When the NYT and WaPo turn on you you're done.

She should never have taken that job

One of these, BTW, garners full-throated support from said same institutions.

She should never have been offered the job.

to make everyone* happy.

*Everyone: straight, rich, white men.

that would be a start.

she wasn't qualified for.

She broke standards her own students wouldn't survive violating.

Saying she cannot be expected to uphold the same standards is the actual racism here.

is about race or gender.

Dr. Gay was facing more and more accusations of plagiarism. If you've looked at the examples being reported, they look pretty serious. This wasn't one or two examples of sloppy citations. More and more of her published works have been shown to contain near-verbatim passages from works published by other scholars, without citations. That's serious. Many academic leaders have resigned for less.

There probably is institutional racism at Harvard - as there is everywhere - but there's not indication that played a role here.

And why shouldn't she have taken the position? Unless you're suggesting that she should have known that the plagiarism would surface?

Dr. Gay's resume was quite thin for the presidency of one of the world's top universities. She published less than a dozen peer-reviewed papers in over 25 years, she never authored a book and she didn't make any important contributions to her field of political science. In academia, these are important mileposts in one's career. In addition, there are numerous questions of the provenance in her writings with charges of plagiarism being indicated.

Two reasonable questions are suggested: Why was she offered the job? Why did she pursue it?

The second is easier to answer because to reach the apex of academia in her early 50s is an ascension of meteoric speed. The public exposure is world-wide, the money is astronomic and the influence is a mile deep and ten miles wide. Who wouldn't grab the opportunity?! Yet there are obvious dangers and pot holes on that highway and Dr. Gay is experiencing them now.

Harvard is the richest university in the world with an endowment of about $50 billion. The job of its president is multi-faceted and includes business and academic administration, fund raising, chief cheer leader for the institution and more. Did the university's board think Dr. Gay would be effective at those tasks? What was in her past that suggested she had those diverse skills? So the first question is why did they offer her the job? When compared to her predecessors' resumes and professional experiences, Dr. Gay doesn't have the same level of accomplishment. For examples, here is a link to the university's website page about the history of its presidents:

https://www.harvard.edu/president/history/

The questions about possible plagiarism are recent and their revelations are somewhat suspect. But they raise the question of why didn't the university vet her work more closely? Or are they trying to cover their asses? Are there other issues involved that the cowards won't speak of?

I don't know the truth, of course. Personally, I think Dr. Gay has been sucker punched and I expect Harvard will try to tar her to try to justify their current and past behavior. I agree with you, malaise, that she should have declined the job. First, it was probably over-reach for her at that time in her career. Second, the university's motives have always been suspect.

It's all pathetic and despicable. And predictable.

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People need to stop apologizing for people behaving poorly because of which "side" they're on. She had a ton of issues, and if she were on the Right, we'd not even be having the conversation.

A President cannot lead a university when they've done things the average student would get tossed for. And it really didn't help when the university pulled a "we've investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing." Right. And we'd accept that from anyone else?

If people really want to restore Harvard's reputation (which is indisputably messed up at the moment) they'd be taking a long hard look at the corporate board. Which may very well be the next step. I'm curious to see if Pritzker lasts.

The students deserve better.

You clearly know what the plagiarism accusations are with enough specificity that you know they would have gotten an average student tossed.

What, in your opinion, are the worst examples?

About the value of doing one's own work?

Let's go with acknowledgements as my personal number one because it's so stupid and so, so hilarious. Who does that?

Lifting entire paragraphs without quotation or citation in her dissertation is pretty bad (the Voss/Palmquist parts stand out). That would immediately kill an assignment for me with a professor. It would be an instant fail. Full stop. If you leave out quotes, maybe - people screw up while writing and miss things in editing. It happens. If you leave out quotes and it's not in your citations? You are failing that assignment with my professors. And it was her dissertation.

A university president should not have done what I myself wouldn't dream of doing, because I know I'd be risking my academic career.

But people are all mad she got caught. Ok. Be mad.

Everyone should be judged by the exact same standards as far as the law, as far as doing their jobs competently, and as far as not making such an ass out of themselves that they bring discredit to their institution. Always. Everyone. No matter ***HOW*** far left or right they are. Same Standards, to everyone, always. No more forgiveness for her being an anti-Semite and a plagiarist than anyone on DU would give her if she was a Trumper at Liberty University or some such institution.

Right and wrong actions are completely distinct from the personal and political views of the person, at least to everyone who is not a vile hypocrite.

She applied very different standards to the anti-Israel protestors calling for genocide ('from the river to the sea') than she would have to Nazis or Klansmen.

Good riddance, Harvard can do better, even my local JC could do better.

Bet it was quite substantial

it's going to get really, really ugly. This will also serve as a roadmap for anyone wanting to undermine DEI efforts at any public-facing institution. It's not about antisemitism or plagiarism. It's about keeping nonwhite people out.

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see the whole picture clearly and doesn't understand the stakes.

who without any academic qualifications whatsoever aside from a questionable connection to Jerry Fallwell Jr., was elevated to head a university "think tank" that linked their names and now snarks about "unqualified diversity hires."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/charlie-kirk-liberty-falwell-falkirk.html

"When the Falkirk Center think tank was established at Liberty University in Virginia in 2019, it quickly became the de facto headquarters of evangelical Trumpism on a campus that had risen to national prominence.

Its fellows included Sebastian Gorka, the former aide to President Donald J. Trump. Rudy Giuliani, the former president’s lawyer, appeared on a Falkirk podcast.

Now, less than two years later, Falkirk’s high-profile founders are gone, and Liberty is rethinking the center’s future in a post-Trump world.

The university quietly opted last fall not to renew the contract of Charlie Kirk, the combative young conservative activist who started the Falkirk Center with Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of Liberty’s founder. Mr. Falwell resigned as university president in August in the wake of a multipronged scandal that included allegations of sexual impropriety."....(more)

I have edited enough papers submitted for publication by people in equivalent positions to know that the kind of plagiarism she is accused of is, unfortunately, pretty routine. From what I have seen, it is more sloppy than it is theft.

In a university setting, it is publish or perish - so anyone up for president of a university or college will have a significant number of published papers or books. Depending on how thoroughly the editors of academic journals reviewed the text and citations it would be relatively easy to build a case that very few (regardless of race or gender) should remain in their positions.

This is a matter of targeting someone to oust from their job and finding the evidence to justify it. Until everyone is a similar position is systematically reviewed under the same microscope, those targeted will largely be nonwhite, female, LGBTQ, etc.

Defend it however you like, but to most people it sure looks like "rules for thee, not me"

It frustrated me to no end to spend hours upon hours tracking down citations, correcting citations, correcting quotes or paraphrasing passages that were too close to quotes, adding citations where there were none - for people getting paid far more than I was making (zippo as an editor of a University law review), all of whom should have known better. Had it been my choice, I would have sent them back unedited to the authors to correct them. But the decision to accept the articles for publication was made by the prior year's editors (who read, but did not cite check, the articles). That experience gives me a window into the dirty little world of academic publications that many looking only at the allegations against Gay don't have.

So what I am saying is that Harvard was looking for a reason to get rid of her; the plagiarism allegations are simply the justification. Having participated in the hiring of faculty and deans at a law school, I can tell you that none of the publications are submitted to the kind of scrutiny Gay's were. And my experience in editing articles for their peers tells me that if they had been reviewed, many would contain similar plagiarism.

Until all University/college presidents are subjected to the same level of scrutiny - and all who committed similar acts of plagiarism are asked to resign - it remains a justification to get rid of a politically inconvenient black female, not the reason she is leaving. And the fact that it looks like "rules for thee, not me" is only because no one is checking the other "mes."

I’d be hoping big time that I didn’t cheat getting my masters or PHD. I’d imagine every one of them is going through their works hoping to find nothing. And honestly, we should as a society expect university presidents to have perfect published works.

Of course University presidents should be held to high standards - although perfection is unrealistic (I invite you to take any randomly selected academic article and the applicable citation manual and verify it is perfect).

It is a matter of whether it is appropriate to hold a politicaly inconvenient black woman accountable to those standards based on the kind of selective scrutiny we are applying to her without subjecting others similarly situated to similar scrutiny.

Since the only scrutiny would be by the universities themselves of their own faculty, what other outcome would you expect to see? Classic fox guarding the henhouse.

Maybe the colleges need to check the other "me's" instead of turning a blind eye by tasking people like you to "correct" them.

Especially when students are held to a completely different standard. The colleges want to take the moral high ground by applying strict plagiarism policies for students by preaching how serious an offense it is, and then refusing to apply those same policies to the administrators and faculty. That's the part that angers me the most.

In my experience universities review quantity, subject matter, and readability of publications, but no one checks for plagiarism.

As for who does the checking - at least for law faculty - most faculty do not submit to their own institution for publication. So it is usually going to be someone outside of the University checking the citations. And, for law faculty, that means it is being checked by a student at another law school.

There are two things going on:

The standard (everyone's work is held to the same standard)
Level of scrutiny (the amount of scrutiny an individual's work receives to determine whether it meets the standard varies dramatically based far too often on who the person is).

Both for students and faculty, it is important to ask why a particular person's writing is being scrutinized. Is that scrutiny part of an evenly applied evaluation of all work - OR - as here - is the scrutiny occurring because it is an easy way to get rid of/punish an inconvenient person (while turning a blind eye to whehter others are meeting the same standard).

This wasn't a couple of sloppy citations. She lifted whole passages - sometimes a half a page - almost verbatim, with no citation.

It's the definition of plagiarism.

And what I am saying is that in the articles submitted for publication that I have edited, that is unfortunately as much the norm as it is the exception.

Perhaps such scrutiny should be part of the vetting process for all University/college presidents. But it currently isn't. So until all (or even most) others in similar positions are subjected to the same level of scrutiny of their work, this feels to me like justification to get rid of a politically inconvenient black female.

It's very disheartening to learn that this level of plagiarism would be considered acceptable. I'm not surprised that some scholars whose work she lifted have complained.

Students are held to higher standards.

But students face a similar disparate level of scrutiny. It is often the weaker students, who are often minorities or 1st generation college students who face heightened scrutiny.

Plagiarism doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - you have to actively check for it. That is tedious work that most faculty don't have time to do - so checking is spotty. There is far less scrutiny applied to the law review editor (especially a white male one) than the student at the bottom of the class who turns in a better-than-expected paper (especially a minority one).

I am guilty of the same kind of bias. One of the classes I teach requires two kinds of essay writing. I grade blind, but when I enter the grades I notice whether the grade is consistent with other grades the students have earned. I started to notice a few students who could barely form complete sentences or perform legal analysis on the first type of essay (the easier kind), but who were writing at the top of the class on the second (more difficult kind). I started actively searching for where they copied the essays from and came up blank. After confirming that they weren't plagiarizing, I talked to them about what I was seeing. It turns out that these students - universally - had on-the-job experience in writing the second kind of essay under the same kind of time restraints imposed in class.

But I was barely keeping up with grading despite putting in 80-100 hours a week. So the plagiarism I checked for was only that which stuck out like a sore thumb: metadata that showed up from one paper to another, phrases that turned up repeatedly in multiple papers that didn't come from the source documents, or dramatic changes in writing ability within a student. Out of 1700 essays a semester, no more than 10 were obvious enough that I did any serious checking for plagiarism. (I graded far more essays than most faculty - most 1st year faculty graded 4-800 essays a year, mostly on exams where plagiarism is less likely; writing faculty graded 150-200 longer papers). So students being held to higher standards is also illusory. They are held to higher standards if their plagiarism is so obvious it stands out.

I think the president of Harvard would be expected to hold a higher standard, though. Nobody would expect to have to check.

(or had someone do it on her behalf)

Are students awarded the same opportunity to have their essays accepted under similar circumstances ?

Making the examples of plagiarism a much larger percentage of her supposedly scholarly work.

If she had scores of journal articles and a handful of them had minor citation issues... this would have been different.

There should have been a better vetting process for her role. Online plagiarism checking is cheap (for some schools it's essentially automatic now)

Makes one wonder....

It's called Turn It In, and assignments are run through it automatically.

It processes your paper and highlights any passages that are lifted or appear lifted. Fortunately for me - because I am not a plagiarist - the only things in my papers that ever get highlighted are quotes and properly cited materials. It's almost impressive sometimes, because I really go digging in the data bases sometimes out of boredom to find the most esoteric citation possible. "It's a journal article from 1937! You'll never find it. Succccck itttt, computer!" Newp. It highlights the thing.

If I had not properly cited my work, well, I imagine no one would be offering me faculty positions anywhere. Maybe. Seeing all these apologias for what Gay did, I'm starting to give academia a little bit of a side eye about what standards they're holding their faculties and administrations to.

She gave plenty.

Race and gender are not a valid defense of incompetence, dishonesty, and rabid partisanship.

As I say, that's not what this little expedition has been about.

Not everything is about what *YOU* think it's about. It's this attitude that no matter how vile or just stupid a person behaves, we can't criticize and must support them because of factors such as physical appearance or political ideology. Damn right shed should have been fired, and just as fast as if they were a white male; the people who have any issue with this are our leftist mirror image of the election deniers and insurrectionists.

NO MATTER WHO SAYS IT.

The truth of a statement has nothing to do with the vileness of the person who utters it. Well except to people so blinded by ideology that they wouldn't know the truth if you asked them to prove it.

Just because some stupid MAGAts also don't like her means nothing, except to fools.

It's because of people so partisan that they even pick at stupid arguments, such as 'well, person XXX, a known asshole said this, so it must be false' that we aren't taken seriously when there is ACTUAL racism and sexism.

An act is exactly the same degree of wrong, or right, regardless of who does it. She supported genocidal statements and she plagiarized; only an utter fool could excuse those and say she should remain at the head of anything more than a popsicle stand.

And yeah, any time an anti-Semite is taken down, I rejoice, ALWAYS, regardless of any other circumstances or context.

If I hate my neighbor, begin watching him closely, and suddenly realize he's running a meth lab out of his house, does it matter my initial motive was because I hated the guy?

No. And when I report the meth lab, would you come rushing in, "He only found the meth lab, because he hated his neighbor!"

No. It would be absurd to do it.

So why does that fly here? That motive for seeking out wrongdoing is somehow worse than the actual wrongdoing?

It's this kind of foolishness that hurts us, IMO. Don't be mad she got caught. Get mad that she gave the Right the opportunity.

Fix blame where blame lies.

I'm the first to deplore Elise Stefanik and her gotcha expedition but there are two important points:

- Ivy League presidents get paid big bucks to be effective communicators. That's the core of their job. Dr. Gay communicated poorly to Congress.

She would have survived that. Except...

- High profile academics can't afford to have plagiarized in nearly half their published works.

If the dissertation that was a requirement for her doctorate contained plagiarism, it's not a far stretch to say since it wasn't her own words and thoughts, that she shouldn't have got credit for it in the first place.

Without handing wins to the far right. Trump is already calling for seizure of university endowments to fund his plan for an "American University" to indoctrinate university students. Dr Gay had major faults and stepping down was the right move but we have to tread carefully in these matters, lest we play into the rights hands.

by defending the indefensible.

I hope those sorry pieces of shit we have in Congress are proud of themselves. I find it disgusting that people like Stefanik, Jordon, and the rest of the rightwing morons fell self-righteous enough to criticize others for anything.

We are rapidly turning into a nation that is almost unrecognizable.

should be disciplined. And so anyone in a Harvard classroom who expresses support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza should be disciplined.

This is the reflexive stupidity of the right that just wants to shut down liberal arts education and shove their religion down everyone’s throats.

And apparently the muddled thinking of knee jerk “liberal” centrism once again steps in it.

M'kay?

You obviously ignored everything I wrote after the first sentence, hoping I would fall for your false framing and limp straw dog implication. I'm sure you would acknowledge that there are pro-Israeli students at Harvard who would speak up in class in support of Israel's war on Gaza. I believe their first amendment rights should be respected, as well as the spirit of open inquiry in any real academic institution.

Would you allow a student to express support for the Third Reich in a Harvard classroom? While I would find it abhorrent and obnoxious, I do not think they should be silenced or censored, unless they're being disruptive. Would you allow a student to support Netanyahu and his administration's stance on Gaza, a number of which administrators have made recent genocidal statements? I would, though again I would find it abhorrent and obnoxious.

Claudine Gay received racist comments and death threats after her testimony in Congress, where she was put on the spot with a gotcha question. We all know from whence such horseshit flings. Many faculty and students rallied to her support.

You might want to be careful about whose water you carry, m'kay?

Here's a recent example of the Israeli administration's rhetoric: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218568637

And here's what the UN says about ethnic cleansing:

Oh my!

tantamount to supporting the destruction of Gaza, because that’s what their doing. Moreover, and more to the point, when you make a law or administrative policy, it has to apply across the board to everyone. So even if you think your side is too gracious and demure to engage in such behavior, you still need to be cognizant of the larger implications. And the simple fact is, your side is not. Again, as I have said above, Netanyahu’s administration has issued numerous statements in support of wiping out the Palestinians in Gaza. It is simply naive to think all university students are rosy cheeked cherubs who would never say such a thing, especially those of a right-wing persuasion. Who do you think was sending racist threats to Claudine Gay?

I don’t know of any pro-Palestinian student calling for the genocide of Israel. Can you cite an example? It was a bullshit gotcha question from some MAGA idiot grandstanding in Congress.

I don’t need to supply an example, because it’s beside the point. And anyway, all I have to do is point to the pro-Israeli counter protesters, because what they are saying is “Yes, Israel has the right and the duty to destroy Gaza.”

By the way, continuous sarcasm doesn’t make an argument. It makes you look like you don’t have one, and comes off as weak.

Yo, bud: take that shit elsewhere.

it was the alleged plagiarism allegations that were suddenly discovered

that with unwanted controversy your professional days are numbered.

They were known some months back, before she testified before Congress.

But once the spotlight was on her, the allegations got a lot more notice.

that the main impetus for scrutinizing her record was the goal of pre-emptively shutting down speech on collage campuses.

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