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).
I would defer to political scientists here. In the humanities and social sciences, usually university press books and/or peer reviewed articles are the coin of the realm. But there are exceptions. I don’t know enough about her field to make a determination.
But - I actually looked at her CV posted online - it’s three pages long. I’ve been in academia 9 years fewer than Gay, and my complete CV is around 50 pp. I suspect this is an abbreviated CV. Most scholars have a short CV and a biosketch for the funding agencies. I’ll assume that’s what’s happening here.
For instance, there is a Google Scholar link to a paper she authored from the 2013 APSA annual meeting that is not on her CV - again, not knowing the conventions of the field, this might be a significant piece of work that carries weight.
I used one of the tools (iThenticate) and ran my dissertation through it. There were a number of similarities reported. To my relief, they were virtually all in works after my submission - and I was surprised that some of the similarities were things like citations and quotes. So if one uses a tool like iThenticate, you have to pull those out. And the front matter (“A Thesis Fulfilling The Requirements for the Degree…”) matched to one of my classmates’ dissertations. They all say that.
If I had the time (and I suspect Gay does) I would go through each of these claims and address them all. But as I said the damage is done, at least externally.
I think you’re both giving her too much of a pass. Here is the acknowledgement example from the NYT:
Original: He "showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor,” adding later he “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”
Dr. Gay: He “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.” adding later they “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”
She was really incapable of thinking something “original to say?”
I read that–but honestly I don’t care much about it. As others have said, the acknowledgement in a book is about the least academic part of the book imaginable. It’s a little weird to copy someone else’s words so closely there, but I’m unconvinced it speaks to her academic integrity or to her ability to do the job she was hired for.
Add into that an explicit campaign to get her fired as part of a racist anti-DEI drive, and I’m super skeptical.
Resignation is what happens when people in high-up positions get fired. Sometimes it happens when people leave on their own, but in this case I’m pretty sure it was a polite way of firing her. There’s no reason to assume Gay saw the error of her ways and left of her own accord. But there’s no real way of knowing.
I 100% agree with this. A bit weird, sure, but I feel like acknowledgements, of all places, are where it would be OK to copy a template. (Full disclosure: my thesis totally used other people’s LaTeX formatting template hacks verbatim! With permission, of course.)
This is truly bizarre. That could be the phraseology of a favorite professor. I could see King or Jencks telling their students “get the data right and follow where it leads, without fear or favor” and students repeating it in the acknowledgments.
Phrases stick in our minds. The “fear or favor” construction I recognize from Rachel Maddow’s sign offs. Is it possible that Gay found Hochschild’s words, and decided to copy it? It’s possible. It’s also possible that she didn’t.
I read that. Was she incapable of finding a new way to express that rather mundane idea? I doubt it. Would there have been any increased value to her work if she’d done so? Absolutely not.
As i said, i routinely copy standard verbiage when i write condolence notes, congratulations on marriages, etc. it’s not that I’m incapable of coming up with my own words. But it’s already been done. It’s been done really well. And the formulas will be understood.
If her contributions to her field are stolen, that’s a huge deal.
If the words she uses to say thank you for common forms of support are stolen… Meh.
That being said, plagiarism is a huge deal in academia, and i expected her to resign when i saw the charges. But do i think a lot of them are silly and trumped up, because people were out to get her? Yes, i do.
The Corporation gave a full throated endorsement of Gay a week ago. In a lot of ways, this makes it appear (as we have seen from Rufo and Ackman’s gloating) that they are beholden to social media pressure campaigns which is certainly not a good look.
I suspect she probably got mixed signals about their support.
I have no reason to doubt that because she cares about Harvard, and her own mental health and well being, she may have made the choice to resign. And I would applaud her for doing that. Too many people sacrifice their health for a title or role and are left with broken bodies and psyches… for what? They can find someone else to run the university.
The college presidency is becoming the new superintendency - a job that very few want and has a short tenure. The average tenure of a college president is around 5-6 years. Deans (at least at my university) serve 6 year terms. If this first six months is indicative of the next 6 years I can see why Gay chose to resign.
It is very easy for a turn of phrase to be absorbed and re-emitted without realizing where it came from. One sentence with some stock phrasing in it to me seems more like uninspired blandness than plagiarism. If this is the best example, than it seems awfully weak to me.
It is relevant if what Gay did is common among her peers.
It isn’t relevant if what Gay did was done by someone’s spouse. Unless Neri Oxman has been attacking other people for plagarism (has she?), Business Insider is out of line.
The same of course applies to Ackman’s plan, which I hope he abandons. Has he considered that if he outs sloppy progressive MIT professors, others will be motivated to go after sloppy conservative MIT professors?
As bad as Ackman’s plan to check the publications of Sally Kornbluth and other MIT professors, it would be even worse if he checks Kornbluth’s husband (who is a Duke professor). And that’s closest to what Business Insider did.
He researched Gay for purely political reasons. Someone else researched his wife for purely political reasons. They were both wrong.
So are Gay and Oxman. And Oxman’s plagiarism looks a lot worse than Gay’s, in first glance. But neither would ever have been noticed except for unrelated political vendettas.
When I was a university history student in the 1970’s, I mostly took classes that required term papers. I don’t recall thinking I might be plagiarizing, but I do recall being concerned that I would mix up a quotation and the footnote while using my system of citation numbers on note cards. Almost surely, I repeatedly made the careless but honest mistake of footnoting a primary source quotation to the wrong nineteenth century American author.
I tentatively think that plagiarism is, by itself, minor compared to other academic misdeeds, such as cheating on exams, or submitting the entirety, or a substantial portion, of someone else’s work as your own. Regarding that last one, I am thinking of the files of old term papers allegedly kept by fraternities. Submitting that should reasonably get you kicked out of school for a year. But if one percent of your term paper is someone else’s unattributed work, that’s cause for giving the term paper a lower grade, or for the professor to require it to be re-done.
Given my opposition to wholistic admissions, this may be inconsistent, but: I think papers which contain plagiarism should be considered in a wholistic matter where the quality of the work as a whole is paramount. And a student honor court has no competence to make that judgment.