If You Ignore Claudine Gay's Plagiarism, Shame on You

Academic malfeasance by Harvard's president deserves media coverage and condemnation, not excuses.

Claudine Gay is the president of Harvard University. In recent weeks, she has come under fire for plagiarizing portions of her 1997 doctoral dissertation, as well as published articles she had authored in recent years.

Examples of plagiarism were first identified by the conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, following Gay's much-derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus. Rufo has all but declared war on the Ivy League, which has prompted many academics to ignore his claims on grounds that he is acting in bad faith; Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried told The New York Times that Gay was fending off an "extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions."

"If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence," he said, referring to the plagiarism accusations. "But not from these people."

Similarly, NAACP President Derrick Johnson dismissed all criticism of Gay as "political theatrics advancing a White supremacist agenda."

This attitude, though common, is profoundly mistaken. The charges facing Gay are serious, as recent coverage by mainstream outlets—like the Times and CNN—has finally conceded. Neither Rufo's alleged political agenda nor the timing of these revelations should matter if they are in fact true. There's nothing inherently racist or white supremacist about applying Harvard's own standards for students and faculty to the president of the institution. On the contrary, excusing plagiarism at the most elite levels of academia merely because the people calling it out are on the wrong team would constitute a profound betrayal of the very values the academy supposedly values. Harvard, which has done very little to address the charges, should take note.

Rufo's initial reporting, co-authored by writer Christopher Brunet, contended that Gay's dissertation reused sentences from other scholars without adequately rewording them; she cites her sources but does not thoroughly paraphrase. This is a form of sloppy plagiarism in which credence is given but sufficient effort is not undertaken to rework the underlying material. People can disagree about how serious the charge is, but it does appear to violate Harvard's policies.

The Washington Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium found numerous additional examples of sloppy plagiarism throughout articles published by Gay between 1993 and 2017. Several of the plagiarized scholars—as well as academic experts consulted by Sibarium—agreed that she had committed plagiarism.

It gets worse. Phillip W. Magness, an economic historian who has written for Reason, discovered a passage from a 2014 paper in which Gay inadequately paraphrased other scholars' work and also failed to cite them.

At some point, lazy plagiarism is still plagiarism—especially when it is accompanied by literal plagiarism.

So far, Harvard has stuck by Gay, merely noting that some of the articles would be reworded to satisfy critics. This did not satisfy CNN's Em Steck, who correctly took the school to task for failing to address "her clearest instances of plagiarism." And according to the Times, the university's review of Gay's work was conducted by Harvard Corporation—the university's governing board—rather than the office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which would normally handle academic malfeasance.

People are free to conclude that Gay's transgressions are not quite serious enough to merit termination. They are also free to point out that such sloppiness is probably rampant in higher education and certainly under-policed. (At some point, though, this isn't really an excuse for Gay—but rather a broader indictment of the entire project of elite education.)

It's baffling, though, that anyone would think Gay's work is above scrutiny because the people scrutinizing it are, to varying degrees, adversarial. Would this work for any Harvard students credibly accused of plagiarism? Could they go before their review boards and say, "My professor is a bad-faith actor, and, thus, these numerous examples of plagiarism must be ignored"? Obviously not; the idea is ludicrous.

That declaration—"maybe the problem is you"—is fairly telling. Collins evidently thinks that mainstream outlets should not report on the president of Harvard's well-documented plagiarism because he loathes the politics of the people who first identified it. This is a journalist whose specialty is correcting misinformation, mind you.

If Rufo, or Magness, or Sibarium, or anyone else, had misinformed readers about Gay's plagiarism, then the media should correct them. But that's not really what's being debated here. Media outlets are being told to ignore true information because the information is inconvenient. One cannot find a stronger cautionary tale than that.

Beware the gatekeepers of misinformation who pretend that it is somehow in everybody's best interest if accurate information is kept quiet—and who disdain other reporters for breaking ranks.

And this.

Disgraced “Harvard president,” Claudine Gay, built
a towering ghetto-nurtured DEI empire on campus.

Source-—12/21/23 FR thread

In one example, Gay commissioned a “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage” after the death of George Floyd in 2020. This task force later released a series of recommendations for engaging in what it referred to as the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.”

Among its recommendations reportedly included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.”

It also said administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.”

The task force never explained who the white men were or why they were on the walls of Annenberg Hall in the first place. The only reasons for the removal of these paintings appeared to be due to their skin color and sex, according to white-biased Gay.

Last year, Gay launched an initiative within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “de-naming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration.

Moreover, deeming such entities “racist” would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values,” meaning that Harvard would use presentism in order to pass judgment on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago.

“Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president,” Rufo pointed out.

In another example, Gay, as president of Harvard, is leading a “sprawling DEI bureaucracy,” otherwise known as Diversity, equity, and inclusion, which “seeks to influence how students speak, think, and behave in relation to race.”

The CRT expert noted that....... Harvard has deleted nearly all DEI materials from its website....... following Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony, in which she declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus.

Recovered DEI documents through an Internet archive show that Harvard’s diversity administrators urge students to internalize the Critical Race Theory narrative, which is that America is systemically racist, riddled with white-baiting code words like “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.”

Students have also been encouraged to “unpack” their so-called “white” and “male” privileges, and to consider their “white fragility,” which ghetto-nurtured Gay’s DEI documents say is derived from “the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.”

As Breitbart News reported, Gay has been facing nationwide scrutiny since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel due to her failure to properly respond to the matter.

The Harvard leadership botched its statement after more than 30 of its student groups signed a pro-terror later blaming Israel for the terrorist attack against itself.

Gay later delivered a disastrous testimony during a congressional hearing regarding antisemitism alongside the presidents of University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Now, the Harvard president’s own Ph.D. dissertation is being called into question over allegations of plagiarism.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

Here’s how Harvard (and the local rag known as the Boston Globe) explain it away: https://ori.hhs.gov/definition-research-misconduct

Clear plagiarism by any academic measure, but someone who long before reaching the PhD stage would be well aware of definition thereof.

But somehow Harvard finds that it didn’t constitute “research misconduct”, despite plagiarism clearly being one form of research misconduct:

https://ori.hhs.gov/definition-research-misconduct

So they are simply allowing her to make “corrections:.

I’m old enough to remember when the standard at pretty much any undergraduate college in the country was mandatory expulsion for any plagiarized submission in any course.

As some of you may know, I have had a daily thread in the Religion Forum for 14 years.

It's set up as a Bible quote (with the proper copyright notice attached), an original prayer, and then, an original story. These are stories and parables that illustrate the text. They are all true reminiscences from my childhood.

When choosing illustrations, I try my best to use images that are in the Public Domain.

Sometimes I tell a story more than once, and sometimes I quote from an old thread.

At the sheer horror of somehow plagiarizing, even if I am only plagiarizing MYSELF, I always use a blockquote indent and state that this is a story I have told before. (As a musician I know that MANY Classical musicians reused themes from their previous works, so I'm sure it's OK to do this.)

I also have Native American Ancestry, but have never used that to “get ahead”.

I have an overdeveloped sense of honor and integrity, which makes me a freak in today's world, I guess.

I'll never get into Harvard.

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