There were multiple credible accusations of plagiarism. I don’t see how Harvard can overlook that and still expect to discipline students for the same thing. I don’t believe she got the job because she’s a black woman, and anyone who does may want to consider what that says about their own unconscious bias. But I also don’t think she should still have the job.
If plagiarism is common in academia, that means other academics should lose their jobs, not that it should be excused.
Worth noting that this was published anonymously. There are certainly valid privacy concerns for the author but given the number of people who have ulterior motives in this thing it makes me a bit skeptical.
Also worth noting, according to the article, “In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources” but also that, “Since the Council was established in 2015, roughly 16 percent of students who have appeared before us have been required to withdraw.” Which suggests that a large majority of plagiarism cases do not end in expulsion.
There isn’t enough information to compare how Gay’s issues compare to other cases in either frequency or severity.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, Claudine Gay is not my friend but when a black woman gets ousted from a position of power after a bunch of right wingers have explicitly said she was a target it makes me suspect she may not be getting fair and impartial treatment.
I would defer to Gay and her peers in her field, specifically. This whole issue is a referendum on the dangers of surrendering expertise to the internet and Google rather than people who have spent years working in this speciality.
Resignation is probably an inevitable outcome, because regardless of what the findings of the scholarly investigation by peers would be, the allegation would be used as a cudgel throughout her tenure. And because women and people of color have to be twice as good and perfect, it would be used to prove that she is not qualified for the job. It’s a lose-lose proposition and personally, I think she made the right call if she is centering her well being. College presidencies are awful jobs, and probably there is no more awful job than the one at Harvard.
Bill Ackman is a terrible human being. He had no regard for Claudine Gay’s family or well being during his screeds on plagiarism which offered no nuance, and importantly, seemed to take delight in the accusations agains Gay - and immediately connected it to a lower standard because of her race and gender. He doesn’t appear to have the same energy for his wife’s accusations. In the case of both scholars, their work should be investigated by a committee of peers. And there are gradations of academic dishonesty from incorrect citations to research fakery. Every scholar knows that, but this isn’t Bill Ackman’s field, and he decided with Chris Rufo to lead the battle against plagiarism. Perhaps he should have spoken with someone with some expertise in the area before doing so - like his wife?
I mentioned earlier that I sat on a Committee of Rights and Responsibilities at Harvard as a grad student. We rarely expelled or revoked degrees, as Nicest_of_the_Damned noted. The point of a judicial process is educate the person found responsible, and do what we can to lessen the possibility of it happening again. People are obsessing with a narrow definition of plagiarism being “stealing ideas and passing them off as your own.” In both Gay and Oxman’s cases, from what I’ve seen, that is not what is occurring.
People make mistakes. My first book has typos in it - the book was typeset incorrectly. One of my earliest articles was published with odd characters in it (the journal did reprint it). Even accomplished senior scholars make mistakes. Miscalculations, misattributions, and so forth. It’s idiocy to act as if this doesn’t happen. In fact, if I was in a disciplinary hearing, it would helpful to say that citation errors are common - it even happens with senior scholars. (A significant part of our work was helping students work through shame - these were high achieving people who would never categorize themselves as “cheaters.”)
It’s emotionally devastating to have your work dismissed because of an error, or a number of errors. And I would make a clear delineation between someone who fakes data or steals ideas for others, and someone who did not accurately cite sources (or did so awkwardly).
I have run my papers through iThenticate and the things that are detected do not always legitimately rise to plagiarism. Indeed, there are papers published after mine that have similar language, and the one I did investigate I would not consider plagiarism (we were both describing the tenets of Critical Race Theory in educational settings). The ability of AI and large language models means that we can produce reports completely free of nuance.
Being president of a university does have an ethical dimension - I don’t think presidents should be people who have been convicted of impersonating a police officer, for instance. But a president who is a human being and/or admits to mistakes can be a powerful role model. Santa Ono, the president of the University of Michigan, has spoken openly about his bipolar disorder and suicide ideation. (Please note I do not consider bipolar a “mistake” - it’s part of who he is.)
There’s nothing problematic about an institution sanctioning and dismissing a student who steals answers from a test key, and having a more educational sanction for a student who has problematic citations - you can point to the fact that even the president of the institution has been sanctioned for these errors.
The other thing I see a lot of with the Oxman accusations is that it’s different because Oxman is a faculty member and Gay is a president. I am both a senior administrator and a professor, and academia is famously a space where peer relationships are valued. It is not similar to a corporate setting where a president can fire a subordinate; in fact, I think most faculty members would laugh at the idea that the president is their “boss.” (Technically, they are supervised by department chairs, deans, and a provost.) Academic dishonesty is a problem for both of them, and the need for sober and careful investigation of their work is equally needed.
One other thing - I mentioned earlier citation rules differ by discipline. In my field we use the APA formatting and style guide, now in the 7th edition. I have seen a lot of hay around a block of text without quotes, but a citation.
Well, in APA, there is a rule that for quotations of 40 words or more, you do not use quotation marks. You make it a block quote, left indented, and put the citation afterward.
Political science uses both APA and MLA. If I’m looking at a block of text, not in a PDF that is a block quote, it probably isn’t formatted as such. So that’s another issue that isn’t clear. Which is why you need experts to make these determinations.
Thank you for your thoughtful and informative posts, not just here, but across the board. I’ve enjoyed reading them.
Aw thanks Spice_Weasel! I’ve enjoyed yours too. This is clearly an issue that hits home for me, and frankly, it’s cathartic to have this discussion with smart folks (vs. Twitter). Even among my colleagues, we can be a little tunnel visioned on this. And I do think that higher education has a communications problem, so it’s good to talk with folks in other fields to see how the things that make sense to me don’t to them - and vice versa.
Seconding this! It’s a topic I don’t have any expertise on, so it’s really interesting to read from someone who does, as opposed to reading a bunch of blowhard pundits who have column-inches to fill.
Just academics? Shouldn’t everyone who committed plagiarism in school lose their jobs?
Or just resubmit their assignments like Sheriff David Clarke:
And that’s as it should be. I assume a panel of faculty examined the evidence and concluded that Clarke was not trying to pass off the work as his own. Make the corrections and move on.
(I think Clarke is a despicable idiot, but even he deserves the right to correct his mistakes.)
Suppose that there is soon an automated AI way to do this, checking all U.S. masters and PhD theses, and all the articles indexed at scholar.google.com, and all the senior theses, going back many years, from places like Swarthmore and Harvard, and a computer can run the check in a couple months. And the guilty are fired that year.
I predict this would cause a measurable decline in gross national product. I wonder if it would trip us into recession.
If anyone should be in favor of firing all the fakers and cheaters, it’s me, because I have a play-by-the-rules personality. Never cheated in school at any level. But if everyone who isn’t like me is fired, what happens to Social Security financing?
A bigger problem than plagiarism is data faking (check out www.retractionwatch.com). Some fakers do need to be fired. But firing all the data fakers, were it possible, might also be an economic mistake.
Giving everyone the Gay treatment would be, in the old phrase, worse than a crime — it would be a mistake.
So you’re saying plagiarism and exam cheating are good for the economy, right?
This won’t work in many STEM fields. Every chapter of my PhD thesis, for example, was a published paper, 2 of which were published before the thesis. This is routine in my field in fact. Blasting my thesis against Google Scholar will come up as a 1:1 match for “plagiarism” when it’s nothing of the sort.
I anticipate a lot of this type of thing happening with no context on field-dependent norms, and a lot of conservative witch-hunting. Which is, of course, the point.
…“fired that year”, you say?
As I understand it, Gay is still a professor at Harvard; she’s only resigned from the presidency. So maybe that’s the lesson, here? That what she did is compatible with the former, but not with the latter?
TriPolar asked:
“Shouldn’t everyone who committed plagiarism in school lose their jobs?”
My answer was no. If they have two jobs, they generally shouldn’t even lose one of them. The reason is that too many people would be fired. Lesser sanctions — or none when offenses were long ago – are generally warranted. I think this consistent with posts by Hippy_Hollow, who has more expertise here than I do.
Claudine Gay seems better qualified to be Harvard president than to have an endowed chair in arguably the best political science department in the world. The other Black woman, with a Harvard Government chair, Danielle Allen, is a true public intellectual with a regular Washington Post column and the author of many books in her field of political philosophy. She’s off the charts qualified. So it’s not that all you have to do is click the intersectional check box.
I looked at two of Gay’s quantitative articles and, aside from plagiarism questions, they are neither earth-shatteringly important nor wonderfully written. Gay’s administration skills were probably considered when they offered her the professorship.
In light of his wife’s plagiarism being outed, Bill Ackman has now pivoted to the “everybody does it” excuse.
"In an extensive, 5,139-word post on X made Saturday evening, Ackman — who led the crusade to get Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign over plagiarism allegations — said it is “a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers.”
There may be something more embarrassing than an academic plagiarizing Wikipedia (as Ackman’s wife reportedly did), but it’s hard to imagine what.
Mistakes
I’ve made a few
But then again
Too few to mention
A good thing that may come out of this whole fooferaw is that tools for plagiarism detection will get more widespread use and authors will think twice about plagiarizing once they realize the likelihood of being found out. The repercussions could include more journal articles and books being retracted/withdrawn, as has been the case in the scientific community where altered/duplicated images and various types of malfeasance and fraud have been uncovered thanks to detective work by people such as Elisabeth Bik.
*Retraction Watch’s count of retracted Covid-19 papers is up to 388 (not counting Expressions of Concern), though not all the retractions involve hanky-panky.
You kicked this post off by replying to a copy-and-pasted quote of mine, but I’m not aware that I’ve stated that ‘all you have to do is click the intersectional check box.’ I’m honestly not sure why you’re mentioning it.
That said, I kind of figured the situation was kind of like that old line about something being necessary but not sufficient: that people decided to get her out of the presidency once she gave those answers to Congress, and they would’ve been happy to have her resign over that — and, when her answers to Congress didn’t result in her resigning, they went looking for something else that would result in her resigning. Which, as it happens, turned out to be (checks notes) plagiarism? Well, if ’plagiarism’ is what turned up, and for some reason that’ll get the out-of-the-presidency result that her answers to Congress didn’t, then they’ll shrug and go with that.
But that’s the only reason, right? People who copied their homework in college don’t deserve to have jobs, do they? I always assumed there was no worse crime that could occur on a college campus. Was I wrong about that?
This is a really great piece written by a forensic metascientist… you know, the ones who come up and say “we can’t replicate the finding of this study, so some fuckery’s afoot” people. He frames the Gay issue appropriately - it’s not nothing, but it’s not “50 EXAMPLES OF PLAGIARISM!!11!” either. And he warns against the politicization of these processes - the disgusting underbelly of the Rufo/Ackman agenda is to erode trust in institutions.
It’s happened to the media, and government, and higher education is likely next. Because who is going to call out the very rich and very powerful? Spaces of investigation and inquiry - which media, government, and academia are supposed to do. Very bad people would like those things to go away so they can behave as they like.
Anyway - worth a read. I’m bookmarking James Heathers because I like the cut of his jib (Scott, 1824).
Thanks for sharing. Definitely worth a read—fascinating.
@Spice_Weasel, you might find the background on Ivies (and their faux progressiveness) interesting.