years. Single sentence or partial sentence pieces like that are a minimal issue and, if considered one by the author, easily fixed with some quotation marks.
It’s very obviously looking for a problem because it isn’t the claimed plagiarism anyone actually cares about, but exists as a convenient excuse attempt.
Single sentence and partial sentence is a minor issue and totally understandable if it happens a handful of times (everyone forgets citations one point or another). But if it happens nearly 50 times in less then a dozen articles it’s a very consistent pattern of academic dishonesty.
So, single or partial sentence issues less than 5 times in each article. Articles that are many, many pages long, as such published articles are wont to do, yes? Again, this just sounds like an “you should extend a reference to cover this as well” sort of suggestion and not a major issue.
Neither of those cherry picked quotes are egregious at all. They’re one sentence long.
They’re not cherry picked, I’m just not going to list all 47 (as of today, more keep being discovered) instances of plagiarism here. The ones I gave aren’t even the close to the most egregious!
Would you prefer these:
Bradley and Voss:
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).
Gay:
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.
Gilliam:
Historically, politics has been a vehicle for upward mobility among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Minority political incorporation and the redirection of public resources that is hypothesized to come with it, should alter how people evaluate and relate to their local governments.
Gay:
Historically, politics has been an important vehicle in the mobility (and “mainstreaming”) of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As a consequence, minority office-holding should alter how people evaluate and relate to government
The general rule of thumb is that five words, even with paraphrasing, of unquoted or uncited text is plagiarism:
I doubt any past Harvard prez has faced this much scrutiny, and I’m sure you would find plagiarism or worse among them if you did scrutinize them so extremely. That’s not really an excuse though, and doesn’t change the fact that the plagiarism issue is a real problem that wasn’t going away so resigning was the only way to move past it.
That’s what I’m saying, though… I don’t think anyone actually thought it was a problem until they decided they wanted her out. The supposed plagiarism was reviewed twice by independent bodies and they both said they couldn’t find an “intent to deceive or mislead”. They said that the quotations were negligent but wouldn’t be considered plagiarism in those instances and would typically be allowed to be submitted for revision.
If she was trying to pass off someone else’s words or thoughts as her own, that would be one thing. Missing a citation for a technical description doesn’t seem to fall under that umbrella.
Yes, and I’m saying this isn’t a situation where nuanced discussions about plagiarism matter in the end. Whether she was just sloppy or did it with intent, there’s an issue that people can point to, and given the current context those people aren’t going to stop. I think she is right that to serve the institution she had to resign, I’m not saying it’s ideal or just, but the situation is what it is and I believe she did the honorable thing.
I agree. They wouldn’t stop. It’s just a shame that that’s enough to derail everything. Why would anyone want that job when the school will just bow to any kind of political pressure as opposed to actual, objective issues with the way she’s performing the job.
We all know that plagiarism was not the real issue here. It was a convenient excuse to call for her resignation, but it was the other thing listed above that was the real push by certain well known non-profit groups to get her fired.
For sure. I’m not saying it is the real issue, just that it is a real issue.
The people she supposedly plagiarized all agree that the technical nature of what she was summarizing wouldn’t make it plagiarism.
I don’t think that’s correct. I haven’t looked at the full list of people who were supposedly plagiarized, but at least one of them, Dr. Carol Swain, was calling for Dr. Claudine Gay to be fired.
This Carol Swain? Yeah, no, it has nothing to do with plagiarism, it has to do with Swain being pro-ethnic cleansing and is mad that Claudine Gay didn’t expel all Palestinian students or some other extreme action to show loyalty to Israel.
Holy shit that lady is insane.
She even somehow managed to blame Obama for starting all of this?!? wtf?
Don’t you know that Obama is personally responsible for 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina?
Fact: he did nothing to stop either.
I stubbed my toe the other day and muttered “thanks Obama”.
I know your argument is of semantics but I’d say it’s not relevant either way. The determination should be done by objective third parties.
So you’re anti-semantic?
And it was, supposedly.
The same third party board that said she didn’t commit plagiarism while also forcing her to add dozens of missing citations to her work where she directly copied sentences from other articles… Which makes absolutely no sense.
It makes perfect sense. Negligence is not the same as attempting to pass off someone else’s ideas as your own. The third party boards that reviewed her work found that she didn’t properly cite those definitions from the sources, not that she was trying to pass off what those definitions were as definitions that she, herself, came up with.
It very clearly wasn’t negligence- she cited plenty of other sources in her work that she didn’t copy word for word. She only left out the ones that she quite directly copied language from and did so on multiple occasions.
The review board let her off easy, giving her the benefit of doubt towards her intentions because she was the esteemed president of the university.
That’s just simply not true. All of the quotes are word for word, whether they’re cited or not. That’s what makes them quotes. The quotes that weren’t cited were written in summaries of technical descriptions for ideas where even the people she quoted agreed that she didn’t plagiarize. Saying the review board let her off is while ignoring the actual authors (with one notable, political exception) means you think there’s some sort of conspiracy here and that’s just not something anyone should take seriously.
While that is true, I don’t think she actually addressed the substance of the plagiarism claims. She just issued a blanket statement calling for her to be fired.
It’s massive plagiarism actually. To the point she even copied the acknowledgement sections…wtf.
I’d not been following this story closely because it all seemed so utterly inconsequential. I couldn’t understand why anyone was this angry that she followed a lawyers advice at a formal hearing.
Now I see that she’s black in an important locus of elite power and it suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Now I see that she’s black in an important locus of elite power and it suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy about race. The white Penn administrator that screwed up their testimony in the exact same way in the exact same hearing was forced out in the exact same way.
No, but when you’re a PoC, it’s much more likely that people latch onto your story and watch you closely for mistakes instead of just letting things slide.
But that’s very clearly not what happened here and it’s detrimental to the discussion at hand to falsely label it as such. She in fact was able to let it slide for multiple months longer than her white counterpart and Penn.
I don’t actually know anything about what happened in this specific case, I made a general statement.
You say, after there was a prime example of it not being the case? What was let slide with the other, white president? Nothing, she was immediately ousted.
More or less. And she took a neutral stance on the issue of students exhibiting their free speech, rather than expelling them all for not supporting Israel.
Which then led to all the certain well-known non-profits all about promoting Israel to start a furor calling for her resignation.
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I mean… even the Harvard Crimson has been posting op-eds from folks on the Academic Integrity Committee and student government calling for her resignation.
She fucked around (50+ instances of plagiarism) and found out (forced to resign).
Here is the text of her resignation letter:
Good evening. This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this University. Each time I have done so to discuss with you some matter that I believe affected the student interest.
I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the University must always come before any personal considerations.
From the discussions I have had with alumni and other administrators, I have concluded that because of the plagiarism matter I might not have the support of the student body that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the University would require.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my job is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of Harvard first.
Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
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Yeah, but her resignation had nothing to do with the shitshow of a hearing.
Won’t stop Stefanik from bragging, though.
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