I have a simpler outlook. When I see passages from Gay’s articles next to the texts she is accused of copying without attribution and they are almost identical I conclude that she is guilty of plagiarism.
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And 3/4 don’t. So let’s just consider plagiarism for these.
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Okay. Let’s. The answer is the same.
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I am aware of two cases of CEOs who were terminated after lying to their boards. Both were cases of sexual misconduct…one had some allegations of financial shenanigans as well (but related to the sexual issues…think payoffs, hush money type of things).
I don’t think either case is analogous to Harvard. Both men violated very clear internal policies about engaging in a relationship with a subordinate and there was ample evidence (using company emails, meeting during business trips, etc) so fighting would have been futile. But of course most people’s inclination is deny deny deny until it’s clear your luck has run out.
Gay hasn’t exploited her position for sexual favors; not clear what power dynamic is at play in her case.
But yes… CEOs get fired for lying to their boards. In one case, the guy could have saved his job if he’d been forthcoming and no lied, and claimed it was true love or whatever…the lying did him in…
I’m sure there are many more examples and other posters should weigh in if they know why a successful CEO suddenly decides to take a break from his corporate career to spend more time with his family…
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Not CEO level, but I have fired employees, including those in management who lied to me. If they had told me the truth, they would in most cases have been reprimanded, but not fired. It is a question of integrity and accountability. Not saying Gay crossed that line. Don’t know enough facts.
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Summary of recent coverage on CNN:
“Is Harvard University really holding its president, Dr. Claudine Gay to the same standards when it comes to plagiarism that they would assail for students committing the same offense?” [Jake] Tapper asked as he introduced reporter Matt Egan…
{Egan} added that Harvard is facing two major criticisms: “One is the lightning-fast speed that Harvard pulled off this independent review. These types of plagiarism reviews, they can take anywhere from six months to two years, and this one wasn’t even two months. Another criticism is that there’s a double standard; one set of rules for the students and another for the president of the university.
The big question, I think, in the future is, how will Harvard be able to punish any students found guilty of the same offense without inviting a lawsuit,” {Jake} Tapper said. “Because if she gets away with something that students can’t then get away with, that could be messy, legally, for the school…”
And from the Boston Globe:
“The irregularities have drawn criticism from Harvard professors. Richard Parker, who has taught at Harvard Law School for almost 50 years, told the Boston Globe that the half-hearted investigation "exudes contempt for our students and faculty."
“There are few things more repellent than a top official getting and taking a pass for something they punish underlings for doing,” Parker said.”
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Something in the appropriation of another’s words strikes a chord of resentment in us otherwise mild-mannered paper-pushers and keyboard-strokers. And this is independent of whether grand ideas are at stake. Words themselves are the stock-in-trade of the capable scholar. It was the unintentional use of some very unremarkable ones in her sources that ruined the reputation of Doris Kearns Goodwin two decades ago, forcing her resignation from the Harvard Board. That the words were so pedestrian just made their appropriation the more ridiculous.
The vigilantes that came after Goodwin were not culture warriors; they were an army of students and scholars and writers who had themselves struggled to assimilate knowledge and render it on the page. To short-circuit that painful process seems to us ordinary strugglers like stealing a base, and it invites resentment. What Claudine Gay has done may not have been a theft of ideas; may not have been intentional; may not have been dishonest. However, it is very bad for her reputation and effectiveness. That’s just a fact, not a call for her ouster. Ridicule may not be fair, but it is frequently lethal.
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Well…if the whole of someone’s scholarly output beyond the thesis is made up of eleven journal articles… 
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On a lighter note, I bet there will be fierce internal competition at Harvard Business School on which professor gets to create a new HBS Case called “Management Failure: The Harvard PR Disaster of 2023”.
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The evidence appears to show that Dr. Gay is a habitual plagiarizer. She even plagiarized lines from Jennifer L. Hochschild’s “Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation” (1996) in—get this—the Acknowledgments section of her PhD dissertation.
As to the issue of intention: If you accidentally plagiarize by forgetting to properly cite a source, you’ll pretty much 100% of the time render the quoted words accurately. After all, you intended to give proper attribution and just forgot. What you won’t do, however, is change one or two minor words in the passage in hopes that doing this will turn your action into a paraphrase and negate future accusations of plagiarism. That’s what Claudine Gay has frequently done. That’s clear intent to plagiarize.
As for the Harvard Corporation’s attempt to sanitize her plagiarism by asking her to make corrections, to me, that’s like asking a bank robber to return the money with no further questions asked. Plagiarism is academic theft. Students Harvard has punished for plagiarism have not been granted the same leniency.
Dr. Carol Swain, by the way, if you listen to her on YouTube, says Claudine Gay went well beyond plagiarizing particular lines or paragraphs from her work. Swain says Gay took her entire research program, even the research questions that she pursued, from Swain’s multiple award-winning book, "Black Faces, Black Interests.”
Recall that, in 1991, Joachim Maitre, dean of Boston University’s School of Communications, was compelled to resign over plagiarism. Despite Maitre’s explanation that it just slipped his mind to credit the source, John Silber, BU’s president, said this: “Failure to credit sources cannot be excused on the grounds of negligence, stress, fatigue or exhaustion… This is a failure for which offenders are held strictly liable.” Harvard can’t give Gay a pass on the matter.
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President Gay’s tenure at Harvard is a study in double standards.
First, President Gay cannot bring herself to state that calls for the genecide of Jews violates the severe restrictions on speech at Harvard designed to protect fragile students from ever feeling they were threatened, yet Harvard requires incoming freshman to undergo training that, in part, states that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexualism” constitute “violence” and are grounds for discipline. So, at Harvard you can be disciplined for making a fat joke, but calling for genecide is A-OK.
Second, Gay is caught plagiarising throughout her academic career (last count I saw was over two dozen instances, and the number seems to increase each day), and the Harvard Corporation covers for her. Meanwhile, in the 2020-21 academic year over two dozen students were expelled from Harvard for plagiarism. One would hope that the president of the university would be held to a higher standard than its students. And let’s not forget that Larry Summers - an academic with far better credentials than Gay - was summarily drummed out of Harvard for merely acknowledging the possibility that the disparity of men and women in STEM fields MIGHT be partially explained by self selection and differences in aptitude (claims that are born out in a good number of studies).
People are up in arms not due to any personal animous toward Gay. They are disgusted by the obvious double standards at “elite” universities.
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She has to step down because she won’t be effective and will struggle to raise money. At the same time, Im not sure how well many academics’ work would hold up to this level of scrutiny given the tools we have today that didn’t exist 30 years ago. It is
much easier to catch plagiarism than it was in the past.
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I have zero problem with removing any professors that committed these transgressions at the level that Claudine Gay has.
They knew the rules back then too, which really haven’t changed.
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I am reluctant to further comment as I feel like it has all been said by others.
Irony abounds 
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I agree, but let’s be honest, they aren’t going to be scrutinized because most people don’t care about the work of your typical academic. That doesn’t excuse president Gay, of course, but adds context to the situation. At the end of the day, while I do think this was a bit of a witch hunt, you can’t just ignore what was uncovered because you don’t like the messenger (and I don’t).
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It’s a context-dependent decision.
As I said earlier, I think you she should step down - she is compromised as a leader and can’t carry out the main job of the president of Harvard which is to bring in the $$. It also looks bad - how can someone talk about academic integrity after being outed in this way? She committed plagiarism, whether or not it was intentional and whether or not the people who uncovered it had an ulterior motive.
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It was a cultural reference 
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Ha! I didn’t pick that up. It’s a sad situation and a bad look for Harvard any way you cut it. For a school as rich in tradition, and with their deep pockets, it’s really unconscionable that they find themselves in this predicament.
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I should have cited it properly. Mea culpa.
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