Can Claudine Gay survive as President of Harvard with the increasingly numerous cases of plagiarism found in her writings? I don’t think so. Even the Harvard Crimson has published an article saying that some of those cases rise to the level of plagiarism forbidden by Harvard’s student code, and the New York Times details the new instances as well. Both articles are below, and you can click the headlines to read them. Taken together, and with the similarity of articles not disputed (though Gay insists her record of scholarship is spotless), these will embarrass Harvard to the degree that, I think, they’ll have to ask for her resignation fairly soon. Otherwise, she’ll always be known as “the Plagiarizing President”—someone who eroded the reputation of Harvard. Yes, she’s Harvard’s first black woman President, but even that, I suspect, won’t save her from getting a pink slip.
The Crimson article is pretty well balanced, listing examples of plagiarism, and saying which are justified (i.e., violate Harvard’s standard’s of impermissible copying) and which are not). Click below to read:
As we’ve learned before, the Harvard Corporation reviewed Gay’s academic history and the accusations of plagiarism, and she “voluntarily” made four changes in three articles. After that, Harvard said they would keep her on. There were then more allegations:
The Free Beacon article focused on four articles by Gay: a 1993 essay in Origins, a historical magazine then printed by Brock Publishing International Inc. in Ontario; her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation from her time as a graduate student at Harvard; and two papers she wrote while a professor at Harvard, in 2012 and 2017. Rufo and Brunet’s Substack post only discussed her dissertation.
The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.
Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.
A Harvard web page titled “What Constitutes Plagiarism?” says that when copying language “word for word from another source,” scholars “must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.”
The Crimson could not confirm whether such policies or similar versions were in place in 1997, when her dissertation was published. Swain did not answer questions about the state of the policy at the time.
The accusations involve Gay’s dissertation, an essay in “Origins”, a history magazine, and articles in 2012 and 2017. In all cases Gay’s words are compared to earlier ones, and in some cases the similarities simply cannot be ascribed to coincidence. And many are too long to reflect “convergent thought.” Most of the authors who are quoted don’t think Gay committed plagiarism, but at least ten people contacted by the Crimson refused to comment, which might be telling.
Click below to read the new NYT article, which adds the news that a Congressional committee is investigating her work. Why is that necessary?
An excerpt:
Harvard University, in the face of mounting questions over possible plagiarism in the scholarly work of its president, Claudine Gay, said on Wednesday that it had found two additional instances of insufficient citation in her work.
The issues were found in Dr. Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Last week, Harvard said that an earlier review had found two published articles that needed additional citations, and that Dr. Gay would request corrections.
“President Gay will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation,” the university said on Wednesday of the additional findings.
The news was an embarrassing development for the university, which has sought to quell tumult over Dr. Gay’s leadership in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, a congressional committee currently investigating Harvard sent a letter to the university demanding all its documentation and communications related to the allegations.
. . .Altogether, the allegations accuse Dr. Gay, a political scientist, of using material from other sources without proper attribution in her dissertation and about half of the 11 journal articles listed on her résumé.
The examples range from brief snippets of technical definitions to paragraphs summing up other scholars’ research that are only lightly paraphrased, and in some cases lack any direct citation of the other scholars.
Note that Gay’s c.v. (you can find it here) is fairly thin for a faculty member at a major university: a total of just eleven peer-reviewed journal articles (the last in 2017) and one edited book. (I have over 120 articles and one scholarly book, and I’m by no means at the top of the publishing heap in my field.) So the proportion of plagiarized pieces in Gay’s oeuvre (about half) is pretty high.
Finally, there’s this, but there’s a lot more since the article is long:
As allegations mounted last week, faculty members at Harvard and scholars elsewhere offered varying assessments of the severity of the infractions, with some seeing a disturbing pattern, and others calling them minor or dismissing them as a partisan hit job.
But to some, the issue is plain: Dr. Gay committed plagiarism — a word which does not actually appear in the Harvard board’s initial statement on Dec. 12 — and Harvard should admit it.
Carol Swain, a political scientist who retired from Vanderbilt University in 2017, said that she was “livid,” both at Dr. Gay’s use of her work and Harvard’s defense of her.
“I also have a concern that Harvard University decides it gets to redefine what plagiarism is when it suits its needs,” she said. “That to me is unacceptable.”
My view: if you look at the material, it’s clear that Gay committed plagiarism. While I don’t think a Congressional committee should be investigating this (WHY?), hers is not suitable behavior for a Harvard President. If a Harvard student would be thrown out for having done this, why wouldn’t a President? The fact that she’s black and female is, I think, giving her some protection from being booted.
Still, Claudine Gay should resign.
h/t: Greg
John McWhorter’s Twitter thread on this is astute.
It starts:
“The tipping point is here. It’d really be good if Claudine Gay resigned now. The mere 11 papers was unseemly, but just maybe a university president doesn’t need to be a top-class scholar. But the sheer volume of the plagiarism ON TOP OF THIS is a really bad look.”
The final two Tweets of the thread are:
“Meanwhile, the implication will be that this kind of mediocrity and sloppiness is somehow okay for black scholars, that the symbolism of our blackness, our “diverseness,” is what matters most about us. I am unclear where the black pride (or antiracism) is in this.”
and …
“But – Harvard won’t dismiss her, out of fear of being called racist (and, I suspect, out of a quiet sense that it’s racist to expect the best from black people …?). Prof. Gay should do the right thing for Harvard, herself, and black America and step down.”
+1
You and I were typing at the same time, Coel!
And McWhorter has now published a NYTimes opinion piece stating his case for this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay.html
Last week, I thought this was still potentially salvageable — IF the Harvard Corporation (essentially their name for their board of trustees) came out and clearly condemned this as plagiarism and the Harvard faculty censured her for academic integrity issues. But if both bodies also emphasized that these weren’t about major appropriation of ideas (like stealing a complete paper or major idea), they could perhaps may a case that they believed Gay could still potentially function as president.
The opportunity for that is over, though. Especially with Harvard’s inability to actually call this plagiarism — instead using phrases like “inadequate citation” and more recently “duplicative language.”
This is, frankly, very embarrassing to me as a former academic. This is plagiarism, plain and simple! It’s not perhaps the most egregious and awful form of plagiarism where someone basically steals an entire concept for an article or paraphrases most of a source. But it is plagiarism nonetheless and the sheer number of examples is very concerning.
The fact that Harvard is mumbling in these euphemisms instead of trying to uphold integrity standards is incredibly concerning. Maybe this could have been turned around last week. But at this point, I agree with McWhorter. She needs to go.
Just to add, reading McWhorter’s Times opinion piece, I’m astounded where he went with this at the very end:
“If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month.”
Given McWhorter’s level of respect for academic integrity, it’s impossible that this reference was unintentional. For those who are unaware, Martin Luther King plagiarized huge sections of his doctoral dissertation, and (to me) it’s an embarrassment that his doctoral degree was never revoked by BU when the allegations came to light in the late 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr._authorship_issues
To be clear, I hold Rev. Martin Luther King in great respect, and I think he should still be honored for his many contributions to the civil rights movement as well as some of his other writings. In a more nuanced world, we could appreciate that a great man could also have some serious flaws — or perhaps even different standards or misunderstandings were applied to his doctoral work which made him think it was acceptable at the time. Regardless, it’s pretty much beyond doubt that if such a level of plagiarism had been found in some dissertation by a person who was not a major Civil Rights figure with a holiday to his name, the degree would have been revoked.
Claudine Gay’s few paragraphs of missed citations are nowhere near King’s broad appropriations of the work of others for large sections of his dissertation — I don’t think most fair academics would call for Gay’s degree to be revoked on the basis of what has come out (so far). But McWhorter’s reference here is pretty clear to those who know about King’s history, and I suspect he’s being much more provocative here than his piece may seem at first glance.
McWhorter might also be observing that the bigotry of low expectations that makes it impossible for Harvard to fire Claudine Gay without appearing racist (or indeed made it impossible for them to hire someone better in the first place) can be traced directly back to Dr. King. It was he who advocated for the preferential hiring of black people without regard to merit but to meet quotas instead. I’ll allow that he might have envisioned it as a temporary necessity, but here we are.
So his speech about the “content of their character” was basically propaganda.
This was disappointing news to me.
To quote Tom Lehrer, “Be sure always to call it please, Research”
There’s a new instance of plagiarism, making 41. Now, 8 of 11 are known to have been pilfered in part from others: https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1737868285327388931?s=20
McWhorter commented a few days ago that he wouldn’t be surprised if she did this in all her papers. He may be right. They are still looking. Today McWhorter said this: https://x.com/JohnHMcWhorter/status/1737874945160421385?s=20
Rufo did go after Gay, and I am concerned about political opponents doing this to discredit any one of us. A few years ago, Leftist bullies went through my CV and each of my publications. I was already on their radar since I had massive twitter account at the time and was an out-and-out Pinker supporter and Heterodox thinker. But they accused me of supporting rape culture when I said it was hypocritical and unwise for female academics to complain that men flirt with them AFTER posting salacious pix of themselves in bikinis on the (formerly known) bird app. They had the perfect excuse to try to ruin me. They wrote Harvard trying to get me fired. To its credit, Harvard protected me, not unlike how they are doing in a much bigger way to Gay. The leftist bullies tried very, very hard to discredit me, though found nothing. They forgot about me when I deleted my account. But would they have continued to hound me indefinitely had I not left the public sphere? Would they have spent months or years looking through my papers for plagiarism? No, I’m not that important. But what’s the saying about friends and enemies: Friends come and go, but enemies are forever. (I’m back on X now but have about 8000 of the trollish academics blocked.) Someone else at Harvard even spread I didn’t work for Harvard! So, I’m also concerned the Left will weaponize Rufo’s strategy and attempt this more often, seeing how effective it is, especially against prolific heterodox writers, pouring through each of their published words to try to find something. But I disagree with those who are saying what’s happening to Gay is only a Right-wing smear campaign. There is more to it. Gay has tanked our reputation so badly I don’t see a way out of the damage without her resigning. The fact that she lacks the clarity, integrity, and pride as a academic to do so makes me feel disdain for her. How could she be so selfish? I’ve seen people predict that if she resigns, she will say it’s for her mental health, playing the victim.
Pinker tweeted out an essay earlier this morning that suggested Gay could help heal relations between Blacks and Jews on campus. I COULD NOT DISAGREE MORE, though I understand why he’s trying to encourage this. The very last thing we need is her disingenuous narrow casting to Jewish groups on campus, while ushering in more speech restrictions and bringing anti-semitism more under the umbrella of DEI, which I suspect is her idiotic plan.
Another billionaire is pausing donations to Harvard: https://x.com/sfmcguire79/status/1737857861902819370?s=20.
Link to Bloomberg piece: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-21/harvard-s-financial-strain-grows-as-blavatnik-joins-donor-revolt?embedded-checkout=true
Thank you for discussing the agony that can result from bullying. Your perspective is valuable. There may indeed be some bullying going on in the Gay case. We need the critics to stick to the facts and avoid ad hominem attacks.
Most of the critics I’ve read have stuck to the facts at hand—and there are now too many to ignore or explain away. Apparently her transgressions took place throughout her entire career and across all of her scholarship.
I didn’t read the Steven Pinker essay, but (having not read his argument) I cannot have any confidence whatsoever that Dr. Gay can be of any service to Jews on campus or anywhere else.
Hi Roz,
if you’re a big supporter of Pinker [ and maybe your crimson paths cross ], maybe you’re able to entice him to be an occasional guest columnist on this blog, if Dr Coyne approves?
This is such a Gay week, I hope I can do a self-plagiarisation and write again, Harvard’s motto should be changed to ‘Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me, Makes me Stronger — or more Gay!’
On the subject of ‘diversity hires’ in academia, is it correct to state in the North American context that if an Asian is hired to lead a university or disciplinary school, this is not a ‘diversity hire’, since most major Asian ethnic groups are not considered ‘Oppressed by structural racism and academically underperforming’?
I think the sooner she resigns, the better. The president of Harvard should be held to the highest standards of scholarship. Furthermore, if she stays it will reinforce the idea that Black women are diversity hires who aren’t really qualified solely on their merits. This is unfair to the women of color who are high achievers and earned their success.
Carol Swain should ask the journal that published Gay’s article plagiarizing her work to retract the article. In fact, she shouldn’t have to ask — the journal editor should be doing it anyway.
A danger to academic integrity: if the president of Harvard plagiarizes, everybody can plagiarize. Hell, maybe everybody IS plagiarizing–no big gadilla, it’s just the culture, you know?
It is interesting that Harvard has on its faculty an extremely distinguished black woman scholar, Danielle Allen, who also had experience in university administration at the University of Chicago. On paper she would look like a far better candidate for President than Claudine Gay. It may be that she did not want to be considered as a candidate for President, but one wonders whether she might simply not have been what DEI was looking for.
IDK whether Allen would have wanted to be President, but her recent WaPo op-ed suggests that the Harvard DEI folks would not want her.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/10/antisemitism-campus-culture-harvard-penn-mit-hearing-path-forward/
If you have a subscription to the NYTimes, go to reader comments on this article and click on the most liked sorting……….the comments are scathing, one after the other.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html
Thanks for that suggestion! Just looked. Wow. One of the commentators on the NYT piece remarked that they felt sorry for Harvard students since, in a matter of weeks, the value of a degree from Harvard has tanked.
Well, if Gay wants equality of outcomes, she sure as heck is doing a good job of making sure students at Harvard are given no reputational advantages! How ironic!
Gay’s commitment to DEI is functioning to remove the privilege Harvard students have relative to everyone else.
I’ve already seen companies vow not to hire Harvard grads.
Thanks for the pointer. Top-rated comment is also my favourite:
“Hold up — the head of Harvatd [sic] has only 11 publications?”
The scandal isn’t just the plagiarism, it’s the mediocrity.
I find Dr. Gay’s plagiarized example below a bit funny and I’m not an English major.
“he reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor”
When you plagiarize an eye-sore of a sentence (” …where it leads…” ) and you’re the Dean of Harvard !
Datum is the singular form of data, per Oxford English Dictionary (OED). But in practice one finds “data” often treated as a singular noun. This isn’t just my observation. It is also stated in the OED. So treating “data” as a singular or plural non, both are okay.
Indeed. And 25 years ago, “data” was still more likely to be treated as a plural noun. Today it feels a bit pedantic, though the usage is still common among some statisticians.
She was not hired for her scholarship.
At any rate, her expertise is not in a scholarly field. They all use the same phrases and language to call things racist, the same way members of the red guard use the words of Mao or Marx to denounce different things.
Poor scholarship and issues with honesty are symptoms of what should disqualify her, not the causes.
I can’t find any previous use of the phrase “duplicative language” as a euphemism for plagiarism (whether suspected or proven). If that’s the case, Harvard gets credit for coining yet another euphemism to join the long list of euphemisms invented by institutions to put an innocent gloss on ugly truths (e.g., ‘enhanced interrogation” and ‘justice-involved youth’).
On edit, I just want to add that I’m mystified by congressional involvement in this matter too. Actually, horrified. What business does government have in this? Gay is a private citizen working for a private institution.
typo for “duplicitous language”?
No – duplicitous language is language that is untruthful. ‘Duplicative language’ here refers to text that duplicates what someone else has written (which may or may not be true). It is a euphemism that avoids using the term ‘plagiarism’.
Jerry wrote:
“If a Harvard student would be thrown out for having done this, why wouldn’t a President?”
But do we know that a Harvard student would be thrown out for having done this? I doubt it. What she did is a bit inept, but it is still fairly inconsequential. I say that as somebody who does not like her because she is woke (and she has acted accordingly as a Harvard dean)!
The thing that I find remarkable is her mediocre scholarly record. How she got hired by Harvard as associate professor and then got promoted to full professor is surprising – until one considers that she is a black woman. What is galling is that she benefited from affirmative action without, presumably, having faced any substantial disadvantages. Her parents are immigrants from Haiti, her mother a registered nurse and her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That looks pretty middle class to me. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a fancy private boarding school. (All per Wikipedia.)
If I remember this correctly, at Duke University, in the political science department, in the 1990s, to get tenure, you needed to turn your dissertation into a book and then write a second book. (The tenure decision was made after 7 years as an assistant professor.) She would not have gotten tenure at Duke, without an affirmative-action bonus. It was already true at Duke in the first half of the 1990s, 30 years ago, that the department was keen on hiring women and very keen on hiring blacks as professors.
I lean towards predicting that she will keep her job as president, unless she fails as a fund raiser (or is expected to fail as such).
The august Harvard English literature department should TS Eliotise [ ie, steal ] the old Keats’ term ‘negative capability’ and use it for the Gay-Kornbluth-forgothername triumvirate. ‘Negative capability’ for their fundraising chops and much else.
+3 for John McWhorter’s comments, which nail a crucial issue. Max Blanke (#9) hits another nail on the head: “duplicative language”, generally a little less obvious than that of Ms. Gay, is the essence of the whole Critical DEI Studies mock discipline in academia. It is endless chewing over a few sacred texts (e.g., the gospels of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw), without discovering anything. In much the same way, the discipline called Theology has been chewing over the thoughts of Augustine of Hippo for the last millenium and a half, achieving exactly the “progress” in knowledge that this kind of exercise yields. In the Jewish world, it was once described as “commentary”, is but more generally known as pilpul.
She was SUCH a “diversity hire” ahead of Roland Frier – who busted the BLM fraud for what it is. And they had some election lately where a guy who promised to kill DEI root and branch at Harvard lost.
Claudine Gay and her ilk are a cancer on Harvard but moreso, our society. Sometimes bad ideas need to be SHOUTED, like this story, for the rest of people to understand. It does push the needle.
What I hate about affirmative action/DEI/set asides is the patronizing dynamic tarring real qualified minorities. That’s a deal breaker for me.
First the BLM fraud (costing thousands of black deaths via the Ferguson Effect), then the trans cult, now Palestine…. I’m not the lefty I have been all my life anymore.
I’m out.
D.A.
NYC
https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/
D.A. Thank you so much for your informative articles particularly regarding the current assault against Israel. You should be required reading for many of the idiots, both student and faculty in universities world wide. It is frightening, the extent of stupidity.
I hope you remain safe personally as there are many who do not like the truth. In a previous life long ago serving in the UK RAF I visited various parts of the Middle East and they were never my favourite destinations.
I’m sure Ceiling Cat will see this, if he hasn’t already, but speaking of McWhorter:
Why Claudine Gay Should Go:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay.html?searchResultPosition=1
(I’m reading right now…)