The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.
“Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.
It’s shocking that some of those Harvard profs said it doesn’t amount to plagiarism. Verbatim copying without attribution is plagiarism. University standards are all very clear about that, and undergrads are routinely disciplined for similar infractions. If the university president gets off the hook, it totally undermines all efforts to instill students with a sense of academic integrity.
It’s too bad that this plays into the hands of right wingers, but at the end of the day the blame lies squarely at the feet of Claudine Gay. She should not have plagiarized.
It doesn’t. Everyone is missing the fact that plagiarism requires an intent to mislead. It’s not plagiarism if you cite the authors in the same paper or even paragraph and then don’t quote something they said in a technical summary.
If I find a line in a book that I think is profound and use it as the basis for something I write with modification, it’s not plagiarism unless I’m attempting to pass that off as my own thoughts or attempt to mislead people into thinking that it’s my contribution to the body of knowledge related to the topic. That’s why the board didn’t agree with plagiarism and why none of the authors that were supposedly plagiarized (with one notable, political exception) felt it was plagiarism.
There’s a reason it’s being determined as “negligence” and corrections are being allowed as opposed to plagiarism and malice.
The vast majority of undergrad plagiarism, which students are rightfully disciplined for, falls into this type.
The student copies some text verbatim from a source, changes a few words so that it is not so obvious, then the source is buried somewhere in the references without any indication that text was copied verbatim from it.
The way to avoid getting tripped up by this is to just avoid copying what other people wrote, and write things entirely in your own words. Undergrads are held to this standard, so a university administrator (let alone a president) cannot to held to a looser standard.
It’s entirely on Gay that she did this, and on most of her papers too.
This is where you got it wrong. There were citations earlier in the technical summaries as she was referencing the summaries from those papers. That’s why she’s being allowed to correct her citations. She mentions the author and the source document/book/article but then did not use quote marks to denote that follow-up statements were also quotations. That’s why it “didn’t rise to the level of plagiarism” and was instead judged to be insufficient citation.
It doesn’t rise to the level of plagiarism if you look at it like a lawyer doing everything you can to defend a client.
If you look at the statements in question in context, even if she had put the quotation marks there, it would have been really weird to have quotations there. For the stuff she was writing about, a scholar would have been expected to write in her own words instead of copying what someone else wrote (with or without quotations). University educators fight a constant battle to get undergrads to understand this principle, and students get disciplined over such practices all the time, and rightly so.
Or, apparently, as an independent board trying to determine if someone plagiarized…
Setting up an “independent board” that won’t rock the boat is the easiest thing in the world. And in this case, the report was tying itself in knots to avoid saying Gay copied. “Duplicative language” has the same vibes as “enhanced interrogation techniques”…
Agreed 100%. It’s not some evil conservative weapon, it’s simply don’t quote others without attribution. Don’t give them that weapon against you, it’s crazy someone would think this wouldn’t come back to bite them.
Undergrads get held to this standard, so should all academics.