Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Shortest Tenure in University History

macarthur_park@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 211 points – HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY RESIGNS, SHORTEST TENURE IN UNIVERSITY HISTORY | News | The Harvard Crimson
thecrimson.com

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

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I'm pretty sure the flimsy plagiarism matter is just the lever used to oust her after her poor handling of the students calling for genocide. That looked real bad for the school in the congressional hearing. That or a way to oust her without appearing to pick a side in that whole mess.

She simply refused to make a blanket statement that would exclude all nuance.

She essentially refused to agree to zero tolerance policies. Which, you would think that people would be against.

But it was trap, and the media successfully branded it as condoning hate speech, when that's not at all what her refusal to take the bait was about.

Damned if she did, damned if she didn't.

It wasn't the media at all though; it was fucking Elise Stefanik deliberately interrupting her prior response to hide the fact that her response was the same with regard to student speech vis black people or Israel.

Michelle Goldberg did a great write up of it in the NYT.

But let me correct myself. The news media in general did blow it by not catching on to and calling out what Stefanik did, but it wasn't universal as obviously some of us, including Michelle Goldberg, understood Stefanik's intellectually dishonest fake-out.

I think all presidents handled it very poorly. They didn't really push back much against the claim the students were calling for genocide. I think they agreed that the language was hateful, which, as far as I can tell, it was not. Considering their jobs, they should've handled it better. They should have protected their students from slander.

It only looked bad because the question itself was dishonest and meant to make the school look bad. The students did not openly call for genocide. They called for another “intifada” and repeated the “from the river to the sea” mantra (or whatever you’d call it). Both of these things would be protected by a free speech policy that, as she stated, requires things to be targeted and actionable.

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Eh, us professors care pretty deeply about the plagiarism she did. Intent or even knowledge of plagiarism isn't necessary for disciplinary action in plagiarism cases at major research universities. Any one of these examples would be enough for my university's academic integrity committee to rule that plagiarism occurred:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html

And in the case of a dissertation, plagiarism is an automatic expulsion and degree retraction from my university. At the PhD level, students certainly know that what Dr. Gay did is plagiarism (a good rule of thumb is that five sequential words, even with paraphrasing, without citing the source, is plagiarism), and that plagiarism is completely unacceptable.

I already know of a student who made the argument that their plagiarism wasn't as bad as Dr. Gay's, so because Dr. Gay wasn't penalized, they shouldn't be penalized. Had she not stepped down, that line of argument likely would have snowballed out of control. The professors I know think her comments to Congress were out of touch, but all of us had been livid that she and Harvard were saying that she didn't plagiarize--any professor who looks at those examples will tell you that she did.

Her students were not calling for genocide and the questions were a trap along the lines of "when did you stop beating your wife?".

I think it's fair to say that she did not handle it as well as she could have done - directly calling out the nature of the question would have been better. But her refusal to throw her students under the bus is to be commended.

Harvard received the first plagiarism complaint in October. The investigation of the claims in that complaint came to its conclusion on December 9. Harvard said they supported her as recently as December 12.

Harvard University announced Tuesday that under-fire President Claudine Gay will keep her job — even after reportedly losing more than $1 billion in donations since her disastrous congressional testimony about antisemitism.

The Harvard Corporation — the university’s highest governing body — made its announcement Tuesday following night-long talks between Gay and university leaders, a source familiar with the decision told the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

"As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University. Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the group said in a statement.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/12/news/harvard-expected-to-announce-claudine-gay-will-keep-job/

The Harvard Corporation expressed concerns about allegations of plagiarism in University President Claudine Gay’s academic work Tuesday morning, even as the board declared its unanimous support for Harvard’s embattled president, providing Gay with a path forward to remain in office.

“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a University-wide statement on Tuesday. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.” ... While the Corporation said it did not believe that the allegations amount to misconduct, it announced that Gay agreed to amend two publications.

“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” the Fellows wrote. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/corporation-raises-plagiarism-concerns/

That said, two additional complaints were submitted in December. One complaint was submitted on December 18 and the other was on December 29. I think the last one just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/fresh-allegations-of-plagiarism-unearthed-in-official-academic-complaint-against-claudine-gay/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html

It's absolutely not flimsy- she's only written a dozen articles and there's been concrete examples of plagiarism in at least of a quarter of them. Here is one of 40+ examples of the plagiarism found:

Swain in her article:

“the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”

Gay in her article:

"the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities.”

Swain in her article:

“Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent”

Gay in her article:

"Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%”

She never cited Swain in any way until she was forced to do so this year by the review board. If I pulled this in college in more then 25% of my essays I'd most certainly be in front of my department head in a very serious conversation, looking at suspension at least.

Edit: Lol, late breaking news! As of today plagiarism allegations now cover 50%! Half! of her papers as even more examples have come out literally a few hours ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html

And yet Swain seems to care about other things than the claimed plagiarism, which she didn't even mention in her call to have Gay fired. No, she cares a lot more that Gay wasn't vociferously pro-Israel and didn't expel the students for their pro-Palestine speech.

It doesn't matter one single bit what the people who she plagiarized think about her, if they're upset by it or not, or if they think she's a good person or not. That's not what plagiarism is.

She directly took language from the work of others without prior permission and claimed it to be her own. That's all the context that is taken for academic dishonesty- if I was accused of plagiarizing my friend's essay by my department and countered with "but my friend thinks I'm such a good person", I'd be laughed out of the room.

The examples you gave are also incredibly minor. I've taught students and dealt with plagiarism for years. Single sentence or partial sentence pieces like that are a minimal issue and, if considered one by the author, easily fixed with some quotation marks.

It's very obviously looking for a problem because it isn't the claimed plagiarism anyone actually cares about, but exists as a convenient excuse attempt.

Single sentence and partial sentence is a minor issue and totally understandable if it happens a handful of times (everyone forgets citations one point or another). But if it happens nearly 50 times in less then a dozen articles it's a very consistent pattern of academic dishonesty.

So, single or partial sentence issues less than 5 times in each article. Articles that are many, many pages long, as such published articles are wont to do, yes? Again, this just sounds like an "you should extend a reference to cover this as well" sort of suggestion and not a major issue.

So would you think it were a big deal if it were longer then a single sentence? Say like:

Bradley and Voss:

.. the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race's turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other's across the graph).

Gay:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race's turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.

Or like:

Canon:

The central parts of the VRA are Section 2 and Section 5. The former prohibits any state or political subdivision from imposing a voting practice that will "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." The latter was imposed only on "covered" jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, which must submit changes in any electoral process or mechanism to the federal government for approval.^3

Gay:

The central parts of the measure are Section 2 and Section 5. Section 2 reiterates the guarantees of the 15th amendment, prohibiting any state or political subdivision from adopting voting practices that "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Section 5, imposed only on "covered" jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, requires Justice Department preclearance of changes in any electoral process or mechanism.

Neither of those cherry picked quotes are egregious at all. They're one sentence long.

They’re not cherry picked, I’m just not going to list all 47 (as of today, more keep being discovered) instances of plagiarism here. The ones I gave aren’t even the close to the most egregious!

Would you prefer these:

Bradley and Voss:

the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race's turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other's across the graph).

Gay:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race's turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.

Gilliam:

Historically, politics has been a vehicle for upward mobility among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Minority political incorporation and the redirection of public resources that is hypothesized to come with it, should alter how people evaluate and relate to their local governments.

Gay:

Historically, politics has been an important vehicle in the mobility (and "mainstreaming") of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As a consequence, minority office-holding should alter how people evaluate and relate to government

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