From Harvard’s webpage on avoiding plagiarism with my bolds added . . .
When you fail to cite your sources, or when you cite them inadequately, you are plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard. Plagiarism is defined as the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else.
Under this definition. even unintentional failures to properly cite sources qualify as plagiarism.
One would think, but plagiarism and the punishment for plagiarism is a complicated and contextual matter, and when people refer to plagiarism they aren’t aways talking about the same thing. Harvard’s old guidebook acknowledges that “incidents vary in seriousness and in circumstance” and range from “insignificant” to egregious . . .
Many students have at some point in their careers obliviously or lazily incorporated a few phrases from a source, or simply absorbed a basic idea from a source that should probably have been cited. In such cases, the plagiarized material represents an insignificant contribution to the paper in question. When more substantial sections are involved, occasionally a student has been confused about the rules of acknowledgment. At the other end of the scale is the student who cold-bloodedly plagiarizes entire sections or a whole paper because he or she doesn’t care about the course and is unwilling to give it any time.
In short, given the broad definition of plagiarism that does NOT require intentional acts, it is an oversimplification equate plagiarism with dishonesty in all circumstances.
ETA: I see you linked to a related page, but he actual “definition” is on the page I linked above. Frankly Harvard seems a bit all over the place on what is plagiarism, which is why I focus on their definition.
Seems that plagiarism is not just a “conservative weapon”, because Business Insider is going after Bill Ackman’s wife for a lack of quotation marks in her PhD thesis. Here’s her tweeted apology:
Which follows Blossom’s advice for damage control, instead of making threats against the publication:
I understand what you are saying here, and agree that the board made errors. And going forward, they certainly ought to change their vetting process.
But I am not sure if reasonable to think they should have seen it coming, or that they acted negligently in appointing her in the first place. This is a new paradigm. Mistakes like the ones she made would not have cost previous presidents their job, not because they were morally superior, but because they didn’t evoke the kind of outrage that she does. To put it simply, they never would have been investigated the way she has been. And even if they were, the chances of anything coming of such unimportant errors is miniscule.
As a point of reference about how different this situation is, go back and take a look at the scope and apparent intentionality of Neil Gorsuch’s plagiarism. Gay’s transgressions pale in comparison. The outrage, though, is tenfold (at least) for Gay than it was for Gorsuch who became a Supreme Court justice even though the plagiarism was discovered beforehand. Society didn’t really care and it has largely been forgotten. And of course the right wing culture warriors dismissed it is not serious.
Here though, there is outrage, outrage, and more outrage. Where was all this outrage then? Surely SC Justices ought to be intellectually “honest.”
Times have changed. What used to be a nothing burger now matters. Alternatively there is a hypocritical double standard that applies to Dr. Gay. Or both.
I think a better one is with the president of Stanford, who resigned after some papers he was a co-author of were found to have falsified data. As far as I know, nobody has accused him of either falsifying the data or even knowing about it. But as a co-author, he was responsible for vetting what he attached his name to. And because of his mistakes, he could not stay on as president.
Claudine Gay’s transgressions were much less serious than falsifying data, but she was more directly responsible for the ones in her papers. And given how students would have been treated in a similar instance, she also had to go.
The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)
Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.
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The idea that clear and long-established criteria for plagiarism should have been thrown out to save the elite-born president of an elite university, solely on the basis of her skin color, is not only preposterous; it’s that old soft bigotry. There are talented senior academics and administrators of color across this country who don’t need anyone to lower plagiarism standards for them. Harvard can, and should, hire one of them. Doing so would put a thumb in the eye of the meddling right, defending the ideal of diversity while sending a clear message that neither conservative media nor billionaire alumni get to decide who runs the university.
Tessier-Lavigne resignation was brought on at least in part by his failures as an administrator. Specifically, he did not adequately supervise those working under him in his lab, nor did he immediately correct the falsification issues when they were discovered.
More to the point, the comparison wasn’t intended to rehash whether Dr. Gay should have resigned or not, but rather to explore the different levels of public outrage regarding plagiarism by public figures in important positions. In this regard, Gorsuch is very much the right comparison.
Why the remarkably different treatment of Gorsuch as opposed to Gay? Is it sudden change in how we view such issues, or is it something else about Gay that is driving this?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for Conservative culture warriors to demand that Gorsuch resign.
So we both agree that he should have resigned. But are you suggesting that if Tessier-Lavigne had not resigned, that he could have weathered the outcry that would have resulted? I don’t think that’s true.
The reason I don’t think that the Gorsuch situation is the same as Gay’s is that the standards are different for the leader of an educational institution vs that of a political appointment. Yes, judges appointed to the Supreme Court should ideally be apolitical and have the highest ethical and moral standards. But we know that’s long not been true or necessary.
On the other hand, if people now want to go after Gorsuch’s head, I certainly won’t be defending him.
I’ll bite. Sadly (that’s IMO that its sad) the SC justices apparently have a different level of ethical scrutiny. The kind of stuff that has come to light with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would get any other judge elsewhere removed for code of conduct violations doesn’t happen to the SC judges. So it’s a waste of breath to call for Gorsuch’s removal. That differs for academicians who have been found to have plagiarized. This thread is about academicians.
