The former president is a former colleague and friend of mine. He’s now the president of Talladega College, an HBCU in Alabama. To be clear, Penn’s investigation allowed him to make revisions to his dissertation - in the literature review.
And not to have a go at Jackmannii, but the accusations are typically what get the white hot media focus. If the infractions are determined to be minor and/or correctable that’s usually a below-the-fold story.
I won’t rehash most of what’s been said. I did sit on the one of the Committee of Rights and Responsibiilities for two years at Harvard when I was in graduate school, which is the equivalent of a j-board. In the two years I served, I can recall one expulsion (centered on verified criminal behavior). The remainder were educational sanctions where students were allowed to either make changes and resubmit, or enroll in a class, or simply receive a grade of zero on an assignment. There is also a time-limited separation that may have been assigned (usually when a student was going through emotional distress or a mental health situation) but they were allowed to return.
So the refrain commonly posted on social media “if this was a student they would have been expelled” is inaccurate. Plagiarism (in this case, misattribution, poor or unclear citations) is a different stripe than cheating on an exam. Short of outright cheating - like getting a test file and copying answers - most cases of academic dishonesty are hopefully educational in nature. While there is a Harvard guide for “Writing with Sources,” I suspect most students do not read it.
Another issue that has not been discussed are the rules around citation, which do change. When I was dissertating, we used the APA 5th Edition stylebook. Today, the 7th edition is used. There are changes. A legitimate investigation would have to use the rules for citation and sourcing that were in effect when Gay defended her dissertation - 1997, I believe. I don’t think the rules would have changed that much, but still, that’s what should be done.
I did some perusing of the evidence (not all). I saw one example when Gay stated that the Voting Rights Act was the most significant legislation of the 20th century. Another source stated something almost verbatim. There are principles and statements of opinion in my field - say, the centrality of Brown v. Board of Education to educational equity - that any researcher in the field would likely posit without a need for attribution. Another example I saw was a description of a statistical finding. There’s really no way to describe interactions and effects without using very similar language. So if those examples are the basis for the charges, I suspect a complete examination of the charges (which would take time and nuance) would find many like this.
The framing that’s problematic is I see breathless reporting of “60 examples of plagiarism!” that doesn’t reflect if they are common statements of fact or generally held opinion which are in other works, misattributions or poor citations, or on the extreme end, outright theft of original ideas and findings. An investigation could not be done during a media news cycle - it would take time and the expertise of those working in the field.
Another thought is that in an academic career, much of the literature and methodological framing of one’s work will be similar. Where the alleged plagiarism appears is also significant. In a literature review or methods section, the author is not arguing an original idea; they are building the basis for the context of their study. In a findings or analysis section - that’s really problematic.
Last thought - researchers, even ones trained at Harvard, are human and make errors. I suspect most of us who have published frequently will have phrases or sections in our writings that are similar - particularly, if one publishes in research venues as well as practioner venues where you’re translating findings from a peer reviewed journal into a book chapter, for instance. The more one publishes the more likely this is to be the case.
Ideally, Harvard would acknowledge these concerns and investigate - taking the time to do this work correctly. Sort of what Plagiarism Today recommended. Personally, I think it’s absurd to think that being an academic leader, and being one at a selective institution such as Harvard, somehow means that mistakes cannot be made or rectified. We have US presidents and Supreme Court justices who have been accused of plagiarism. If an unbiased investigation finds that the allegations are severe enough to warrant a sanction - retraction, or even demotion - then that should be what happens. It could also be that the allegations rise to the level of corrections, which should also happen.
But in many ways, the breathless reporting and simplistic parroting of bad faith actors has poisoned the well. Would anyone remember that Gay was exonerated, or found to have made minor errors that were correctible six months from now? Interestingly, the spouse of Bill Ackman, one of the most vocal commenters regarding Gay’s academic integrity, has also made attribution errors in her work. (I looked at these and also found them to be minor and correctible.) I’ll also say her response is an honest and good one. But it does show that the issue is probably more common than most think. And I certainly don’t think it warrants anything more than correcting the errors. But the promulgators of this incident probably aren’t going to demand her resignation, or claim that the errors somehow mean that she is unqualified to hold her position, are they?