Harvard itself described their process as unusually fast:
“By Harvard’s recent standards, the announcement brings to a remarkably swift close a search…”
And: “The search committee, led by Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81], considered more than 600 nominations over the span of just five months, making it the shortest Harvard presidential search in almost 70 years.”
And this is very, um, “interesting”, in light of what we all know now:
“The committee valued candidates’ scholarly reputation, according to Tilghman, who said the University “needed someone who had the ability to command the respect of the faculty.”
Hadn’t seen this but pretty much as I would have expected of the search process. So leads to three options:
They didn’t do proper diligence regarding her scholarly work. If so grossly negligent, inconsistent with established norms and begs the question of why. If you fire her you admit it is a consequence of the board’s negligence and abdication of its responsibilities.
The citation issues were identified and determined to be under normal circumstances disqualifying but for some reason the standard was changed. Begs the question of why change the standard and if there existed alternative candidates without these issues. If you fire her, lots of very difficult questions will be asked of the board members who made the decision and the board will have no basis in cause for termination.
The citation issues were identified and determined to be insignificant. If so firing her is a disaster because you have no basis in cause for termination and the board is accountable for abandoning her and being complicit in destroying her reputation and future earning potential.
Pick your poison. I suspect the board will never allow us to know for sure.
I think it’s actually #1b: there would be no reason to suspect plagiarism/academic dishonesty in previous work, so it wouldn’t have been looked at all. And that wouldn’t be negligent on the Board’s part: No one would have suspected a record of that kind of brazen disregard for academic standards over an academic career (part of the responsibility, of course, lies with her advisors and mentors along the way who weren’t diligent enough—this really reflects badly on a whole string of people from Exeter to Stanford to Harvard and beyond).
“3.” is probably closest to the truth, although my guess is they did exercise due diligence, but the “citation issues” weren’t identified because they are so insignificant. (A subtle difference but IMO important.) And they readdressed the issue when all this came about and confirmed that the issues were insignificant (beyond requiring a few minor corrections). Firing her now would not only be without cause, it would be a capitulation to bullies who want her gone for reasons that have nothing to do with plagiarism.
Alternatively, the “whole string of people” acted appropriately.
At least in my non academic experience they take a very close look at prior work product. In my industry they look at regulatory fillings, interview peers, review financial disclosures and get very granular and specific with interviews conducted by subject matter experts.
I can’t imagine given her small portfolio of published works that they wouldn’t have been subjected to both human and automated scrutiny.
Well certainly those seeking to discredit her suspected it and discovered it fairly readily. It also appears some of her peers (Carol Swain) had suspicions or where aware and not happy about it. This doesn’t seem to have been particularly well concealed, which may suggest Dr Gay didn’t think it was an issue or was told it’s not an issue.
Yolo I respectfully disagree in that her academic work product would have been a focus of any vetting process in my experience.
Agree. When we hire assistant professors, we never do any due diligence on potential plagiarism, not even on the finalists we invite to campus. We do carefully go over some of the applicants’ most significant publications, but that is to better understand their work than to catch any academic foul play. Perhaps we shouldn’t, but we place a lot of trust on who their Ph.D. advisors/postdoc supervisors are and the journals/conferences their work appear in.
I respectfully disagree in that her academic work product would have been a focus of any vetting process in my experience.
This just seems insane to me if this was the case.
To have such a lengthy selection process and not check the academic work seems so silly in hindsight.
As someone said above, the selection committee effectively relied on the work of Stanford and Phillips Exeter to vet her if this was the case. It was a stamp of approval that led to another stamp of approval that led to this.
Respectfully this is the President of Harvard who has a $50 billion endowment not an assistant professor. This is no different in terms of reputation and responsibility than high profile corporate leadership roles.
They would do things like confirm the publications listed in her CV, and get feedback from those in the field about their significance in that area of study. They wouldn’t do things like run text from individual papers through a plagiarism checker, attempt to check that data wasn’t falsified (this is what brought eventually brought down Tessier-Lavigne at Stanford; IMO: this is a possibility that shouldn’t be ruled out as another shoe that could drop in Gay’s case), or check statistical calculations and conclusions derived from them. These weren’t fly-by-night journals that her papers were published in. The review processes for publication would be seen as sufficient.
That’s why her behavior is such a betrayal. It reflects really badly on the institutions and people who trained and oversaw her. And even with all sort of review and oversight procedures, you’re counting on someone being honest and competent at a fundamental level, because no one from a dissertation adviser to a journal review panel can check every single damn thing.
They probably didn’t have a legitimate, lengthy selection process. They probably only pretended to. I suspect Dr. Gay’s selection was likely a fait accompli the moment they knew Lawrence Bacow was leaving, as she was whom Penny Pritzker wanted.
It is unlikely her dissertation was the first time she ever plagarised. It would be a very odd place to start. Given thatcm we know she copied language after her dissertation, it would not be surprising that she did so before as well.
Even if you were right, the reality is that she is beyond the point of recovery.
The reason is that everyone has been taught about how serious plagiarism is, and almost everyone in the public believes that what she did constitutes serious cases of plagiarism. So it actually doesn’t matter if most academics believe those are not serious cases. You will not be able to convince the public.
As has been previously mentioned, a main job of a university president is to raise money. This means that the president has to convey a positive impression of themself and the university with the public. There is zero chance she will be able to do that effectively when all the news about her is uniformly negative.
And of course, this doesn’t even consider how she bungled the congressional hearing, but again, that would be the topic for a different thread.
Harvard could easily withstand this. Whether they will or not remains not remains to be seen.
But if Harvard caves to the bullying, it sends a clear and chilling message to their current and potential faculty and administration. Harvard does NOT have their back, even in situations like here where at every stage Harvard has signed off on everything Dr. Gay has done. If rabid culture warriors throw enough mud and get donors interested, Harvard will bow to the pressure and scapegoat their own.
If it is a topic for another thread they why to you keep inserting this into the thread?
Because quite often a person is fired for not just one event, but a cascade of events. For example, Liz Magill had a series of mistakes before the Congressional hearing, and that was the final straw. For Claudine Gay, the Congressional hearing was the second mistake (her initial reaction at Harvard was the first), and the plagiarism is likely the final straw.
Conversely, Sally Kornbluth will likely survive because she has made only one significant mistake, at the congressional hearing.
It is certainly possible to mention it as one factor that could be a part of Gay’s dismissal without getting into the details—just as “hebegebe” has. This is not a difficult concept.