Once again, references to race are not permitted on this thread. Please start a new thread in the PF.
Flags are starting to fly again and I’m putting this on slow mode.
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Absurdly, she is even being falsely accused of ripping off the work of her own dissertation adviser in her dissertation, even though her dissertation adviser read every draft and had an obligation to her, himself, and academia to ferret out academic dishonesty. I guess the adviser should be fired too, as an accomplice. 
Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard who was Gay’s dissertation adviser, was adamant that Gay had not plagiarized him, calling the allegation “absurd” in a phone call with The Chronicle. According to Rufo and Brunet, though Gay “cites King’s book,” she “does not explicitly acknowledge” that an appendix in her dissertation “is entirely grounded in King’s concepts, instead passing it off as her own original work. Throughout the appendix, Gay takes entire phrases and sentences directly from King’s book, without any citations or quotation marks.”
It would be “perfectly clear,” King said, to readers that Gay was using a method that King proposed in his book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem, and that has now become widespread. In no way was Gay trying to pass off that method as her own, King said. He pointed out that, as her dissertation adviser, he read every draft and would therefore be the last person a student planning to plagiarize would steal from.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-bad-are-the-plagiarism-allegations-against-the-harvard-president-it-depends-on-whom-you-ask
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@mtmind, you are ignoring a key point here.
Suppose someone takes many classes in college and only gets caught for plagiarism in one of them. That person doesn’t get to say, “Look, in the vast majority of my classes, I didn’t get caught for plagiarism, and therefore, I am not guilty.”
No, that person is still guilty of plagiarism. And Carol Swain is saying Gay is guilty of plagiarism far beyond the two quotes that she was not properly attributed for. She is saying that some of Gay’s core concepts for her dissertation were lifted directly from her book and not properly attributed.
As for the other cases, you seem intent on minimizing her nearly direct copying of someone else’s work. But as has been pointed out, a competent researcher adds the attribution to the document the same time the copied text gets put into the document. The fact that she fails to do this repeatedly is what is causing the red flags, not just a single instance.
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I have not read Gay’s whole thesis, but I did look at it to see whether King was given credit for the solution she used to the Ecological Inference problem.
From what I see, she does so explicitly. Specifically, at the beginning of Chapter 1 (p.20): “In this chapter, I not only use King’s method of ecological inference to reliably estimate race-specific turnout rates, but I also consider how behavior differs across different socioeconomic settings within one congressional district.” She cites King again on page 28. Then on page 30 " In estimating the parameters of interest in precinct i, King’s method of ecological inference uses not only the aggregate statistics available for precinct / itself (i.e. X, and TJ, but also “borrows” from the information available in the other precincts." Then again on page 34 she cites King for her means of calculating absolute bounds. In Appendix A, she acknowledges King as a source of much of the voting data through the ROAD study, and in Appendix B cites him as the source of the method of Ecological Inference in detail i.e. : “The method of ecological inference developed by Gary King, and applied in this book, addresses the shortcomings of Goodman’s regression, significantly improving the accuracy of the estimates” and also attributes to him again the method for calculating bounds.
I do not know which sentences of King’s from her dissertation she took verbatim, and I presume there are some and she should not have, but Rufo and Brunet’s claims about her thesis do not seem substantiated: she makes it clear that she is using King’s work as the basis for her calculations.
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I looked at the two studies conflicting quotations regarding voter turnout as a function of proportion of the population that is African American in the papers themselves, and in fact the two studies found opposite results. In Louisiana, where the first study was conducted, voter turnout declined with proportion of African-American voters in the population, whereas in Gay’s study, which used voted data from Pennsylvania District 2, voter turnout increased with proportion of African-American voters. It seemed odd to me that she did not cite the opposite result as something that needed to be explained since she was obviously aware of it, but maybe it is considered normal that these variables covary in different ways in different states. In my field, if a finding is tentative and conflicts with other findings you would say “turnout rate seemed to” because you are describing only what happened in your own dataset. When you say “turnout rate seems to” it would be seen as a statement of a general relationship that has been uncovered or a conclusion that can be drawn. However, protocols like this differ between fields and Gay’s whole thesis is written in the present tense.
In conclusion, I think Gay did not hold herself to a high enough standard in rewording or citing some of these sentences but she did correctly plagiarize that particular sentence by flipping the direction of the association.
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I am asking this earnestly as a non academic, is there a correct way to plagiarize? Sorry for my lack of familiarity but anxious to learn.
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I’ve never denied there were a technical citation and quotation issues with isolated sections of her body of work. And if, by definition, every citation/quotation mistake constitutes plagiarism, then I agree there is “plagiarism” by that extremely broad definition. By that standard about every social scientist has “plagiarized” at some point in their careers. (I won’t speak for scientists bc I don’t know the requirements)
But she clearly had no intention of ripping off anyone’s written work. Not even the author you keep quoting claims otherwise. That may not matter to you, but it matters to me. In our society, when it comes to taking punitive action to address wrongdoing, intention matters.
Turning to the substance . . . The way it is being defined and used here, “guilty of plagiarism” can mean anything from using one citation where two citations are technically required (like in the very first Swain example you provided in support of Gay’s supposed “guilt”) to stealing someone’s entire body of work, such as using, verbatim, a paper found online and claim it as one’s own.
If your hypothetical student (even graduate student) does the former, it would be (or at least should be) treated as a teaching/learning moment with the error corrected and everyone one moving on with their lives. It would NOT be the end of the student’s academic career. If, on the other hand, the student dishonestly and intentionally stole and took credit the entirety of someone else’s work, the reaction would and should be much different.
Whatever else Swain is complaining about beyond the two isolated instances (including the one with citation!) it isn’t plagiarism, and she isn’t calling it plagiarism.
If I am wrong and there was further plagiarism as you allege, let’s see it? After all, we are being technical and definitional about plagiarism, are we not? So what else, exactly, was plagiarized? Other than the two snippets (one of which contained a citation) what exactly has Gay published that was written by Swain?
As I already explained, she seems to be trying to bootstrap minor, technical citation errors into a more generalized complaint about not have been shown the deference she thinks she deserves. That’s not an allegation of plagiarism.
But she’s not doing it repeatedly. Most of the instances are ridiculous accusations from the “Free Beacon” or whatever it’s called, and taking their count seriously is not justified by the underlying facts. See, for example, @ProfandParent’s analysis of the their claim she plagiarized her dissertation advisor.
Simple question, was Gay intentionally trying take credit for the writings of others?
In other words, was she intentionally trying to pass of the writings of other as her own?
As I understand it, it doesn’t conflict. The point concerns the linearity, not whether the line slopes up or down. But is worth reiterating that there are different standards and norms at work here, in different fields of study, and as you pointed out one can not just apply one to the other.
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Well, when I put the two sentences side-by-side it looked like she got a critical part of the sentence – its meaning – wrong. Since meaning is important, getting it wrong is as bad as plagiarizing if your goal is contributing to knowledge. However, she edited the sentence to reflect her own data so the meaning of the sentence was right.
But no, you should not plagiarize! My own experience is that students doing experiments based on my work sometimes borrow wording from my methods sections and do not edit it a lot because they consider it “boilerplate.” I require they edit it, but I don’t compare it to my own papers side by side, so similar sentences may slip through and I would not consider it a career-defining event, especially given that the paper they are modelling their section on is being cited. So I agree with Gary King’s position here.
Missing a citation that should have been included can also happen. Essentially every idea you are going to write is founded on someone else’s work, but journals will not let you provide citations for very phrase. What should not happen is that there is a swath/paragraph of identical or near-identical text that is not in quotes, and if a paragraph is very similar but edited so not in quotes, it should still be attributed.
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@mtmind, since you seem intent upon minimizing what she has done, let’s go through more examples. The next four examples are all from a single six page article she submitted while a grad student at Harvard.
This time, there is no argument as to whether she got the citations right, because according to the Crimson, she didn’t provide any citations.
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I would like to hear the takes of the academics @MWolf and @ProfandParent on the above listed examples.
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I would also like to hear from the profs in the group what potential consequences a student who had plagiarized/didn’t provide citations/etc in a similar fashion to Pres Gay might face at their institutions.
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I tried to get a copy of this paper on-line (which should be the easiest thing on earth?) and I can’t. It’s not listed in google scholar, the only place I can find it on the internet is Ohio State University but when I click the link I get this. I am not comfortable commenting without reviewing the two sources myself. Edit: I just read the Crimson piece and it mentions that the article includes no references at all. This is sometimes done when a submission is less formal, is invited and isn’t really considered a scholarly work. The fact that it is not on google scholar and there is no reference list suggests to me that this was not a normal publication. (That is not a license to quote someone without attribution, and would be a reason to avoid quoting someone.) Is this specific paper a smoking gun to destroy a career? Without having all the information, I can’t say, but currently I would lean toward no. I believe a career-destroying plagiarism case would not involve a few sentence fragments in an invited, uncited paper; it would involve a paragraph, more likely several, lifted wholesale without attribution and reproduced in a peer-reviewed publication that counted for merit and attracted citations.
I’m not that persuaded by the arguments that if a student had done what Gay had done they’d have been… summarily executed? made to sit in the stocks (it’s Boston after all).
I think an institution is within its rights to decide whether or not something passes the smell test, based on the situation at hand, regardless of whether a different case, at a different time, by a different human being, who is being evaluated by different groups of people would be given the same leniency.
I’m pretty sure that somewhere in academia- land a talented football player has graduated with a degree based on a transcript and a senior thesis (for schools that require them) that would have gotten someone else put on academic probation or a mandatory one semester leave. I’m also pretty sure that somewhere in academia-land a professor is now enjoying his emeritus status and full retirement benefits despite a track record of sexual harrassment and/or assault of undergrads which would have gotten him expelled if he’d been a sophomore frat guy.
Like I said upthread- no meaningful connections to Harvard, no axe to grind with Gay, I think she represents a sad trend of erstwhile leaders in our society who get prepped by lawyers instead of having an actual and thoughtful investigation of the facts. But whether or not her citations were accurate, robust, complete, etc… outside of the provost and Harvard’s overseers- who cares? It’s more revealing of Harvard as an institution (in my opinion) that whether or not gang rape of non-combatants is bad or wrong is apparently up for discussion and not roundly condemned. All this citation stuff seems to be burying the lede here…
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If someone wants to create a “Why Claudine Gay Is Unfit Because of Her Congressional Testimony” thread, I will read it. I don’t think we are limited to one Claudine Gay thread at a time.
That said, I think academic honesty is also a required trait of a professor, and those leading major research institutions should be held to particularly high standards.
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No, you are not reading the situation correctly. President Gay is one of Gary King’s most famous and successful students. He will look the other way and will deny any wrongdoing on her part.
He has absolutely nothing to gain from her plagiarism being proven, and everything to lose. He is not a disinterested party, and any of his statements must be taken as doing his best to protect his star student.
Moreover, that is not how it works. A person cannot “give permission” to somebody else to plagiarize their work.
Personally, I think that President Gay may have committed enough plagiarism that she should not be serving as the president of a university. Somebody else can decide whether her thesis fulfills the requirement for a PhD.
A President is not primarily an academic position. It is a political and administrative position. It is best to have an academic as a college president, but the best academics rarely make the best presidents. If President Gay’s scholarship is merely weak (and it is by any standard), that is not enough to disqualify her as President of Harvard.
However, her academic “character” is important.
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Stick a fork in her. She’s done.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/business/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism
Im not minimizing anything. I’ve admitted from the beginning she was sloppy, but I am trying to get an accurate understanding of what you are accusing her of having done. Because in my opinion, these examples don’t match your accusations. To clear it up, will you answer my questions? If not, why not?
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Regarding Swain, you suggest that “Gay is guilty of plagiarism far beyond the two quotes that (Swain) was not properly attributed for.” Other than the two snippets (one of which contained a citation) what exactly has Gay published that was actually written by Swain?
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In your most recent posts you again vaguely attack her “honesty,” implying she was intentionally trying to pass off the writing of others as her own. Do you believe Gay was intentionally trying take credit for the writings of others? If so, can you provide the copying which makes this apparent?
@MWolf, I believe @ProfandParent more than adequately addressed the issue of the absurd allegation that she copied from her dissertation advisor a few posts above.
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A DEI colleague of mine told me yesterday that Black academics and HR professionals are horrified that the plagiarism story about Gay has become a “pile on”. I told her I thought that was an over-reaction but now I think I owe her an apology.
There are senior folks in corporate roles (the world I know best) who would not withstand a thorough scrubbing of their resumes right now. A slight exaggeration becomes a bigger exaggeration which in the next iteration of their life becomes an outright lie. In very rare and greatly publicized examples someone gets caught. (Not talking George Santos type lying… things like attending a three day seminar at Wharton on “negotiating strategies” which then becomes a “Management certificate” from Wharton which eventually ends up as an MBA from Wharton.) Easily verifiable-- but it can go for decades unchallenged. People lose their jobs, everyone insists on more rigorous background checking protocols, everyone goes back to work. And in some cases- there is an internal inquiry, someone’s hand gets slapped, and nobody ever hears about it.
I remember a few cases after 9/11 where employees would discover they were on the DHS “no fly” list due to “mistaken identity”, so my company would hire an outside firm to scrub their background so we could show the government that they put the wrong person on the list. A few of these turned up… let’s call it stuff. Not talking unpaid parking tickets from college-- more like restraining orders, open arrest warrants, and in one very egregious case, a guy who had pled guilty less than a year before starting with our company for orchestrating the sale of company computers at his previous job (we’re talking felony, not misdemeanor level).
My point? Every organization gets to determine where the bar is. Your significant other took out a restraining order against you 15 years ago, you moved, have never contacted her or even been in the same state, and you haven’t been in any trouble since. Does that person get hired- or get fired once that’s revealed?
Is the President of Harvard on the same “we need to know” level as a United States Congressperson, or a Supreme Court Justice, or even your county sheriff? I don’t know- I certainly don’t care about the plagiarism stuff since I’m willing to bet that there are dozens of white guys now running universities who have done the same or worse.
They haven’t been caught-- true. Or maybe they have- and their Trustees have opted to keep it close to the vest.
But I owe my colleague an apology. Could be a pile-on right now.
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Harvard gets to choose the bar they set for their president. I assume it’s at least as high as the bar they set for their students ( IMO it should be higher).
Then investors can vote with their money and companies can vote with their job offers.
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