[mcpackieh]

> What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive.

> She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.

Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:

> After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.

> In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.

> Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.

> But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...

[bitcurious]

The plagiarism allegations were first surfaced about a year ago, entirely unrelated to Dr. Gay’s embarrassing failure to condemn antisemitism.

> Over the past year, the accusations against Gay were a frequent topic of discussion including accusations that she is a serial plagiarist.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/behind-the-campaign-to...

[OrvalWintermute]

It isn't just her plagiarism.

She has a very thin scholarly record. https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-ha...

That this this thin record which she has, is apparently partially contaminated

[gruez]

>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until [...]

If the recent youtube plagiarism drama[1] is anything to go by, you can do blatant plagiarism for years, get called out by randoms, and still get away with it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ

[2] https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-s...

[greatpostman]

It’s all about Israel and flexing power to remove others, a warning shot to institutions about what will be tolerated.

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.“

[nvm0n2]

> The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people

This seems to be standard in academia. The president of Stanford was found to be a fraud through work he'd done years or decades earlier, it only came to light after an undergraduate went on the attack. How did nobody notice beforehand? Turned out that the had noticed and it'd all been swept under the table.

[poulsbohemian]

>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long.

Multiple German politicians have been forced to resign decades after their dissertations, with similar accusations. It seems like it is a case of rising to a point of public renown that then leads to greater public scrutiny. In some cases, I wonder if it a fake-it-until-you-make-it situation that upon making it, causes the house of cards to collapse.

[nradov]

Plagiarism and research fraud are rife throughout academia. If we subjected everyone to the same level of scrutiny we would find a lot of people who have done far worse than Dr. Gay. I am hopeful that new AI tools will automate this type of investigation and find more instances of academic dishonesty.

[daft_pink]

The president of Harvard should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny related to academic integrity than most people.

[pylua]

The same ai tools that ironically aid in plagiarism and inability to give credit to their sources.

[AlbertCory]

Does Turnitin not meet your standards?

[db48x]

The problem really isn’t that students at her institution support genocide. The problem is that when she asked if chanting in support of the murder of Jews was against school policy, she equivocated. She would not have equivocated if the students had been chanting that Blacks should be killed, instead of Jews.

[zdragnar]

Charitably, I think the point was that academics overlook it, like the dirty inside secret that everyone knows to not talk about.

Once she drew the ire of people outside the normal academic circles, things that should have been controversial (like blatant plagiarism) were brought forward.

Further, these people weren't looking specifically in the interest of academic integrity, they were looking for any reason at all to get her fired for not unequivocally saying that calling for genocide is outside the student code of conduct.

As a result, the allegations have, thus far, been treated as unworthy of much attention- it wasn't that they are right, but the accusers have the wrong motivation.

I don't know how much of this phenomenon is a modern issue, but it does seem to be very prevalent in today's society.

[OrvalWintermute]

I am against the genocide of any peoples.

The anti-zionist attacks, the anti-jewish genocide talk, and the anti-palestinian rubbling of Gaza are all deeply troubling. Consequently, I do not fall into either of the two main camps.

However, she is the president of a premier university and must be held to account for her serial failures to uphold academic ethics.

The Plagiarist must go