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.
It’s sad to me that simply bringing enough negative attention, whether it’s warranted or not, is enough to get organizations to cave. They had a third party investigate her writing and they found it didn’t fall to the level of plagiarism. The people she supposedly plagiarized all agree that the technical nature of what she was summarizing wouldn’t make it plagiarism. The majority of students support her and the work she was doing.
I’m curious if any other Harvard President has ever had this level of scrutiny on their work come years after the fact. Feels like it’s people dishonestly taking objection just because they want to see her removed and now they’ve succeeded.
I’m pretty sure the flimsy plagiarism matter is just the lever used to oust her after her poor handling of the students calling for genocide. That looked real bad for the school in the congressional hearing. That or a way to oust her without appearing to pick a side in that whole mess.
She simply refused to make a blanket statement that would exclude all nuance.
She essentially refused to agree to zero tolerance policies. Which, you would think that people would be against.
But it was trap, and the media successfully branded it as condoning hate speech, when that’s not at all what her refusal to take the bait was about.
Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
It only looked bad because the question itself was dishonest and meant to make the school look bad. The students did not openly call for genocide. They called for another “intifada” and repeated the “from the river to the sea” mantra (or whatever you’d call it). Both of these things would be protected by a free speech policy that, as she stated, requires things to be targeted and actionable.
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The word “intifada” means “rebellion”. It’s more a statement about Palestine defending itself than it is a call to violence.
It’s absolutely not flimsy- she’s only written a dozen articles and there’s been concrete examples of plagiarism in at least of a quarter of them. Here is one of 40+ examples of the plagiarism found:
Swain in her article:
“the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
Gay in her article:
"the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities.”
Swain in her article:
“Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent”
Gay in her article:
"Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%”
She never cited Swain in any way until she was forced to do so this year by the review board. If I pulled this in college in more then 25% of my essays I’d most certainly be in front of my department head in a very serious conversation, looking at suspension at least.
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.
Neither of those cherry picked quotes are egregious at all. They’re one sentence long.
I doubt any past Harvard prez has faced this much scrutiny, and I’m sure you would find plagiarism or worse among them if you did scrutinize them so extremely. That’s not really an excuse though, and doesn’t change the fact that the plagiarism issue is a real problem that wasn’t going away so resigning was the only way to move past it.
That’s what I’m saying, though… I don’t think anyone actually thought it was a problem until they decided they wanted her out. The supposed plagiarism was reviewed twice by independent bodies and they both said they couldn’t find an “intent to deceive or mislead”. They said that the quotations were negligent but wouldn’t be considered plagiarism in those instances and would typically be allowed to be submitted for revision.
If she was trying to pass off someone else’s words or thoughts as her own, that would be one thing. Missing a citation for a technical description doesn’t seem to fall under that umbrella.
We all know that plagiarism was not the real issue here. It was a convenient excuse to call for her resignation, but it was the other thing listed above that was the real push by certain well known non-profit groups to get her fired.
The people she supposedly plagiarized all agree that the technical nature of what she was summarizing wouldn’t make it plagiarism.
I don’t think that’s correct. I haven’t looked at the full list of people who were supposedly plagiarized, but at least one of them, Dr. Carol Swain, was calling for Dr. Claudine Gay to be fired.
This Carol Swain? Yeah, no, it has nothing to do with plagiarism, it has to do with Swain being pro-ethnic cleansing and is mad that Claudine Gay didn’t expel all Palestinian students or some other extreme action to show loyalty to Israel.
Holy shit that lady is insane.
She even somehow managed to blame Obama for starting all of this?!? wtf?
Don’t you know that Obama is personally responsible for 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina?
I know your argument is of semantics but I’d say it’s not relevant either way. The determination should be done by objective third parties.
And it was, supposedly.
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 you’re anti-semantic?
While that is true, I don’t think she actually addressed the substance of the plagiarism claims. She just issued a blanket statement calling for her to be fired.
It’s massive plagiarism actually. To the point she even copied the acknowledgement sections…wtf.
I’d not been following this story closely because it all seemed so utterly inconsequential. I couldn’t understand why anyone was this angry that she followed a lawyers advice at a formal hearing.
Now I see that she’s black in an important locus of elite power and it suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Now I see that she’s black in an important locus of elite power and it suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy about race. The white Penn administrator that screwed up their testimony in the exact same way in the exact same hearing was forced out in the exact same way.
No, but when you’re a PoC, it’s much more likely that people latch onto your story and watch you closely for mistakes instead of just letting things slide.
But that’s very clearly not what happened here and it’s detrimental to the discussion at hand to falsely label it as such. She in fact was able to let it slide for multiple months longer than her white counterpart and Penn.
More or less. And she took a neutral stance on the issue of students exhibiting their free speech, rather than expelling them all for not supporting Israel.
Which then led to all the certain well-known non-profits all about promoting Israel to start a furor calling for her resignation.
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Harvard. I remember having some respect for the institution, before learning about the legacy bullshit that props up the Ivy League schools. Now when I hear someone attended Harvard, the connotation is almost completely negative.
Behind the Bastards beat any respect I might of had out of me.
Here is the text of her resignation letter:
Good evening. This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this University. Each time I have done so to discuss with you some matter that I believe affected the student interest.
I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the University must always come before any personal considerations.
From the discussions I have had with alumni and other administrators, I have concluded that because of the plagiarism matter I might not have the support of the student body that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the University would require.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my job is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of Harvard first.
Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
Yeah, but her resignation had nothing to do with the shitshow of a hearing.
Won’t stop Stefanik from bragging, though.
Sadly, her name might have had something to do with it.
