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by mcpackieh 893 days ago
> What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive.

> She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.

Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:

> After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.

> In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.

> Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.

> But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...

6 comments

The plagiarism allegations were first surfaced about a year ago, entirely unrelated to Dr. Gay’s embarrassing failure to condemn antisemitism.

> Over the past year, the accusations against Gay were a frequent topic of discussion including accusations that she is a serial plagiarist.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/behind-the-campaign-to...

It isn't just her plagiarism.

She has a very thin scholarly record. https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-ha...

That this this thin record which she has, is apparently partially contaminated

>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until [...]

If the recent youtube plagiarism drama[1] is anything to go by, you can do blatant plagiarism for years, get called out by randoms, and still get away with it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ

[2] https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-s...

It’s all about Israel and flexing power to remove others, a warning shot to institutions about what will be tolerated.

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.“

> The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people

This seems to be standard in academia. The president of Stanford was found to be a fraud through work he'd done years or decades earlier, it only came to light after an undergraduate went on the attack. How did nobody notice beforehand? Turned out that the had noticed and it'd all been swept under the table.

>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long.

Multiple German politicians have been forced to resign decades after their dissertations, with similar accusations. It seems like it is a case of rising to a point of public renown that then leads to greater public scrutiny. In some cases, I wonder if it a fake-it-until-you-make-it situation that upon making it, causes the house of cards to collapse.

Plagiarism and research fraud are rife throughout academia. If we subjected everyone to the same level of scrutiny we would find a lot of people who have done far worse than Dr. Gay. I am hopeful that new AI tools will automate this type of investigation and find more instances of academic dishonesty.
The president of Harvard should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny related to academic integrity than most people.
Everyone should be subject to a very high level of scrutiny.
The same ai tools that ironically aid in plagiarism and inability to give credit to their sources.
Does Turnitin not meet your standards?
I haven't used Turnitin for several years. From what I recall it couldn't detect cases where the author paraphrased another work without adding any original thoughts.