I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay's Getting Off Easy

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/

by mcenedella • 3 years ago

123 45 3 years ago

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

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...

nradov2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

pylua• 3 years ago

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

AlbertCory• 3 years ago

Does Turnitin not meet your standards?

gruez• 3 years ago

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...

bitcurious• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

greatpostman• 3 years ago

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.“

poulsbohemian• 3 years ago

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.

nvm0n22• 3 years ago

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.

vecplane• 3 years ago

Is it feasible to generate comprehensive plagiarism analyses for most or all published works?

andy99• 3 years ago

I wrote a paper this year (after about a 15 year hiatus) and apparently submitted papers, this was to an elsevier journal, now automatically go though a plagiarism detector of some kind that gives a score that can't exceed some value. We actually failed the first time because we'd published the paper on Arxiv first, which seems like a big flaw in the system. I don't have a lot of faith in, nor do I support automated detection like that, but it does happen systematically now.

Robotbeat• 3 years ago

It’s not a flaw from Elsevier’s perspective to discourage authors from releasing free pre-prints.

woodruffw• 3 years ago

Not without false positives, which are unacceptable (unless you're willing to put the work saved from plagiarism checking into absolving the innocent).

I was forced to submit essays to a plagarism checker in high school (well over a decade ago). The company running this checker had, in their infinite wisdom, included a check for writing complexity under the assumption that a 10th grader who writes like an adult is probably cheating. This was embarrassing for everyone.

yowzadave• 3 years ago

I had a high school English teacher who became suspicious of a piece of writing I did for this reason—no automated checking was necessary! he called me in to talk with him about the work, probed my knowledge a bit, satisfied himself that it wasn't plagiarism, and gave me a compliment for writing at a high level.

False positives are not necessarily deal-breakers, as long as the teacher treats the situation carefully before taking any disciplinary action.

hooverd• 3 years ago

As long as it's available to students so they can check their work for unintentional plagiarism.

matthewdgreen3• 3 years ago

If you screw up parallel parking while taking a driver’s test, you won’t pass. You won’t get a driver’s license. It’s a very harsh treatment. By contrast if you screw up parallel parking in the real world, the police (probably) won’t arrest you and take you to jail for messing up on your first few tries. There’s a reason for this, and it’s related to the reason we have very different standards at the undergraduate and professional levels.

twbarr• 3 years ago

By comparison, if you steal as an infant, you get off easy. If you steal as an adult, you don't. Screwing up parallel parking is a mistake, plagiarism is not.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 years ago

Based on the definition of plagiarism in the article, I'm not 100% convinced that only intentional plagiarism counts as plagiarism - it seems like omitting proper markings around something intended to be a quote, or dropping a \cite line under a section rephrasing an idea mentioned in another paper could be enough to be considered a mild form of plagiarism, to be punished with a "light" punishment that "only" derails your academic career for half a year.

Given the concept of "self-plagiarism" and given the treatment I've seen honest students (at a different university) receive for alleged plagiarism (turns out there are only so many unique ways to implement a fizzbuzz-level piece of homework), I'm not willing to blindly assume common sense here.

wredcoll• 3 years ago

Don't be silly. If I write a sentence in a paper that happens to be identical to a sentence someone else wrote, I've now committed plagiarism even if I had no way of knowing that sentence even existed!

matthewdgreen3• 3 years ago

This isn’t stealing. Using a meaningless sentence isn’t a very big deal. In academia we care about plagiarism because we care very deeply about the misattribution of academic credit. In practice this does not mean borrowing a sentence in an acknowledgements section, which is sad and embarrassing. It means stealing full ideas and written sections to take credit for them. We treat this much more harshly at the early student level to dissuade serious violations later in life. We do this for the same reason we demand exceptional performance on the parking section of the driving test, even though many licensed adult drivers are terrible at parking and society survives just fine.

Capricorn2481• 3 years ago

The reason is that those are two different organizations with different rules.

Also, this is not true? If you screw up parallel parking you're docked points. Lots of people pass with screwing it up, it's the most commonly missed part of the test

messiah_complex2• 3 years ago

The analogy is inapt. It's not illegal to fail at parallel parking. Even if it was, it's not the type of offense that would get you arrested. You say the standards are different, and they are, but then you conflate the two contexts by treating both consequences as punishments. Failing a test is not a punishment. Failing at parallel parking is not legally or morally blameworthy.

matthewdgreen3• 3 years ago

It’s not illegal to misattribute small portions of a sentence either. There is literally no law against it. We harshly dissuade it at the grade school, high school, and undergraduate levels (meaning, we will give you a bad grade) because we are trying to teach young students not to misuse even a fragment of text with extremely harsh punishments outside of the legal system. We don’t apply the same level of punishment in real life and certainly not through the legal system because it’s not that serious to borrow a few words in the acknowledgement of a thesis. It’s just embarrassing and bad, as long as the concepts are original.

ETA: I say this as someone who has had both scientific contributions and entire introductory sections copied verbatim into other paper. That’s plagiarism. A meaningless sentence copied from my work has as much relationship to serious plagiarism as a fart in a car has to a Sarin gas attack.

justinclift• 3 years ago

    In order to protect the author from retaliation, and because the proceedings of the
    Harvard College Honor Council are sensitive and confidential, we made the decision to
    grant this author anonymity.

Lets see how long that lasts...

alkhatib• 3 years ago

Another interesting read, from "the most read" section: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/29/steinberg-weap...

thedailymail• 3 years ago

As an academic, the real surprise for me is how thin her publication record is. At my institution someone with only 11 papers would be considered early career, not president material. (I do realize that different fields have different metrics of success.)

lacrimacida• 3 years ago

Is it always quantity over quality? Maybe just pumping out quantity exacerbated the plagiarism we’re seeing popping up more and more often.

mjdiloreto• 3 years ago

Seems like quality is lacking in this case also, considering the plagiarism.

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

What exactly did she plagiarize and where? Politics doesn't influence the severity of plagiarism.

When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year.

It would also help if the author or someone could give examples of specific instances and their punishments including this one (with the student anonymous and assignment vague enough that it's not identifying).

---

Accidental plagiarism is real plagiarism, but in practice, not a big deal. Even a few instances like "two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation", over a 100+ page dissertation and 11 journal entries, seem OK to me. I'm in academia, still I probably don't know very much, but my understanding is that individual violations like this often end up with lost points, not even a 0 on the assignment. The author mentions that repeat violations carry harsher penalties, but doesn't mention that the next violation is usually made after the student has been cited for the previous one.

On the other hand, just because someone went out of their way to hunt down an instance of plagiarism, doesn't mean it should be downplayed. If she ever intentionally plagiarized, then I agree with the author. Or even if she only accidentally plagiarized, but it was several egregious instances like paragraphs copied verbatim, I'm also inclined to agree (then she's not malicious, but incompetent).

mcenedella2• 3 years ago

Why flagged @dang?

tacheiordache• 3 years ago

Subject does not like being talked about or dissected too much.

I highly doubt @dang flagged this himself, other people did. It seems like a controll valve that can be used from time to time. Anyone can gang up with a bunch of others to mass flag a story.

asylteltine• 3 years ago

Because of who the subject is, plain and simple. Seems to be a double standard here as is typical.

dang• 3 years ago

The usual reason: users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

mcenedella2• 3 years ago

That’s fair. The comments were veering off from academic standards to mideast ethnic conflict.

But I do think the standards of the leadership of the world’s greatest university matter to Hacker News readers.

Gimpei• 3 years ago

I dunno. I was in academia for a while and wrote some papers, and in my field at least, the literature review was worthless and really only there to give other people in your field citations. Which is to say that it was not an area of great originality and if you’re citing somebody else’s literature review, you’re really just citing the grammatical structure of the sentence because there’s nothing original in what you’re saying. So I’m not especially bothered by copying a few sentences from there. It just seems a bit sloppy and a bit lazy to me. Which isn’t to say that I’m much of a fan of Gay. And it does seem like the much bigger deal is the thin publication record. Although, at the same time, isn’t administration the natural place for people who don’t like research to go?

craigdalton• 3 years ago

Has anyone got a link to a list of the alleged plagiarisms? The two alleged examples I saw shared on Twitter were not plagiarism. One alleged example was clearly referenced to the original author.

tzs• 3 years ago

Omitting quotation marks, citing sources incompletely, or not citing sources at all constitutes plagiarism according to Harvard’s definitions.

If anyone is curious what Harvard's plagiarism definitions are, they seem to be in this: https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what-constitutes-plagia...

RickJWagner• 3 years ago

In the end, this is hurting equality.

Clearly, Claudine Gay does not represent academic excellence. She is personifying the 'diversity hire' and providing a true-life example that will set equality back decades.

Harvard can and should do much better.

It's time to do the right thing, fire Claudine Gay and find a worthy replacement.

I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay's Getting Off Easy

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