There is some percentage of the faculty thinking “there but for the grace of god go I”. Maybe an uncited source way back when; a footnote which their editor dropped in their last book which they should have insisted be put back in but did not-- etc. That’s on the plagiarism stuff.
There is some percentage of the faculty who actually believe that Hamas should be raping, murdering and kidnapping as many Israelis as possible. The “intersectionality” that has become the Holy Grail of academia comes to its fullest flower on October 7th, and so having President Gay be unwilling to condemn the various demonstrations etc. on campus is a great fit with their own worldview.
There is some percentage of the faculty who don’t have plagiarism issues and don’t love Hamas. But they are prepared to push back against ANYTHING they perceive as right-wing interference with academia. So Stefanik? She’s the enemy. NY Post? They are scum. Once Stefanik and the Post were aligned against Gay, they HAD to defend her (the enemy of my enemy is my friend).
Etc. We could probably identify another five motives among the faculty. But I think these three groups likely represent the largest percentage…
Also, I’ve read Swain’s criticism and her accusation isn’t primarily about the alleged plagiarism. Instead, Swain seems to think that Gay wasn’t deferential enough, generally, and that Swain didn’t deserve to be given tenure.
In other words, she is using the alleged plagiarism (which in the Swain example you cite is extremely weak) to grind her own axes.
“I write as one of the scholars whose work Ms. Gay plagiarized. She failed to credit me for sections from my 1993 book, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress” and an article I published in 1997, “Women and Blacks in Congress: 1870-1996.” The damage to me extends beyond the two instances of plagiarism identified by researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet.”
I do agree that accusations extend beyond plagiarism but they all start with charges of plagiarism.
She mentions the allegations of plagiarism but the bulk of her complaint seems to be sour grapes about how Gay wasn’t deferential enough for Swain’s liking, and how Harvard gave her tenure.
It is a lot like many of the posts here. What is driving this seems to have more to do with other issues than it does with the alleged plagiarism.
My mistake. There were two instances of Gay copying Swain, one with attribution and one without, and I chose the wrong one in my original post. Here is the one without attribution.
Still seems like the “other issues” are all rooted in plagiarism.
“When scholars aren’t cited adequately or their work is ignored, it harms them because academic stature is determined by how often other researchers cite your work. Ms. Gay had no problem riding on the coattails of people whose work she used without proper attribution. Many of those whose work she pilfered aren’t as incensed as I am. They are elites who have benefited from a system that protects its own.”
Please don’t be dismissive by intimation as I have been nothing but respectful. I have read the article it’s about plagiarism.
Everyone who has been through college has repeatedly been drilled on what is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of proper attribution and usage of other people’s prior work. A normal college student wouldn’t get away with what she has done.
Again, sour grapes. She thinks her work was ignored, and is using the weak plagiarism charge as a platform to beat her own drum.
My dismissiveness wasn’t directed to you. I don’t know whether you have it in for Gay or not. Some, though, definitely have it in for Gay. They did before this and they will after this.
As for me, I have no strong opinion about her one way or another. Given the examples I’ve seen, the alleged plagiarism was careless, but technical, seemingly unintentional, and not really raising red flags of dishonesty. She didn’t steal a thesis, she didn’t steal an argument, she didn’t copy extensive passages and pass them off on her own. It was the plagiarism version of forgetting pay the dime for the plastic bag when leaving a grocery store. You shouldn’t do it, but it is a bit much to morally condemn someone who accidentally does.
Were I marking papers and came across the example paragraphs, I’d have noted it for correction but I sure as heck wouldn’t have failed the student, fired them, or tossed them out of school.
This just isn’t true. A “normal college student” may have been docked, or told to fix it, but they wouldn’t suffer expulsion of a failed grade for such minor, unintentional, and technical mistakes.
What do you mean by this? Why would anyone who is not connected to Harvard in a meaningful way (student, alum, faculty, staff) have it “in” for Gay? Who had even heard of her before this?
Do you really think that Harvard’s allure is so strong that “non-stakeholders” could name the president of Harvard at any given time?
I have no opinion on Gay as an academic or a leader (I have no immediate connections to Harvard although I know lots of people who went there, taught there, got rejected from there, etc.) I see the pushback on her leadership as mostly being incredulous… that an institution of Harvard’s stature would allow her to get on a plane and sit before Congress without a thorough briefing and media training-- it’s sort of shocking. Yes, the lawyers briefed her (and it showed). But Harvard can’t find a trained media advisor, a crisis communications firm, set up a “war room”?
The absolute worst companies in the Fortune 1000 do a better job of crisis communications than Harvard has done. I think that’s the pushback. Nothing to do with Gay per se (although of course now other stuff like the plagiarism comes out). More that we are used to a certain level of savvy by leaders when they are under the gun… not the legalistic and tortured logic we saw displayed in Washington.
I tend to hold the Presidents of universities to high academic standards, not just President Gay. On the severity or importance of the “oversight” we can agree to disagree but I would have thought Harvard could find someone who didn’t have any “citation mistakes” and at a minimum they should have vetted it in advance of her appointment.
As for the rest, I’m not going to get Gay’s into testimony as it is off-topic.
Not in the least. I have no grudge against Swain. She obviously feels jilted and not respected as a scholar by Gay, and I have no idea whether these sour grapes are justified. But that’s a separate issue from whether Gay intentionally copied her work, her ideas, etc. Even Swain admits that whatever happened probably wasn’t intentional. So when we set aside the sour grapes, what’s left, really?
Who knows? Has every hire or promotion received the same level of scrutiny from the types of operatives looking into Gay after the fact? How many would survive unscathed if they had?
Ignoring the bait here, but I think it’s pretty well known that with 11 publications it’s pretty rare to become a full professor at Harvard. Carol Swain addressed this as follows:
Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none.
If instead, Harvard chose Professor Michelle Williams with an estimated 520 publications as president, I am pretty sure that we wouldn’t be talking about her having plagiarized almost half of them. Her impressive profile can be found here: https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/Profiles/display/Person/101757
President Gay has very few published works for an academic. At a bare minimum her body of work should have been run through plagiarism software prior to her hiring which would have raised the current concerns. This would not have been tough to detect.
In direct response to your question yes people assuming senior leadership roles are typically highly scrutinized through a variety of lenses before confirmed in roles. Background checks, psychological profiling, personal and professional references and review of work product are the norm not the exception.
The role of President at Harvard is at the apex of academic leadership jobs. It is amazing that this didn’t get flagged previously and calls into question the schools due diligence process, whether corners were cut and or was this information quashed.
Isn’t this thread supposed to be about plagiarism? Regardless, it makes little sense to compare the number of publications of a biologist to a political scientist. The disciplines are are structured differently with regard to publications.
As you are well aware, she didn’t “plagiarize almost half” of her work product. We are talking about isolated flags – a few words - in much larger works. It was, if anything, a mistake. Not even the authors of the works at issue have accused her of acting intentionally
Yet you continue to try to try to impugn her integrity.
I’m not so sure. Such screening would likely have happened many years ago when she was hired and/or granted tenure. Her integrity had been well established by the time she was promoted to this position. Also, the supposed infractions are so minor and obviously unintentional that I am not sure any would have raised a flag without the political agenda of those pushing to discredit her.
Plus, a main paper she supposedly plagiarized (by Voss and Palmquist) wasn’t even a published work. (Those political operatives were really motivated find something on her.) Voss was one of her mentors. They worked together. It is unclear whether she even saw the final product or internalized the description of the framework through their extensive contact. Had they been scientists in their same lab, both their names would have gone on her work, and it wouldn’t have been considered plagiarism.
The whole story is so strange. First I was left wondering, how can a Harvard President have so few publications? But we need a control group, and the most recent comparison is Lawrence Bacow who has even fewer real pubs and far fewer citations despite being already at the end of his career. So Bacow set the academic bar low, and Gay exceeded it. Further, Gay’s first publications received a very large number of citations suggesting she might have been tenured based on the influence of the work she was publishing rather than the number of papers. (Research on the academic productivity of males and females has shown that males are more likely to “sausage” and women to combine work into fewer more cited pubs.)
Re: the plagiarism, it is obvious in some of the cited examples. However, it is not there in the first example where the sentence was re-worded slightly and the original author was cited (and there is nothing notably original in the wording of the sentence).
In the second example of plagiarism (on voting rates as a function of African-American proportion of the population), I find it odd that people are focusing on the plagiarism per se rather than the fact that the plagiarized information is cited WRONGLY to entirely reverse its meaning.
Edit: See my post below on the conflicting direction of association in the two studies. I looked up the papers and Gay and the original author found opposing results, which explains why the plagiarism did not include the verb.
I noticed the same thing, but I don’t agree that this means she “reversed the meaning of the results” or that she “assemble(d) data to support what she already believe(d).” My assumption was she used the same framework as Voss (with whom she worked) but used her own data, and/or an inverse scale on one of her axes.
Based on your post, I looked into it a bit, and Voss (the author) himself addresses it on twitter:
No, her edit changed the diagnostic discussion to fit her data rather than ours. I provided a much more in-depth explanation at someone’s request, if you’d like to understand more. It starts here: https://twitter.com/0spacemanspiff0/status/1734774475462181031
If she hadn’t switched those words, our paragraph would have made no sense for her research.
Our line drifts downward as you move right because, in Louisiana then, White turnout was higher than Black turnout. But that same graph, in a place where average Black turnout exceeds White turnout - as was true in her majority-black districts - the same line would drift upward.
If the original author says she appropriately flipped one word and that the change addressed different data, I’ll take his word for it.
I’ve explained to multiple reporters - but it hasn’t shown up in print - that colleagues in a lab often draw on each other. In the natural sciences, it doesn’t meet the definition of plagiarism because the lab director’s name would be on all the pieces. Poli sci lacks that norm.
But yes, defining #plagiarism might be fairly objective but severity has to be judged subjectively. Depends on what you used & how. If someone lifted a key paragraph or idea from my paper, undercutting my ability to publish by stealing my thunder, I’d be incensed.
Voss has repeatedly indicated that didn’t happen here.
"Voss, now an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, said he was unbothered by her use of his words because it was a technical description of a quantitative method, the scope of the description was ‘fairly limited’…
Glad we are taking original authors at their word…
“I write as one of the scholars whose work Ms. Gay plagiarized. She failed to credit me for sections from my 1993 book, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress” and an article I published in 1997, “Women and Blacks in Congress: 1870-1996.” The damage to me extends beyond the two instances of plagiarism identified by researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet.”
So taking both at their word she committed at least one act of plagiarism.
