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.
> 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.
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.
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.
In the real world the bar for “ending the career” of a researcher is very high. And it should be. We as a society spend enormous (often taxpayer funded) resources training researchers. This is why we don’t casually throw careers in the trash over missing citations and correctable minor sentence fragments that can only be discovered by machines. What we do care about is misattribution of substantive ideas, because that undermines the incentives that science relies on. Clearly the former sort of thing is extremely sloppy and should result in corrections and major embarrassment, it’s just not necessarily worth ending careers over. I have been the victim of plagiarism of both kinds, and I can assure you that disciplinary resources in the real world work nothing like the theory you’re taught in grad school. And sometimes that’s a good thing.
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/