I’ve read your post twice, and it seems like a lot of cheetah flips to justify all the plagiarism that Gay has been found to have committed. There are 47 individual items of plagiarism (by some accounts) by the President of Harvard, whose list of publish articles isn’t that numerous, in arguably the most pre-imminent university in the nation.
I’d submit that jumping though this many hoops to mitigate her plagiarism is setting the bar way too low for Harvard. Seems like they thought so too.
Seems like she thought so too.
About to about to happen? 
Before it’s about to happen.
It reads to me like an informed and measured analysis which so much of this conversation has been lacking.
I suspect that this is a bit like when a SCOTUS candidate was caught having paid household help under the table.
No one would have cared much if they were under the microscope and not an uncorrectable item for someone not in that position. But they weee in that position.
Gay was in the position she was within one of the most elite level institutions. Being held to nationwide scrutiny. Targeted by the Right and having minimally disappointed portions of the center Left. Significant issues, like academic impropriety shall we call it, might in other contexts be quietly handled, given a chance to be corrected, even ignored? But not in this context.
FWIW I do not think a white male in that position would have survived either.
No, but I don’t think conservatives would have felt so much glee in bringing him down.
Maybe. But I do not think gender or race motivated it. The motivation, the target, was perceived hypocrisy on college campuses, a willingness to let conservative speech be shut down or shut out, while defending other speech as protected.
And they scored.
Yeah, this is a good analogy. I also have not thought that the vast majority of Gay’s lack of citations are all that bad at all (though the pattern of them looks at best very careless). But if you’re going to be at that kind of elite level (SCOTUS or President of Harvard), you just can’t have even the appearance of impropriety.
I think this comes down to understanding plagiarism as something that occurs in degrees. If we say “over 25 years, Gay has 50 mistakes in her scholarship” - that hits different than saying “50 examples of plagiarism.” As I said earlier, the cases that are most harshly dealt with are those that are outright theft of ideas (passing someone else’s work off as your own), cheating, and research fakery - Francesca Gino was placed on leave by Harvard Business School for this.
Nothing I have read in the accusations to Gay appear to be on this level. I agree DSeid that her prominence and the confluence of the post-October 7 climate issues at Harvard created an environment where she was scrutinized for any misstep. One thing that has not been discussed greatly is the fact that Gay was on the job for six months - she was not a well-established institutional leader. Many of the concerns about speech predate her time as president; it would have been more logical to have Drew Faust and Larry Summers responding to those issues as well.
I absolutely believe gender and race motivated this. Promotion and tenure processes are serious undertakings at universities. Nobody “sneaks by” tenure, and certainly not in the promotion past associate professor to full. (This is part of my job at my university.) While at first glance her academic record seems thin re: publications - books and articles - I consider two things. One, I am not a scholar in her discipline. They all have different thresholds. Two, in political science there may be other indicators of scholarly merit (white papers, conference proceedings, projects in practice, etc).
Many of the provocateurs immediately suggested that her standing and scholarship were somehow below the standard and immediately made the connection to DEI, suggesting that she somehow came into her academic role and administrative role due to lower standards. That’s what makes it abundantly clear that this was race and gender motivated.
I totally disagree. I don’t think anyone would have bothered looking for plagiarism if the president had been a white man. Just as no prior candidate for attorney general had ever even been asked, “who does your house work?”
I’m sure she was attacked because she’s a Black woman.
I mean, if a white man had been found to have plagiarized, he would have had to resign, too. But i don’t think it would have been found because i don’t think anyone would have bothered to look.
A good litmus test for “is this race and gender motivated?” is the reaction to Neil Gorsuch’s plagiarism. It’s been well documented. I’m less concerned about the calls for him to step down - I would argue that a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States is at least equivalent, if not superior in regard to the need to serve as an example and to be precise in one’s work, as a prestigious college presidency.
I have never heard anyone state that Neil Gorsuch is somehow not qualified to sit on the Court, or got to the Supreme Court with lower standards.
I have a long standing and perhaps chronologically irrelevant dislike of Harvard, which I acquired as a result of my studies there (I got a graduate degree in 1982) and a family visit in 2015 when my son briefly considered applying - the campus tour convinced the whole family that Harvard was still guilty of egregious smugness, among other flaws.
I could tell more than one illustrative Harvard story, some of them amusing, but this thread is not the place, except for perhaps one relevant observation that I read in the Real Paper decades ago: If Harvard is so great, and Harvard rules the world, then how come the world sucks?
Harvard might do well to engage in more honest self-assessment of its flaws, but I’ve never observed that to be one of the institution’s strong points.
I just want to point out that form letters are the standard way to deal with this problem. You write one or a few letters that address “frequently asked questions” and some staff member reads incoming emails and picks the appropriate form letter to send back.
The university as a whole has been painfully bad at communicating during this kerfuffle.
I submit that’s not a good argument. It doesn’t actually argue against a single one of the points being made. It just uses disparaging terms to describe them–“cheetah flips” and “jumping through hoops.” That doesn’t establish the arguments are wrong. It doesn’t engage with them on their merits.
You even make an argument that they had already rebutted. They already pointed out how the raw numbers of “separate incidents” of plagiarism is misleading, including things such as a single phrase that is worded similarly because that’s just the standard way to say it.
Now, maybe that claim is wrong, but it would need to be rebutted. It makes no sense to make an argument that has already been rebutted before you started. You’d need to rebut the rebuttal first.
Drilling down on the details isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t mean you’re “jumping through hoops.” It means you’re trying to get a more nuanced understanding.
I’ve grown disillusioned with the whole idea of elite private schools to begin with. They seem barren to me, like you can’t grow anything truly meaningful, because these old ways of doing things are so entrenched. And I was a poor kid at a rich school, so I felt the difference.
I don’t know that I regret my choice, but I would never encourage anyone to attend. Especially now. I used to have a Penn sticker on my car and I seriously think I would remove it today. I keep having dreams about all this. I can’t shake it for some reason. I think because for so long academics were such a huge part of my identity, it feels existentially threatening. Like no, this is not what I stand for.
As far as plagiarism, I suspect this stuff is the norm in academia, but it shouldn’t be, and I expect it’s a lot like how we all put stuff out on the Internet that could be mined and used to ruin us if given the chance. There but for the grace of Og go we all.
I’ve seen commentary on the fact that her 25 years of scholarship amounts to only 11 published papers is in iteslf a big problem for someone hired to be president of a major university. This NYT article, for example.
As Jerry Coyne put it:
Note that Gay’s c.v. (you can find it here) is fairly thin for a faculty member at a major university: a total of just eleven peer-reviewed journal articles (the last in 2017) and one edited book. (I have over 120 articles and one scholarly book, and I’m by no means at the top of the publishing heap in my field.) So the proportion of plagiarized pieces in Gay’s oeuvre (about half) is pretty high.
(From here.)
So are all the instances of plagiarism related to the peer-reviewed articles? Or does that include everything she’s ever written? Because if it’s the latter, that might not be as damning as it sounds.
One was the acknowledgements in a book she wrote. The author of the article thought that was horrible. I kinda thought, “who has something truly original to say in that situation?”
When i write a condolences note, i tend to use phrases I’ve read in other condolences notes. Because someone else came up with a good way to express common feelings. I have to think that book acknowledgements are similar. I care more whether she said something heartfelt than whether she said something original in that particular instance.