> nothing will change until the system that produced this changes
Students chanting “from the river to the sea” while cheering on a terrorist attack may be the shark jump that prompts a systemic change. (Note: there is a huge difference between advocating for Palestinians and supporting Hamas. There is a huger one between supporting Hamas and supporting the October 7th attacks.)
Plagiarists- which Claudine Gay is- should lose their tenure, because their tenure was predicated on them being legitimate scholars, and plagiarists are not legitimate scholars.
It was established that she has a skimpy record, and nearly every one of those contains near-duplication of text without attribution. How could you ever trust an academic after it was exposed that they did that (intentionally)?
It's hard to be an academic but not plagiarizing is rule #1 or #2.
Picking one allegation from the top of the list here [1] (number "6"), it appears that she used similar phrasing to another reference, in order to describe a chart in her own work. But as best I can tell, the charts being described are completely different and based off of different datasets. [2, 3] So what I see in this instance is what looks like similar text matching, not theft of ideas or original research. If I'm wrong about this, I'll happily eat my words. Most of this stuff looks like that, or issues where she cited a reference but didn't include proper citations every time she summarized some fact (which should be fixed, but isn't a catastrophe.)
I absolutely agree that in some situations, text that looks like an exact copy isn't plagiarism. Intent matters!
But don't pick one allegation- consider all of them. When considered in whole, it's seems fairly clear her modus operandi is to 'copy-paste' entire sections of text and then change small numbers of words. And I suspect she had the intent- to do less work to create text that would get published. But I'm not 100% certain and I don't know what mechanism the plagiarism occurred by.
I dojn't think arguing that identical/similar text describing a different analysis is a good line of argument, either- wouldn't text describing charts that were completely different be.... much more different?
Interestingly, she didn't just earn tenure, she did so on a super fast track. She arrived at Stanford in 2000 and was tenured by 2005. [1] That means they put her up for tenure during the 2004-05 academic year. Normally tenure takes about 7 years, and about 50% of Stanford professors who make it to 7 years get tenure. Getting tenure in 6 is a little fast. Getting it in 5 is very uncommon. Getting it in 5 without any monographs (solo authored books) is pretty much unheard of.
My guess is that she had an outside offer (probably Harvard or Yale) and that pressured Stanford to put her up for tenure. I can't imagine an assistant prof with zero books published going to her department after 4 years and asking to be put up for tenure.
You can look at the charts themselves to determine whether they're different. And then if you determine they are, then talking about the slopes (or coefficients) of variables doesn't seem like plagiarism to me.
More generally, "the large numbers of incidents" here is exactly what I'd expect if someone ran a text detector, but didn't do any quality control to see if the result actually represented theft of original research.
I honestly think you are either intentionally or mistakenly ignoring the large swaths of direct copied text, as in entire sentences/paragraphs.
False positives in plagiarism detection is a problem but my inspection of the examples found roughly 3-4 examples of directly copied sentences, usually with just one word changed, from a paper that she explicitly cites elsewhere in the document. Under my understanding (I'm an ex-academic with published papers) this counts as real plagiarism, and since it's repeated throughout multiple works, I think it's safe to conclude she did this intentionally and just thought she wouldn't get caught. I could be wrong.
It's quite apparent from everything that has come to light that she got tenured for the same reason she got to be Harvard president. Merit was not one of the reasons.
She hasn't written a single book that wasn't field-changing, award-winning, and on the NYT bestseller list. (Of course, the same could be said for me.)
It took me a second to realize you were intentionally using a vacuous truth (any statement is true about all members of an empty set) rather than accidentally inverting "was" as "wasn't".
Students chanting “from the river to the sea” while cheering on a terrorist attack may be the shark jump that prompts a systemic change. (Note: there is a huge difference between advocating for Palestinians and supporting Hamas. There is a huger one between supporting Hamas and supporting the October 7th attacks.)