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.
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”…