[dekhn]

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.

[matthewdgreen]

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.)

[1] https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10780874156200... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121593?seq=12

[dekhn]

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?

[JumpCrisscross]

One of the people she plagiarised concludes that she did, and believes Gay's "work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League" [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/claudine-gay-and-my-scholarship...

[gnicholas]

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.

1: https://www.harvard.edu/president/biography/

[matthewdgreen]

If I look at that person's profile, are they going to be more noteworthy for their scholarly work or for their strong political opinions?

[JumpCrisscross]

> are they going to be more noteworthy for their scholarly work or for their strong political opinions

Swain researches the "representation of African Americans in Congress." Gay's work was "on black congressional representation, electoral districting and descriptive representation." Any work on those questions will require voicing politican opinions; the work is deeply political.

[KMag]

Most people interested enough in politics to do political research are likely to also be politically active. However, it would be possible to do political academic research detached from one's personal politics. Similarly, most biblical scholars are religious, but there are notable atheists among them.

You don't need to be politically active to do political research and you don't need to be religious to do religious research. Though, the correlation in both cases is likely high.

[dekhn]

I think the author of that WSJ article has a political motive that is greater than her academic discontent.

Many of the people she plagiarized thought it was "OK" that she did so (not sure why).

[matthewdgreen]

People care if you steal their original ideas and/or forget to cite them entirely. They don't care about fragments of a sentence, or whether you cited them on every page. That stuff is more "sloppy and embarrassing" than offensive.

[dekhn]

I have to ask at this point- are you a published academic? The reason I ask is that there is specific plagiarism training in most programs.

There are very specific guidelines laid down, it's not about whether the person you copy "cares" or not. All of my training around plagiarism made it quite clear: the research misconduct officer will look at all the examples and exclude the ones that appear to be legitimate mistakes and false positives.

I cannot see these examples as legitimate mistakes or false positives.

[matthewdgreen]

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.

[dekhn]

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.