Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Shortest Tenure in University History

News@lemmy.world – 211 points – 10 months ago

HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY RESIGNS, SHORTEST TENURE IN UNIVERSITY HISTORY | News | The Harvard Crimson

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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The same third party board that said she didn't commit plagiarism while also forcing her to add dozens of missing citations to her work where she directly copied sentences from other articles... Which makes absolutely no sense.

It makes perfect sense. Negligence is not the same as attempting to pass off someone else's ideas as your own. The third party boards that reviewed her work found that she didn't properly cite those definitions from the sources, not that she was trying to pass off what those definitions were as definitions that she, herself, came up with.

It very clearly wasn’t negligence- she cited plenty of other sources in her work that she didn’t copy word for word. She only left out the ones that she quite directly copied language from and did so on multiple occasions.

The review board let her off easy, giving her the benefit of doubt towards her intentions because she was the esteemed president of the university.

That's just simply not true. All of the quotes are word for word, whether they're cited or not. That's what makes them quotes. The quotes that weren't cited were written in summaries of technical descriptions for ideas where even the people she quoted agreed that she didn't plagiarize. Saying the review board let her off is while ignoring the actual authors (with one notable, political exception) means you think there's some sort of conspiracy here and that's just not something anyone should take seriously.

So if your definition of a quotation is something written word for word, whether it is cited or even at all distinguishable from her own work (read them yourself, they very clearly aren't distinguishable at all), what do you call something where she very clearly doesn't copy the original text word for word but instead rewrites it to better fit in with her own prose without ever citing it? Maybe something like changing:

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

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

It's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that the review board might've treated her differently from any random undergraduate because of her status within academia. That's just human nature, it doesn't even require intent to do so.

So you're going to ignore the fact that the people she cited didn't think it was plagiarism either. Again, the difference is in whether or not the quotation used was intended to be passed off as the author's own words which, in those cases, clearly weren't since they were in technical summaries and accompanying visualizations that were different from the original context. Saying "the definition of x is y and z" without citing the dictionary is negligence. It's not plagiarism.

If what you're describing isn't a conspiracy theory then it's also not a conspiracy theory to point out that no other former President of Harvard has had the same type of scrutiny brought against them and that she's being treated differently because of her status, right?

Yes, I’m going to ignore what some of the people she didn’t cite think, for two reasons. First because it doesn’t matter as to her intent at the time- they didn’t know her, she didn’t know them, they didn’t give her prior permission. Second because she’s the direct boss and controller of funding for many of them so there’s an inbuilt power dynamic there.

Have you read the papers at hand? They absolutely seem indistinguishable from her own writing. You’d never notice that it wasn’t- in fact it wasn’t noticed for years. She incorporates them directly into arguments and explanations as well.

I don’t recall any former president of Harvard needing to have an academic dishonesty tribunal review their work because they all cited their sources properly (it’s not that hard to do!). I’m quite confident that if they had they done that they would’ve been evaluated in the exact same way- other professors at Harvard in similar situations have gone through similar processes and been punished in the past.

See… you’re already wrong. Some of these people are people that she studied under and worked with regularly. Not all but most. Gary King was her senior advisor, for example. The other examples, such as from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam, are cited earlier in the paragraph. The later citations should have had quotations attributed but didn’t, hence the negligence and not malice.

This didn’t become an issue until the politics came up and I think you’re being dishonest to suggest that she’s being scrutinized because of some academic standard as opposed to partisan political points.

Also- so you say copying a definition (even when not word for word and completely indistinguishable from your own writing) isn’t plagiarism and copying an explanation of a graph isn’t plagiarism. That’s a bit of weird opinion but you do you. I just have a few more questions to prove your definition of plagiarism.

Would you also say that copying an analysis of a text isn’t plagiarism?

Gilliam:

This paper explores two models-symbolic politics and governing coalitions-that focus on how minority office-holding affects people's political orientations. In other words, after an extended period of minority empowerment, what is the distribution of political attitudes between and within racial and ethnic groups? Which groups and subgroups positively evaluate the results of governmental action and which groups will hold more negative views? What are the important demographic and political correlates of how citizens respond to minority empowerment?

Gay:

The central question of this chapter is "How does black representation impact attitudes?" More explicitly, what is the distribution of political attitudes between and within racial groups in black-represented districts? How do groups evaluate the presence of black incumbents? What are the important demographic and political correlates of how citizens respond to minority political leadership?

Would you also say that copying an explanation of a law isn’t plagiarism?

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.

How far are you willing to stretch the definition of plagiarism?

That’s not what I’m saying at all. Either you’re not paying attention or I was right and you’re being dishonest. Plagiarism requires intent to deceive. That’s what’s in question here. Citing someone at the beginning of a paragraph and not repeating the citation later in the same topic or summary is negligent and maybe a little careless but not malicious - and that’s exactly what the review board found and what the people she supposedly plagiarized agree on.

There’s no need to stretch the definition. The definition already includes the idea that the act has to be “to pass of as one’s own work”. That’s not what she was doing. She was using the summaries from the other papers and cited them earlier in the paper.