Dead-last before the Gay debacle and dead-last since. If anything Harvard is consistent
Words, especially when under pressure, are one thing - acts are another. The truth on the ground at Harvard is not what other universities should aspire to.
If plagiarism was really the issue, I’d be a lot more concerned with a professor who has a history of plagiarism than with a university president. I think the plagiarism is really an issue of laziness and sloppiness, but those are important traits in a professor.
A professor’s job is to teach students to explore ideas and present them in papers, presentations, opinion articles, etc. The President of Harvard’s job is to mainly raise money and keep the ship moving. Many universities have non-academics running things.
But after he resigned as Stanford president last July, Tessier-Lavigne is still a professor at Stanford. Here’s the latest on him—the fallout continues:
The final paragraph of that article:
“According to Gene Sykes, chair of the search committee to find a permanent replacement for Tessier-Lavigne, the committee has “plans to do due diligence in a way that it was not done in the previous search.” Stanford has declined to specify those plans.”
I suspect that her apparently thin academic record (somewhat hard to judge whether her small numbers of papers are considered seminal in some field) combined with plagiarism (which seemed sloppy rehashes of literature reviews but may or may not have extended to lifting key ideas that were central to her paper) would have gone unnoticed (or at least unmentioned) had she not screwed the pooch in her repeated missteps following Oct 7th and culminating in her Congressional testimony. It is interesting to hear that upholding scholarly rituals was one of her bedrock values. But, Gay is probably correct that there were those who objected to her solely due to her race. I suspect there were a lot more who objected to the way Harvard was both approaching DEI issues and suppressing the speech of those who disagreed with that approach. She may have been a bit of an architect of the DEI policies, but at one level she was caught in the crossfire between the DEI constituencies and those who objected to the policies and their application. The plagiarism accusations were just waiting until the timing was right.
He also said that what would happen with the student would be a “careful and deliberate hearing,” and that did not happen in Gay’s case. It looks like he didn’t buy into Harvard’s so-called “investigation” of her either.
So Harvard faculty members admit they would refer these type of infractions to the honor council, and the honor council admits that the penalty for these types of infractions is suspension.
How this person continues on the Harvard faculty is beyond me.
I’m not privy to decisions to choose a university president, but I would guess that search committees would not in the past have combed through the publications of a candidate for president to search for plagiarism. In most cases, candidates would be well past publication years and would have spent a number of years in academic leadership positions. I would guess that the search committee would have assumed that any such issues would have been vetted upon a tenure decision or perhaps even before that. They would not be assessing scholarly credentials for the most part but leadership abilities as demonstrated in recent jobs as Deans or Provosts. After Tessier-Lavigne and Gay, that will change. AI plagiarism detectors to the ready.