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.
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.