When she and two other presidents, testifying to Congress, found it impossible to condemn threatening antisemitic language, protests, and physical intimidations, her prospects took a turn for the worst. But being a sclerotic institution of the highest pedigree, the Board did a cursory review and decided they were good with her leadership, apparent antisemitism and all.
Then came initial charges of plagiarism on her already meager scholarship of perhaps a dozen papers. Still the board were OK.
Now there are claims that half her research, or as much as two thirds of it, show evidence of plagiarism. For example, see Fresh Allegations of Plagiarism Unearthed in Official Academic Complaint Against Claudine Gay by Aaron Sibarium.
All the allegations so far, that I have seen, are from right leaning press sources and therefore should be taken with a grain of salt.
When the first allegations came out I took a look at the initial claims. Some of it could definitely be dismissed to carelessness. Some of it looked like borderline plagiarism where there is a clear attempt to reword the thoughts in a different fashion but it still ends up being very close. That's a judgment call. There were only a couple of instances where it seemed pretty clear that plagiarism might have occurred.
My sense was that there was a lot of laziness on display (both she as the author as well as any editors she might have had) resulting in borderline plagiarism but not an instance of wholesale passing off someone else's work as your own. Close, but perhaps no cigar.
I have not looked at the new charges yet but it sounds like the case is getting more firm. And certainly there is the issue of patterns. Things which might be technically plagiarism but only occur once are dismissed as unfortunate. But if there is a pattern of frequently lifting short passages and lazily paraphrasing longer ones, then the issue is harder to dismiss.
Who knows how this will turn out. I am a little leery of plagiarism charges unless they pass a pretty clear line of blatant plagiarism. Maybe the case against Gay will get there.
Independent of the validity of the charges though, there are at least two other considerations almost certainly going on.
The Harvard Board of course does not want to be seen to be giving in to a mob. Good for them. They also don't want to be embarrassed by appearing to have covered for Gay with only a pro forma and in-substantive review just a few days before a more thorough case is revealed. Well, we all want to avoid being embarrassed but that is not a particularly estimable motivation. And they certainly don't want to reinforce an emerging impression that they did indeed only select Gay as an act of DEI obeisance.
On the other hand, and I have seen no other discussion on this yet, they have to be careful to not be seen as having two separate standards for their President and their students, already an issue from years past in terms of plagiarism by professors being more lightly punished than plagiarism by students.
Harvard apparently expels as many as a couple of dozen students a year for plagiarism. I would imagine that there could be a host of lawsuits from past and future expulsions if it becomes clear that Harvard's stated commitment to academic integrity is actually much more flexible than presented. Not to mention the brand implications. I am not enough of a lawyer to assess whether there are viable cases for some six figure lawsuits. Or million dollar lawsuits.
But the more evidence brought forward and the more apparent that there is actually a gap between expectations of leadership and the higher standards that lowly students are held to, the more probable it seems that some ambitious lawyer would try and make that case. Which is another thing the board does not want to have happen.
All so easily avoided were they to choose to have values and adhere to them in the first place.
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