Plagiarism Standards at Harvard: The Claudine Gay Story

I won’t go into the politics here but do you think she resigned of her own free will or because of pressure from everyone else?

Also, how much of a say did donors have in this decision if she didn’t resign of her own free will?

How can the corporation go from defending her to then saying she made mistakes?

And her resignation letter is far from an apology.

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Dead-last before the Gay debacle and dead-last since. If anything Harvard is consistent :rofl:

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.

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They are aware, they just don’t care. This is about power, not diversity.

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Honestly, I doubt the university is going to change.

They’re still going to be obsessed about race long after she’s gone.

They were way quicker to denounce the Supreme Court earlier this year for the decision that shall not be named than actual antisemitism.

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Agree. Disgraceful.

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.

I don’t think plagiarism was the issue.

Reminder that this thread is specifically about plagiarism. We’re wandering into antisemitism, FIRE ratings, etc… which don’t belong on this thread.

She wasnt good at raising money either as she alienated major donors

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That was explicitly suggested in her resignation letter:

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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.”

Here is a Harvard professor responding to CNN reporter questions about Claudine Gay. A couple of interesting points:

  1. He believes that Claudine Gay was an effective leader that was unfairly forced to resign.
  2. He said that if a student did what Claudine Gay did, he would bring her before an academic advisory board.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2024/01/02/claudine-gay-resignation-harvard-professor-ryan-enos-sot-cnc-vpx.cnn

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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.

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It is beginning to sound like Harvard Corporation is refusing to acknowledge they learned anything from this debacle.

If that is the case, it is difficult to see how they will make better decisions going forward.

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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.

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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.

I’ll assume that the discussion of Black US presidents and of Black college presidents not named Claudine Gay has ended on this thread

Looks like the list of things Universities need to vet before hiring Presidents/Chancellors includes more than just plagiarism:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/12/29/university-wisconsin-la-crosse-joe-gow-fired-explicit-videos-wife-cnc-vpx.cnn

It seems like you will defend her no matter the fact pattern…just my view

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The thread about the UW La Crosse chancellor can be found here: U Wi La Crosse Chancellor fired