| HN Mirror

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

gnicholas 896 days ago

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.

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 896 days ago

> 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 896 days ago

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.

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).

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.

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.

Yes. You can type my first and last name into Google to find my publication list and Google Scholar.

I am disappointed by all the people whose understanding of plagiarism is limited to some mechanical set of rules enforced by a University research officer. Academic rules on plagiarism exist for specific reasons, and anyone in this field should be able to articulate those reasons or work them out from first principles. Once you understand why the rules exist, you’ll also understand why we take certain types of misappropriation much more seriously than others, and why in some cases violations can be addressed with a correction.

(It goes without saying that we don’t tell students this. We tell students that if they forget to cite a six-word sentence fragment, they’ll be put in the electric chair and given 20,000 volts.)

Further, saying one thing to students (undergrads) and another thing to Phds and professors is academically dishonest. Not that I woudl do this, but how would you feel if somebody told your students that you applied different rules to university presidents that were more loose than the ones applied to the students?

Thanks; I'm surprised you have an academic track record and yet defend her plagiarism. To me it's cut and dried: this was direct copying, without attribution, likely done with intent, and it's not just a few words going uncited, it's paragraphs with one or two words changed.

Do you truly think she did not intend to plagiarize or thought that what she wrote was totally OK? I've informally polled my larger academic community and by and large, they think that once the full set of examples was shown, that it rose to the level of "a person analyzing this text with the 'first principles' and 'reasons for plagiarism rules' would conclude it was career-ending.

ALso I'd like to say that I really don't like you saying "understanding of plagiarism is limited to some mechanical set of rules enforced by a University research officer". I had several classes when I was a grad student and we discussed all this in detail, as well as going over these sorts of things with other students and my advisor. We really did put a lot of thought into this, it's clearly not just applying the rules of the integrity officer.

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.