In 2002 it came to light that the historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, had “unintentionally” incorporated passages from other writers in one or more of her books. She blamed it on a sloppy methodology in note-taking, very much as the Harvard President is now doing. That didn’t wash. Goodwin was forced out of her position as a frequent contributor to the PBS NewsHour, was disinvited from giving a commencement address at the University of Delaware, and resigned from the 30-person Harvard Board of Overseers. The Harvard Crimson was particularly hard on her, citing the language of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Handbook which, if violated by a student, would be noted on the student’s record and gravely damage if not utterly torpedo aspirations for any sort of academic career. “Goodwin’s plagiarism of sentences, nearly verbatim, from source materials is inexcusable… Even though the plagiarism was apparently unintentional, Goodwin’s gross negligence… constitutes the lack of respect and appreciation of others’ work that cannot be condoned by anyone who purports to be a model for the Harvard Community.” She should resign from the board so as to “respect the reputation that it and each of its 29 other members have worked hard to establish.”
She did that, as she should have. The parallels are not perfect. One might argue that, if anything, Goodwin’s plagiarisms, the omission of quotes around unremarkable passages taken from her sources and hardly original ideas, was less egregious in a “trade book,” a work of popular history, than they would have been in a peer-reviewed work purporting to be original scholarship. But much else is similar to the position of the Harvard President - the importance of leadership, the example set for the University Community, the integrity of the institution itself. And, I suppose it must be said, Goodwin’s critics and cancellers some twenty years ago were not actuated by what is being darkly suggested by many today in the case of President Gay - that racial animosity and resistance to DEI is the true unacknowledged reason for the furor. Perhaps standards were simply higher in those days that now seem so long ago.
Wow. I don’t know how anyone could defend Claudine Gay after reading the 40 allegations highlighted in the document.
The highlighted sentences show a scholar who is too lazy to try to mask the stealing of somebody’s work. Active voice becoming passive voice or vice versa. Inserting/deleting a few words here and there such as changing “we” to “I.” Listing items in essentially the same order (e.g., “work areas, villages, prisons, candomble and umbanda temples, samba schools, afoxes, churches, and favelas” were copied verbatim except “afoxes” which was somehow dropped).
This is not some international Ph.D. student whose native language isn’t English struggling to write a paper in STEM where there are only a few ways to state a mathematical definition/theorem or describe an experimental setup/result. This is the President of freaking Harvard writing about political science.
She can no longer serve effectively, much less pretend to implement an academic integrity standard at Harvard. I hope the new president is a better choice.
How are you explaining your characterization of her “inadvertent citation errors” then? These things don’t just happen. The various excuses you have proffered for this don’t hold water (a proper paraphrase somehow got edited back to identical language from the original source?—ludicrous!)
I am responding to you statement that “Other times there is an attempt made to rewrite so as to avoid using too much of the others material, and those attempts fall short.” The “falling short” here consisted of copying whole phrases verbatim and substituting in a couple of words in other cases. Even someone with only passing familiarity with proper paraphrasing can clearly see that there was no reasonable attempt to paraphrase in these cases.
Did she know proper citation and paraphrasing procedures and just “accidentally” forget to use them? Or was she misinformed and thought what she was doing was acceptable? Either way, it’s plagiarism. This wouldn’t pass muster for a first-year writing class.
To me, it’s almost worse if someone is substituting in occasional words in a patchwriting strategy , because that demonstrates that they are fully aware of what they are doing (i.e., it’s intentional), but they are just not willing to put in the effort to actually paraphrase properly.
Agreed! I’ve looked through the first 15 pages, and these samples are BAD! Claiming other people’s constructs/measures as her own. Copying a citation in a plagiarized passage without citing the source she actually got it from.
LOL. Of course I didn’t write this, nor did I say that she did this. I was giving you generalized examples which refuted your suggestion that all plagiarism was necessarily intentional. But then you know this. Should you lose your career for misrepresenting me?
If the purpose of the strategy was to deceive the reader, then I would agree. But if it was an unsuccessful but well meaning effort to to avoid plagiarizing, then no.
Intentionally trying to deceive the reader is magnitudes worse that trying to do the right thing, but falling short.
You offered those as explanations for what somebody could have done. 1) They don’t hold water. 2) If you didn’t mean them to apply to Dr. Gay, you should have been explicit. We are discussing a specific case with actual evidence of wrongdoing, not some abstract theoretical exercise.
And now you’re being beyond ludicrous with threats towards me.
This wasn’t “trying to do the right thing”. Not even close. The just-revealed trove of more plagiarization demonstrates exactly that: the deception was egregious and widespread. Can’t wait to read your weak rationalizations of those!
Copying a citation in a plagiarized passage without citing the source she actually got it from . This is egregious stuff.
It’s not egregious. I once used values from a published paper (which I cited) to generate an estimate for another variable for one of my papers, but I left out a step. (Hope you’re not going to fire me for this.) My mistake subsequently appeared in at least 20 other papers all of which cited the original paper rather than my paper, although they clearly did not calculate the value themselves using the original paper because it was idiosyncratically incorrect. Should all these people be fired? (Nobody was.)
I briefly looked at the article above to see if there were new examples. The first example I saw was a side by side comparison of a Bobo and Gillam paper and Gay’s thesis. She begins the paragraph (I am paraphrasing from memory) “Bobo and Gillam (1990) conducted the definitive work on this topic, in their analysis of African-American voting behavior. Bobo and Gillam (1990) examined black empowerment–defined as a black mayor in office–” etc. She stole the wording of the sentences and should not have, but she did not represent the ideas as hers. Lifting the parts of the phrasing relevant to her point verbatim from their paper is plagiarism. However, her thesis is 217 pages long. If this is found in a lot of places it’s bad. If it’s in a few places, I would call it lazy and sloppy, not a crime.
I once got a manuscript to review where the entire methods section was a verbatim reproduction of a methods section from a paper I wrote with two colleagues. Two entire pages of our methods, with identical wording. The only difference from what we had written was that they cited us at the end of every sentence, although our words were not in quotes. We debated whether we were going to report them to the journal editor but ultimately took a different route. The authors were Japanese, and may have had challenges with English (the best written part of their paper was our part lol!) Instead, while accepting the paper we told the editor that we were uncomfortable with the level of verbatim reproduction of our words. The editor asked them to rephrase. No one was fired – even though that was the most egregious case of plagiarism I have seen, and we now call those guys “the plagiarists” among ourselves. But they were not trying to steal our ideas, so we were more shocked at the audacity than morally affronted.
I give these examples because everyone in academia has stories like them. I think there is a lot of pearl clutching going on. At this point I wouldn’t mind if Gay stepped down just so we could stop talking about her and move on. But whether she did the deed or not, it does feel like a lynching.
As you well know, I am not “making threats toward you” but rather pointing out the absurdity of meaningless misattribution costing someone their career, like you are gunning for with Dr. Gay.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on whether one should lose their job for 30 year old mistakes without compelling evidence of dishonesty.
Really? As understand it, it is the same old claims, just differently packaged. Interesting you have such strong opinions with so little familiarity with the underlying issues.
How do you know she wasn’t dishonest? Going over the 40 allegations again, I see roughly half where one could give her benefit of the doubt, blaming it on her sloppiness. For example, these two:
• Gay never cites Freedman and Owens 2011. She thanks the two of them for letting her use their data (p. 66n.22).
• Orr et al 2003 is not cited in this paragraph, or any at any later point in the paper. It is cited early in the previous paragraph on p. 154, and it is cited on p. 155 in the text accompanying Figure 1. No quotation marks are used around verbatim language.
In the above, the original authors were at least getting some credit. There were, however, quite a few instances where the original authors were given zero credit, creating the false impression that the statements all came from her. For example, these four:
• Gay’s article has no citations. At the end of the article (p. 28), there is a separate section entitled, “Suggestions for Further Reading.” David Covin’s work is not mentioned there.
• Gay never cites Williamson 2011.
• Palmquist and Voss 1996 is never cited.
• Hochschild 1996 is never cited.
Once or twice, you can blame it on sloppiness. You can even blame it on being a young graduate student who hasn’t developed the habit of carefully vetting every sentence in a paper. But multiple times, including after she became a professor at Stanford and later at Harvard? If she wasn’t dishonest, she is an academic bully who has no qualms about taking credit of others’ work.
And this morning, there are two featured articles in the NY Times, although in terms of content these are several days behind the Crimson, and therefore only cover a few allegations. These are gift articles, and therefore available to anyone.
I agree it doesn’t seem like she will last until May. Perhaps the board president goes too, as at Penn.
I have to wonder if anyone (Gay and/or Board) talked about her potentially not going to the Congressional dog and pony show, as at that point they already knew about the plagiarism charges and the investigation. Seems like a misstep there, although obviously aided by hindsight.
At this point, it’s uncertain she will survive through the end of this calendar year. Aside from the PR damage, Harvard is hemorrhaging both money and talent:
Harvard EA applications have dropped 17% relative to last year.
It would be an epic disaster if Gay actually reappeared before Congress again, as she is already damaged in the court of public opinion and there are plenty of visuals that can bury her (such as the screenshots in post 50 above). In addition, it wouldn’t surprise me if Congress called upon Harvard’s Board to testify to justify its decision as well.
I want to be clear that I DID NOT support Harvard, Penn, or MIT being called before Congress the first time, and I DO NOT support Harvard being called before Congress again. Congress has better things to do with its time.
However, I do support an objective third party investigation as to whether undergrads and grad students at Harvard would have been given the leniency that Claudine Gay has been given. Her continued standing as professor should reflect the most serious penalty given to that of students with similar infractions.
History is filled with PR nightmares- sexual abuse among priests, the Tylenol poisonings, toxic shock syndrome from “new and improved” tampons, Bhopal, thalidomide, Agent Orange, Kent State, Jerry Sandusky and a host of oil leaks in pristine waterways killing marine life and birds.
Smart institutions are constantly prepared for the next shoe to drop. They have a War Room ready to go, they have a playbook which gets updated regularly, they have a roster of tried and true experts who periodically brief the leadership team on best practices.
Why Harvard did not have any of those things is a question for their stakeholders to ask (students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees). But it is curious nonetheless.
