The latest from the Ivy League:
Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision... 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.
I have to admit that despite my misgivings about plagiarism scandals in general, Gay does seem to have done a lot of it. Yesterday's latest batch of discoveries still don't amount to more than sentences here and there, but it's begun to pile up into a lot of sentences.
I will also admit that it distresses me for the odious Rep. Elise Stefanik to win another scalp. She doesn't deserve any rewards for her grotesque behavior when she badgered Gay and two other university presidents about genocide on December 5.
I also hate to see Bill Ackman's resentment-fueled jihad against Gay bear fruit.
And of course there's right-wing warrior Christopher Rufo, who openly engineered the plagiarism charges for political purposes. He wins too, and that kills me.
In other words, every single sentiment I have, tribal and otherwise, makes me want Gay to keep her job. But the plagiarism has turned into bad stuff, and the pressure on other fronts has perhaps become unbearable. I can't deny that this might be for the best.
If it's any consolation I didn't donate to PENN's endowment for the first time in 30+ years. I really don't know much about Liz McGill but I certainly didn't like how the Jewish donors to PENN punished her for her clumsy handling of a politically loaded question. BTW I am very much pro Israel and anti Hamas but I wasn't going to reward the Republicans for their dirty work
I'm confused. Isn't erosion of institutions that are perceived to be liberal their goal? Wouldn't fewer donations to those institutions align with their goals?
Admittedly, I can see how continuing to donate would also align with that.
It's just kind of a dumb situation all around.
The folks refusing to donate to PENN are wealthy Jews mostly. My donation is .000001% of yearly contributions so I doubt my "protest" will have any effect and I assume they'll get their donations eventually from the folks that wanted the President fired
Anti-Semitic much?
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Your earlier post suggested a sentence here or there shouldn't amount to plagiarism. Why do more of them add up to plagiarism? What's the limit on innocuous/accidental copying?
paging Sorites Paradox…
I think whatever the threshold is, at some point, trivial concerns about malicious intent are readily replaced by concerns about plain old sloppiness.
Stefanik and the other cretins won this battle. Time to move on and stay focused on the bigger picture.
Why do more of them add up to plagiarism? What's the limit on innocuous/accidental copying?
Not sure, but obviously a limit exists in theory, for the simple mathematical probability that, any person producing multiple works is likely by sheer random chance alone to have used words or phrases used by others OR is likely (the brain of homo sapiens being what it is) to have inadvertently employed language they read/absorbed in the past.
This has become less of an issue with the advent of text mining software, but much of Gay's work (including her dissertation) was done before this technology was available.
The inexplicable part is why Harvard's search committee didn't employ the software to examine the body of her work before giving her the job. But oversights do happen. As does laziness.
If it's any consolation to the Harvard community, the Claudine Gay imbroglio has generated about ninety zillion times more publicity than the firing of Stanford's president last summer. So there's that. /s
Thanks for the probabilistic analysis — it’s quite relevant given the software tools. My dissertation concerns attention in vision, which has been investigated for a century and a half. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a sentence or two within it approximates something written before. Certainly a judgment of plagiarism should require that a claim of originality is untrue. The claim of originality might be implicit, but it should be clear. A mere coincidence of phrasing in, for example, reviewing previous work, doesn’t seem problematic to me.
Where are the numbers?
Did Gay mildly plagiarize "too many times" or did some enterprising troll merely assemble enough in one spot to make people feel icky?
That kind of attack is effective and getting easier, but the always enumerate Mr. Drum ought not to be susceptible.
Yeah, I mean a little thing like fabricated data in several papers that form the foundation of a decade's worth of development of drugs to fight Alzheimer's Disease -- drugs that don't really work because they're attacking something that probably doesn't cause AIDS at all -- is certainly not as newsworthy. /s
Well, for one thing, they probably relied on the fact that Stanford gave her tenure, and trusted that Stanford's poli sci department checkout our her academic bona fides before doing so. They probably also trusted that her dissertation advisor and readers had read her dissertation carefully, especially before recommending it for a prize.
It turns out that Gay's dissertation committee, her tenure and promotion committee at Stanford, and the team that promoted her at Harvard all fell down on the job.
It occurs to me that an estimate of ‘statistical plagiarism’ can be obtained by running detection algorithms against a corpus of material published after the writings under test — the anachronistic match rate can be scaled to the relative sizes of future to past corpi (?!).
Maybe the way to look at this is just let them have their chew toy. If they want to devote their time, money, and attention to the question of who should be the president of Harvard, I don't see why the rest of us should care.
I kind of feel about this the same way I felt when Jocelyn Elders had to resign from being Surgeon General for advocating that kids should be taught how to masturbate. No, she really wasn't advocating that, but her communication skills were so poor that her words could be twisted that way, and communication skills were a big part of the job requirements. Elders deserved to go for failing that assignment. Probably she was fine, maybe even great, in behind the scenes kinds of ways, but she never should have been in the chief public facing position. The Republicans were atrocious, but she was an easy target.
I haven't seen any strong evidence that Gay substantively stole ideas, but her sloppiness in descriptive material isn't something you'd tolerate in a grad student, let alone a University President. And she did less than great in front of Stefanik, in a case where she should have known she was going into the Lion's Den. Yeah, the Republicans are being odious again, but Gay doesn't seem suited for the public facing part of the job.
Well the same thing happened to Bork when he was prevented from becoming a Supreme Court justice. Did you shed any tears then for twisting of his words?
The way Bork was treated was ground-zero for this behavior in our time.
It won't end until both sides walk away from this behavior. But they won't, will they...
This is nothing like the criticism of Bob Bork, which was not (of course) the first of these sorts of witch hunts. And, yes, even witch-hunts sometimes turn up real problems.
Apropos of little else, but the comment section at The Crimson (who'd have thunk they'd use Disqus) is, well, any number of descriptions come to mind... but it strikes me as many of the commenters would fall into the category of those who think that non-abraising rope was sufficient progress.
I mean, you're no doubt aware of this, but the Crimson's comment software does not require one to be a subscriber (at least last time I checked it out). So Rufo's disciples have probably descended en masse.
First they came for the university presidents
And I did not speak out
Bacause maybe they deserved it a little bit even if i know better.....
When they come for Kevin for misapplying inflation adjustments
Will there be anyone left to speak out for him.....
Sometimes you need to walk away.
In retrospect despite Ken Starr's odious antics, despite all the pious posturing from Republicans, shouldn't we have just cut the cord on Clinton? Gore was fine.
I remember the chorus of 'if we let them get away with this...'. Instead we set a precedent that sleazy behavior is OK. And Trump came along. Who got away with what?
"shouldn't we have just cut the cord on Clinton?"
I'm not sure what you mean--should the Dems in the Senate voted to convict? Or should the party have swapped him out in favor of Gore in '96?
I'm not sure how the latter would not have resulted in a Dole victory--it's hard to run on a platform of "Sure, the Dem president is unfit/corrupt, but how about his Veep?"
Yes, give him a chance to resign, and vote to convict if he refuses. Same as Nixon.
The scandal arose in his second term. I felt at the time that some time as president would help Gore's chances in the next election (2000).
...the Clinton impeachment theater was not precedent-setting.
Really? Are you joking?
Trump wasn’t impeached for his ‘sleazy behavior’, abundant as that was, but for violations of his oath of office,
Thanks for this post. It sums up how I feel. I do think that the plagiarism is quite serious and I have been very bothered by the discussions. The witch hunters set out to prove that she is a DEI case. Left-ish Academia (and I am a member!) have dismissed this as a racist witch hunt (which it is!) and bla bla bla if a white man.... (which is true!), but no one on either side has engaged with the substance of the plagiarism allegations in any manner that is helpful for understanding.
I teach this stuff, and so far what I have seen of her (I must say, rather thin) scholarly record contains many many many examples of stuff we would discuss as "to be avoided", probably due to less than best practices. We are hearing a lot of "everyone does this" which I refuse to believe is true. But I also don't believe that most plagiarism is committed by badly motivated people who want to deceive. It's mostly just sloppy scholarship, which people like me spend lots of time and effort teaching people to avoid.
Every single Harvard president save one (Faust) had a degree from Harvard, and even Faust was a Dean at Harvard before she became president. These arrogant a-holes brought this on themselves.
I will say without hesitation that I have zero problem with setting out to hire a President who checks fashionable demographic boxes, because there are PLENTY of such folk who are supremely qualified. But if you have to add the additional box of "and also is a Harvard affiliate", well then you have just made it harder.
This was a bad pick.
And it is absolutely killing me that the worst effin' people in the world get to claim moral victory on this, and they are not about to stop.
Gee, if ONLY they had been warned about the consequences of making significant academic choices based primarily on DEI.
If only people like, I don't know, John McWhorter, or Thomas Sowell, or Clarence Thomas, had spoken up...
You don't get to complain when something plays out EXACTLY as it was predicted to play out by the people who warned you that you were doing something stupid.
What's next? Complaining about Hamas stoning gays in the Gaza strip because who could possibly have imagined that they might behave that way?
Well, except that this wasn't "based primarily on DEI." She first gained prominence as an administrator by ousting Ronald Sullivan, Harvard's first black dean, who was part of Harvey Weinstein's defense.
But, yeah, the unimpeachable integrity of people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas should definitely be our model.
Why the tone? I didn't hire her.
And I would submit that Harvard's incestuous practice of ONLY hiring their own severely limits the pool, and also ensures they will get someone who lived in a goddam bubble.
As the father of a current Harvard undergrad (and no, neither my wife or I have any historic affiliation with the university) I will share my daughters perspective:
'an undergrad would, likely, be put on probation for a clear instance of plagiarism. Multiple example, almost certainly, would result in removal from the school. The rules are more harsh for grad students and plagiarism. Her credibility to lead Harvard is damaged beyond repair.'
Thank you. Your daughter is correct. I have presided over such cases, and yes.
I work with PhD students. That means when they get to me they have all ben academically successful. One thing I try to convey in my teaching is that the standard for originality in scholarly writing goes WAY beyond what they learned as undergrads, so we need to up our game. I also give them strategies to avoid unintentional plagiarism. In addition, I stress how a lot of plagiarism goes undetected, and when detected it is often by chance (the person reading your paper is familiar with the text that you plagiarized, for example), but still don't do it. Finally, we talk about several fameous examples where the witch hunt was motivated by personal or political grievance but, nonetheless revealed plagiarism.
Looks like I will have another case for my case studies next year.
I was Team Kevin on this (in terms of Gay resigning) until I read this editorial:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/
It’s hard to argue that the president of Harvard should be held to a lower standard than undergraduates at the same institution. You can argue over whether how they handle undergraduate plagiarism should be what it is, but given what it is, all members of the institution should be comparably treated.
I know it is too much, but how about holding the president with a huge salary to a higher standard?
Sorry I asked.
The fact that Gay's opponents pinged so easily from one justification to the next shows that their opposition was never because of antisemitism, plagiarism, or DEI, although that last one gets closer to the truth. This was always about lynching a black woman in a position of authority.
It was The Man who made her plagiarize all those times?
Now ex-Presdient Gay will be a professor at Harvard known to have repeatedly plagiarized. This is likely the first time this has happened at a top 1,000 university.
+1
Claudine Gay was not "lynched." She was (assuming the best) a sloppy scholar. People making excuses for her plagiarism, as Kevin did a few days ago, are letting their sympathy for a probably capable person of color overwhelm better judgment. Elise S. can be a huge a whole and the rules of academic honesty will still apply to the case. Special pleading that "it wasn't really plagiarism or substandard scholarly writing" should be seen as racially motivated. See John McWhorter's take on this in the Times a few days ago.
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
(found at random on the GoodReads website)
What part of what you wrote addresses his comment in any way? I'm surprised you were allowed to graduate; and in any event, no one forced you to write an irrelevant, off-topic, and sloppy post.
Simple questions:
Are black women incapable of doing anything wrong ever?
Are you going to claim that ANY criticism of a black woman, no matter what the circumstances or the evidence, is a "lynching"?
Does that "lynching" only extend to black women who happen to support your political positions? Or does it extend to, I don't know, criticism of, say Candace Owens or Nikki Haley?
Who are you talking to?
Dis she or did she not plagiarize? What I saw looked bad but people wrote that standards are different and the situation matters depending on the discipline. Maybe we can get some clarification on what is plagiarism. One thing for sure, she should not be held to a lower standard than the students.
I hope, when the dust settles, if it ever settles, we can have a clarifying discussion about this. I do not agree that the standards are different depending on the discipline, though the conventions are. And the context does matter. In my view, some of the "examples" of plagiarism are not-specifically when she cites a specific analysis at the top of the paragraph and then summarizes it borrowing too many phrases without quotations-are minor infractions. I get really frustrated with students do this because it suggests that they have not read widely to create a more integrated argument, but it's not a breach of scholarly integrity, since she is presenting a summarized argument of others with attribution. It is much more problematic when she does not cite appropriately but rather does some minor paraphrasing of an otherwise structurally identical paragraph. That is a major infraction. Whether intentional or not (and I would guess, not), she is passing off well formed ideas and arguments of others as her own.
That is a major infraction. Whether intentional or not (and I would guess, not)...
How is not intentional (honest question from a non-academic)? Doesn't the rephrasing require conscious effort? If one sees an idea one wants to use, and then makes subtle changes to the wording, it clearly implies a brain's attempt to render the original less identifiable. Right?
"How is not intentional (honest question from a non-academic)?"
If you hear/read a convincing argument, it makes sense that you will use it in the future when it is releveant, because that is what you think by now. Are you going to call all of these occurrences "intentional rephrasing"?
I may have heard/read a version of the paragraph above 30 years ago. Is it plagiarism? Intentional rephrasing?
(I know nothing abouit what Gay did and have no poisition on that.)
I should probably clarify that "unintentional" can describe a true accident, or neglegence. Like if you are driving, sober, paying complete attention, and an oncoming car drifts into your lane, and you react by swerving and kill a biker, that is a true accident. If you are driving, and your phone rings, and you take a quick look and see unobstructed road, but as you look at your phone a person running after their dog runs into the road and by the time you look up you have hit them, that is negligence on your part. But in neither case did you intend to kill someone with your car.
I've looked at a lot of the examples, and those that I am calling "major infractions" and I would characterize them as negligent, unless clear and malignant intent to deceive can be demonstrated.
I blame TurnItIn a little bit. Many high school and college kids are more or less taught to paraphrase to the point of dropping below the TurnItIn threshold. They are not taught the difference between an idea nad a fact, an argument and a summary, data and analysis. I spend a fair amount of time on this with my first year PhD students. Some of them get it right away (or already knew it), but for about half of them, it takes a while to click.
I'm assuming negligence on Gay's part. I have no reason to assume intent to deceive. But it demonstrates a lack of care and a lack of understanding.
If software is going to be used against students, you can’t blame them for using software in self-defense.
In general we hold on to people who have screwed up because the people bringing them down are so vile.
It is bad practice. Yes, Stefanik is horrible and she set Gay up. But the setup was so obvious! Listen to it!
A university president that witless is not earning their very high pay.
I don’t believe it’s as clear-cut as you think. The attacks on the university presidents deliberately blurred any distinctions among their personal views, any official positions their institutions might have made, and their institutions’ codes of student conduct as applied to speech. They had a common problem in that codes of conduct are enforced through quasi-judicial processes — investigation, deliberation, etc. — and are not simple gates. I’m not sure there was any answer they could have given that questioners acting in bad faith could not have pounced on.
Full props to Kevin for this: "In other words, every single sentiment I have, tribal and otherwise, makes me want Gay to keep her job. But the plagiarism has turned into bad stuff, and the pressure on other fronts has perhaps become unbearable. I can't deny that this might be for the best."
Overcoming tribalism is difficult for all of us, and it should be celebrated for the serious act of intellectual honesty that I believe it to be. But, in this case, I also find it genuinely hard to see how tribalistic impulses, no matter how well-intentioned, ever came up in the first place.
Gay has been bad news for a while. Here is Alex Tabarrok @ Marginal Revolution discussing one of the many ways that Gay has been ruining Harvard (and by extension tarnishing all of American Higher Ed) for years:
"Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that 'serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.' Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias and hysteria. Thus, we see in the Sullivan episode disregard for free speech, unprincipled governance in which different rules are applied to different actors in similar situations, and a bending to the will of the mob, all issues which have repeated themselves under the Gay regime."
Then there is the clear-headed analysis of Gay's hypocrisy, rule-breaking, and arrogance from an undergrad student @ Harvard:
"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 ... What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive ... 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."
And an overall negative estimation of Gay from one group of Harvard Crimson editors:
"Harvard’s presidency is no mere empty honor; it is a deeply challenging managerial job with deeply challenging duties, not least of which is navigating national outcry. In each of these respects, Gay has failed. The Harvard Corporation must find a leader who can do better."
All of the points above strike me as entirely legitimate, and none of them should have ever been approached or understood through a partisan, tribal, or in any way political lens. Either we believe in the application of fair and equal rules for all, or we don't. Either we believe that American institutions of Higher Ed can and should uphold world-class academic standards, or we don't. Either we believe that competence and merit matter, or we don't (and in this case a very loud contingent of the radical left has explicitly and repeatedly asserted that they don't).
These are the issues at question in this Gay situation. Not what Stefanik did at a congressional hearing. Not what Rufo posted on Twitter. Not what Ackman said about Gay.
Who cares if sticking up for principles we believe in sometimes aligns us with people we don't like? Are we going to then abandon our own principles as a result? If so, then we seriously need to ask ourselves if we are in fact doing more harm than good.
But, in this case, I also find it genuinely hard to see how tribalistic impulses, no matter how well-intentioned, ever came up in the first place.
Tell us you're not remotely familiar with the name "Chris Rufo" without telling us.
@Jasper_in_Boston:
My post above already responds to your point:
"These are the issues at question in this Gay situation. Not what Stefanik did at a congressional hearing. Not what Rufo posted on Twitter. Not what Ackman said about Gay.
"Who cares if sticking up for principles we believe in sometimes aligns us with people we don't like? Are we going to then abandon our own principles as a result? If so, then we seriously need to ask ourselves if we are in fact doing more harm than good."
Please don't waste pixels repeating your nonstop rightwing agitprop.
@ Jasper_in_Boston:
I don’t know what else to say other than that I fear for your sanity if you genuinely believe that the promotion of merit, good character, equality, and fairness are “right wing agitprop.”
If the Left really despises those concepts, or pretends to despise them if and when republicans support them, then the Left is already dead.
Everyone knows you're a dim-witted troll who would have been blocked or down-voted into oblivion if Kevin was still at Mother Jones, so spare us your craptacular histrionics.
And thus was Leo1008 enlightened.
You should read Bertrand Russell's _The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism_ (it's short). He gets it right very early on in 1920 – starts off sympathetic to the claimed aims of the revolution but points out that the people running it have zero qualms about whatever lies, smeers, and ignoring of the truth are convenient, and that this will inevitably end in tears and tyranny.
Of course Orwell said the same thing, but he took an additional 20 years or so to see the point.
Others, even after Mao, even after Pol Pot still refuse to see the point. After all, surely the Leopard won't eat THEIR faces?
Sure, but take note: if the new definition of plagiarism is “slight rewordings of technical explanations” rather than “borrowing key ideas” then we’re in for a long ride of plagiarism cases, assuming standards are being evenly applied as you say they should be.
@ DFPaul:
I don't know what you’re talking about. Where are you getting your definitions of plagiarism from, and why are they in quotation marks?
Maybe, and I'm going out on a limb here, because what Gay is accused of is slight rewording rather than attributing the ideas of others to herself? You know, then main point of the discussion you are making yourself part of?
I don't know the truth about Gay's work whether just sloppy or intentional or how egregious a sin it was. However, with AI its alot easier to find unattributed quotes (plagiarism) than the past. What percent of theses have something similar that hasn't been found? There needs to be some research and probably new standards for before AI and after. Anyone writing today needs to test before publishing and there won't be any excuse.
None can guess her intention, but from what I have seen it looks like a lot of unintentional, or rather negligent plagiarism. I fear that this is not uncommon, but it is not good. It suggests failure to master the essential competencies of scholarship.
Your comment assumes that there MAY BE liars and cheats in Academia. There probably are, but what Dr. Gay did in her academic writing was well outside norms. When this kind of thing surfaces, other academics don't usually rush to wave away the matter as no big deal. Commenters on this blog a few days ago, not to mention Kevin, generated a variety of excuses for Dr. Gay's alleged academic misconduct/malpractice. Either she did it or she didn't. The kicker for me was an acknowledgements page (in Gay's dissertation, I think) that was taken almost verbatim from a different researcher. Why would anyone plagiarize personal acknowledgements? Very strange.
The failure is the established media, CNN, NYT, WaPo etc. They should all have come down on Stefanik like a ton of bricks for her antics but they don't have the gumption to do that to any Republican, not even an especially sociopathic one.
The mainstream press treating GOPers wit a lenience not available to Democrats is one of the main problems we have.