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.
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).
---
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).
Subject does not like being talked about or dissected too much.
I highly doubt @dang flagged this himself, other people did. It seems like a controll valve that can be used from time to time. Anyone can gang up with a bunch of others to mass flag a story.
I wrote a paper this year (after about a 15 year hiatus) and apparently submitted papers, this was to an elsevier journal, now automatically go though a plagiarism detector of some kind that gives a score that can't exceed some value. We actually failed the first time because we'd published the paper on Arxiv first, which seems like a big flaw in the system. I don't have a lot of faith in, nor do I support automated detection like that, but it does happen systematically now.
Not without false positives, which are unacceptable (unless you're willing to put the work saved from plagiarism checking into absolving the innocent).
I was forced to submit essays to a plagarism checker in high school (well over a decade ago). The company running this checker had, in their infinite wisdom, included a check for writing complexity under the assumption that a 10th grader who writes like an adult is probably cheating. This was embarrassing for everyone.
I had a high school English teacher who became suspicious of a piece of writing I did for this reason—no automated checking was necessary! he called me in to talk with him about the work, probed my knowledge a bit, satisfied himself that it wasn't plagiarism, and gave me a compliment for writing at a high level.
False positives are not necessarily deal-breakers, as long as the teacher treats the situation carefully before taking any disciplinary action.
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.
>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 [...]
If the recent youtube plagiarism drama[1] is anything to go by, you can do blatant plagiarism for years, get called out by randoms, and still get away with it.
> The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people
This seems to be standard in academia. The president of Stanford was found to be a fraud through work he'd done years or decades earlier, it only came to light after an undergraduate went on the attack. How did nobody notice beforehand? Turned out that the had noticed and it'd all been swept under the table.
>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long.
Multiple German politicians have been forced to resign decades after their dissertations, with similar accusations. It seems like it is a case of rising to a point of public renown that then leads to greater public scrutiny. In some cases, I wonder if it a fake-it-until-you-make-it situation that upon making it, causes the house of cards to collapse.
Plagiarism and research fraud are rife throughout academia. If we subjected everyone to the same level of scrutiny we would find a lot of people who have done far worse than Dr. Gay. I am hopeful that new AI tools will automate this type of investigation and find more instances of academic dishonesty.
I haven't used Turnitin for several years. From what I recall it couldn't detect cases where the author paraphrased another work without adding any original thoughts.
The problem really isn’t that students at her institution support genocide. The problem is that when she asked if chanting in support of the murder of Jews was against school policy, she equivocated. She would not have equivocated if the students had been chanting that Blacks should be killed, instead of Jews.
Exactly. What they said was so offensive, not because she spoke in favor of free speech. It was because after being outspoken and sanctioning students for years in regards to hate speech towards other groups, when it comes to murdering Jews, they are suddenly eliciting the importance of freedom of speech.
When you promote hate speech as free speech against one group, while punishing hate speech against all the others, it leaves many outside observers with the opinion that you tacitly approve of hate speech against that group and I believe creates a hostile environment in the entity you lead towards members of that group.
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
Given that the Second Intifada saw over 800 Israeli civilians murdered in terrorist attacks, it is not unreasonable to interpret "globalize the intifada" as call for murdering Israelis and/or Jews outside of Israel. And if the President of Harvard admits it happened, we don't really need to know the exact dates in order to know that it did happen.
Also, if you don't sit on someone's neck, you don't have to worry about being shaken off. If you don't benefit from or justify oppression, you have nothing to fear from the uprising against it.
It's when you want to eat the cake and still have it when things get "complex", like posting walls of text that amount to "no, I don't" in context.
> like posting walls of text that amount to "no, I don't" in context.
Claudine Gay never said "no" in that part of her testimony. She described "there is only one solution intifada revolution" and "globalize the intifada" as "thoughtless, reckless and hateful language" and "hateful speech" which is "personally abhorrent to me", but didn't give a clearcut answer to the question of whether it is "indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews".
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
If she thinks it’s so hateful, why are you trying to excuse it?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally
abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary
to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values
also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of
conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views
that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech
crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying,
harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that
speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition
of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide
berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
ELISE STEFANIK: You and I both know that’s not the case. You were aware
that Harvard ranked dead last when it came to free speech. Are you not
aware of that report?
CLAUDINE GAY: As I observed earlier, I reject that characterization.
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s — the data shows it’s true. And isn’t it true that
Harvard previously rescinded multiple offers of admissions for
applicants and accepted freshmen for sharing offensive memes, racist
statements, sometimes as young as 16 years old? Did Harvard not rescind
those offers of admission?
CLAUDINE GAY: That long predates my time as president, so I can’t —
ELISE STEFANIK: But you understand that Harvard made that decision to
rescind those offers of admission.
CLAUDINE GAY: I have no reason to contradict the facts as you present
them.
ELISE STEFANIK: Correct, because it’s a fact. You’re also aware that a
Winthrop House faculty dean was let go over he — over who he chose to
legally represent, correct? That was while you were dean.
CLAUDINE GAY: That is an incorrect characterization of what transpired.
ELISE STEFANIK: What’s the characterization?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’m not going to get into details about a personnel
matter.
ELISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this, will admissions offers be
rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or
applicants who say from the river to the sea or intifada advocating for
the murder of Jews?
CLAUDINE GAY: As I’ve said that type of hateful reckless offensive
speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: [inaudible] today that no action will be taken — what
action will be taken?
CLAUDINE GAY: When speech crosses into conduct that violates our
policies, including policies against bullying, harassment or
intimidation, we take action. And we have robust disciplinary processes
that allow us to hold individuals accountable.
ELISE STEFANIK: What action has been taken against students who are
harassing and calling for the genocide of Jews on Harvard’s campus?
CLAUDINE GAY: I can assure you we have robust —
ELISE STEFANIK: What actions have been taken? I’m not asking —
CLAUDINE GAY: What actions underway?
ELISE STEFANIK: I’m asking what actions have been taken against those students.
CLAUDINE GAY: Given students’ rights to privacy and our obligations
under FERPA, I will not say more about any specific cases other than to
reiterate that processes are ongoing.
[…]
And _that_ is why she should not lead a university, Harvard or otherwise. All she had to do was say, without commenting on any specific cases, that chanting “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” or “globalize the intifada.” would be regarded as “bullying, harassment or
intimidation” and students found to have participated in those acts would be punished according to the rules they were required to agree to when they decided to attend Harvard. To retreat to bureaucratic platitudes about FERPA instead shows that the Harvard administration is itself is antisemitic (aka racist). They simply don’t think that what these students did was wrong. They also don’t believe that the rules should be applied to everyone equally.
> They also don’t believe that the rules should be applied to everyone equally.
Exactly. It's unbelievable to me that this is apparently hard for these university presidents to understand. Set the standard and keep it - whether it's punish all the 'abhorrent' things students say, or none of them.
As a Jew, I can't imagine continuing to donate to an institution that was so clearly run by people tolerant of anti-semitism. Hopefully Harvard's endowment sees significant punishment, since the university itself appears to agree with Gay's stance.
Some people consider "from the river to the sea" to be a call to genocide of Jews. Because, of course, they ignore the simple fact that majority of Jews don't even live in Israel [1]. And to call for a Palestinian state from the river to the sea doesn't say that Jews people cannot live inside it. And ironically the likud party which dominated the Israeli government the last couple of decades have almost the same sentence in its first point on its charter [2] and no one calls this a call to kill all Palestinians (Although some say it in public [3][4]).
>Some people consider "from the river to the sea" to be a call to genocide of Jews. Because, of course, they ignore the simple fact that majority of Jews don't even live in Israel [1].
so it's only genocide when you're trying to wipe them out entirely? if you only wipe out a quarter, for instance, that's not genocide?
I didn't say that. This is just you trying to bend my words. I did say that from river to the sea does not mean that Jews living in Palestine will be wiped out. If you think that this the meaning that's fine. I just hope that you consider it the same when the other side use almost exactly the same slogan (interesting you ignored that)
And why do you suppose she did that? Is it perhaps because of the constant attempts to force people to treat "jews the people belonging to a certain race/religion" and "the state of israel" as exactly the same thing? The sheer amount of people who accept these, bad faith, to put it mildly, arguments, is, well, not surprising, but is pretty sad.
So because those Zionist arguments exist, calling for the murder of Jewish people (not metaphorically, the question was a hypothetical) is something where "nuance" matters now?
You acknowledge the arguments as bad faith, then turn around and use them to relativize hate speech. Anyone calling for the murder of Jewish people (per the metaphorical) would never accept those arguments in the first place
I was going to write a long winded reply about the differences between "hate speech" directed at "israelis" vs "jews" and how easy it is to conflate the two, especially with the constant israeli attempts to force people to treat the two as the same thing, but instead let me ask you a question:
Do you honestly think that the president of harvard wishes for, hopes for, or even wants, the mass murder of jewish people all over the world?
And following up on that, do you honestly believe that the students at harvard want all jewish people all over the world to be murdered?
Isn't it more likely that the students in question want the israelis to stop committing acts of violence against palestinians and perhaps don't view the palestinian violence as any worse than what the israelis are doing?
One thing I've noticed over the years is that it seems really easy for people who benefit from the current status quo to condemn violence meant to change the status quo. It's pretty easy to come up with restrictions for people's protests when you're not the one living in an oppressive society.
> And following up on that, do you honestly believe that the students at harvard want all jewish people all over the world to be murdered?
"We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence."
For the people who view Oct 7 as justified, yes
> Isn't it more likely that the students in question want the israelis to stop committing acts of violence against palestinians
They can want both at the same time. October 7th was an act of terror against Jewish civilians. The people who blame the Israeli government 100% (including aforementioned student organizations) don't find fault with the people committing those murders. That implies that they see the murder of Jewish people as justified punishment for the actions of the Israeli government. The choice of words is deliberate
Criticizing the Israeli government and publicly stating that an act of terror is justified are two very different things, of which Harvard students know the difference
Charitably, I think the point was that academics overlook it, like the dirty inside secret that everyone knows to not talk about.
Once she drew the ire of people outside the normal academic circles, things that should have been controversial (like blatant plagiarism) were brought forward.
Further, these people weren't looking specifically in the interest of academic integrity, they were looking for any reason at all to get her fired for not unequivocally saying that calling for genocide is outside the student code of conduct.
As a result, the allegations have, thus far, been treated as unworthy of much attention- it wasn't that they are right, but the accusers have the wrong motivation.
I don't know how much of this phenomenon is a modern issue, but it does seem to be very prevalent in today's society.
The anti-zionist attacks, the anti-jewish genocide talk, and the anti-palestinian rubbling of Gaza are all deeply troubling. Consequently, I do not fall into either of the two main camps.
However, she is the president of a premier university and must be held to account for her serial failures to uphold academic ethics.
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.
By comparison, if you steal as an infant, you get off easy. If you steal as an adult, you don't. Screwing up parallel parking is a mistake, plagiarism is not.
Based on the definition of plagiarism in the article, I'm not 100% convinced that only intentional plagiarism counts as plagiarism - it seems like omitting proper markings around something intended to be a quote, or dropping a \cite line under a section rephrasing an idea mentioned in another paper could be enough to be considered a mild form of plagiarism, to be punished with a "light" punishment that "only" derails your academic career for half a year.
Given the concept of "self-plagiarism" and given the treatment I've seen honest students (at a different university) receive for alleged plagiarism (turns out there are only so many unique ways to implement a fizzbuzz-level piece of homework), I'm not willing to blindly assume common sense here.
This isn’t stealing. Using a meaningless sentence isn’t a very big deal. In academia we care about plagiarism because we care very deeply about the misattribution of academic credit. In practice this does not mean borrowing a sentence in an acknowledgements section, which is sad and embarrassing. It means stealing full ideas and written sections to take credit for them. We treat this much more harshly at the early student level to dissuade serious violations later in life. We do this for the same reason we demand exceptional performance on the parking section of the driving test, even though many licensed adult drivers are terrible at parking and society survives just fine.
In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.
Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.
And if you'd read the article you'd know it starts by saying, "What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive."
Don't be silly. If I write a sentence in a paper that happens to be identical to a sentence someone else wrote, I've now committed plagiarism even if I had no way of knowing that sentence even existed!
The analogy is inapt. It's not illegal to fail at parallel parking. Even if it was, it's not the type of offense that would get you arrested. You say the standards are different, and they are, but then you conflate the two contexts by treating both consequences as punishments. Failing a test is not a punishment. Failing at parallel parking is not legally or morally blameworthy.
It’s not illegal to misattribute small portions of a sentence either. There is literally no law against it. We harshly dissuade it at the grade school, high school, and undergraduate levels (meaning, we will give you a bad grade) because we are trying to teach young students not to misuse even a fragment of text with extremely harsh punishments outside of the legal system. We don’t apply the same level of punishment in real life and certainly not through the legal system because it’s not that serious to borrow a few words in the acknowledgement of a thesis. It’s just embarrassing and bad, as long as the concepts are original.
ETA: I say this as someone who has had both scientific contributions and entire introductory sections copied verbatim into other paper. That’s plagiarism. A meaningless sentence copied from my work has as much relationship to serious plagiarism as a fart in a car has to a Sarin gas attack.
You're using a different definition of plagiarism than Harvard uses. I also think Harvard's definition is overly broad, but that's not the point. The point is that a student would be punished for engaging in the same conduct that's at issue here. The double standard is the problem. The president of Harvard has broken the same rules she has enforced against the University's students. For them, the consequences are serious.
The reason is that those are two different organizations with different rules.
Also, this is not true? If you screw up parallel parking you're docked points. Lots of people pass with screwing it up, it's the most commonly missed part of the test
