6 ms·

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

123 points by mcenedella 3y ago

mcpackieh 3y 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-plagiarism-antisemitism-israel-palestine-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...
- nradov 3y 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 3y ago
    The president of Harvard should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny related to academic integrity than most people.
    - MiguelX413 3y ago
      Everyone should be subject to a very high level of scrutiny.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Does Turnitin not meet your standards?
    - nradov 3y ago
      I haven't used Turnitin for several years. From what I recall it couldn't detect cases where the author paraphrased another work without adding any original thoughts.
  - pylua 3y ago
    The same ai tools that ironically aid in plagiarism and inability to give credit to their sources.
- enriquec 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Charitably, I think the point was that academics overlook it, like the dirty inside secret that everyone knows to not talk about. Once she drew the ire of people outside the normal academic circles, things that should have been controversial (like blatant plagiarism) were brought forward. Further, these people weren't looking specifically in the interest of academic integrity, they were looking for any reason at all to get her fired for not unequivocally saying that calling for genocide is outside the student code of conduct. As a result, the allegations have, thus far, been treated as unworthy of much attention- it wasn't that they are right, but the accusers have the wrong motivation. I don't know how much of this phenomenon is a modern issue, but it does seem to be very prevalent in today's society.
  - db48x 3y ago
    The problem really isn’t that students at her institution support genocide. The problem is that when she asked if chanting in support of the murder of Jews was against school policy, she equivocated. She would not have equivocated if the students had been chanting that Blacks should be killed, instead of Jews.
    - mmcwilliams 3y ago
      Can you tell me the dates of the protests where you heard students chanting "Jews should be killed"?
      - unsupp0rted 3y ago
        Here’s a really in 2017 in which white nationalists didn’t chant “non-whites should be killed”. All they chanted was “you will not replace us”. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-40911744 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-40911744 In Harvard’s case, nobody chanted “kill all Jews”. All they chanted was “from the river to the sea”.
      - 3y ago
- gruez 3y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ [2] https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-somerton-plagiarism.html https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-s...
- bitcurious 3y 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-take-down-harvards-claudine-gay-b551f4a5 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/behind-the-campaign-to...
  - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
    It isn't just her plagiarism. She has a very thin scholarly record. https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-has-no-clothes/ https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-ha... That this this thin record which she has, is apparently partially contaminated
- greatpostman 3y 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 3y 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.
- newsclues 3y ago
  [flagged]
- nvm0n2 3y 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 3y ago
Is it feasible to generate comprehensive plagiarism analyses for most or all published works?
- andy99 3y 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 3y ago
    It’s not a flaw from Elsevier’s perspective to discourage authors from releasing free pre-prints.
    - frumper 3y ago
      It’s a flaw to label it plagiarism.
- woodruffw 3y 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 3y 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.
asylteltine 3y ago
[flagged]
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Please don't insinuate. If you have something to say that you think we know, you should say it.
  - decremental 3y ago
    [dead]
matthewdgreen 3y 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 3y 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.
  - wredcoll 3y 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!
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 3y 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.
  - matthewdgreen 3y 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.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
justinclift 3y 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 3y ago
Another interesting read, from "the most read" section: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/29/steinberg-weaponizing-antisemitism/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/29/steinberg-weap...
thedailymail 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    Seems like quality is lacking in this case also, considering the plagiarism.
armchairhacker 3y 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).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mcenedella 3y ago
Why flagged @dang?
- tacheiordache 3y 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 3y ago
  Because of who the subject is, plain and simple. Seems to be a double standard here as is typical.
- dang 3y ago
  The usual reason: users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
  - mcenedella 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
BOOTRACER 3y ago
[flagged]
tzs 3y 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-plagiarism-0 https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what-constitutes-plagia...
RickJWagner 3y 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.

123 points by mcenedella 3y 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-plagiarism-antisemitism-israel-palestine-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...

nradov 3y 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 3y ago
  The president of Harvard should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny related to academic integrity than most people.
  - MiguelX413 3y ago
    Everyone should be subject to a very high level of scrutiny.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Does Turnitin not meet your standards?
  - nradov 3y ago
    I haven't used Turnitin for several years. From what I recall it couldn't detect cases where the author paraphrased another work without adding any original thoughts.
- pylua 3y ago
  The same ai tools that ironically aid in plagiarism and inability to give credit to their sources.
enriquec 3y ago
[flagged]
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Charitably, I think the point was that academics overlook it, like the dirty inside secret that everyone knows to not talk about. Once she drew the ire of people outside the normal academic circles, things that should have been controversial (like blatant plagiarism) were brought forward. Further, these people weren't looking specifically in the interest of academic integrity, they were looking for any reason at all to get her fired for not unequivocally saying that calling for genocide is outside the student code of conduct. As a result, the allegations have, thus far, been treated as unworthy of much attention- it wasn't that they are right, but the accusers have the wrong motivation. I don't know how much of this phenomenon is a modern issue, but it does seem to be very prevalent in today's society.
- db48x 3y ago
  The problem really isn’t that students at her institution support genocide. The problem is that when she asked if chanting in support of the murder of Jews was against school policy, she equivocated. She would not have equivocated if the students had been chanting that Blacks should be killed, instead of Jews.
  - mmcwilliams 3y ago
    Can you tell me the dates of the protests where you heard students chanting "Jews should be killed"?
    - unsupp0rted 3y ago
      Here’s a really in 2017 in which white nationalists didn’t chant “non-whites should be killed”. All they chanted was “you will not replace us”. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-40911744 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-40911744 In Harvard’s case, nobody chanted “kill all Jews”. All they chanted was “from the river to the sea”.
    - 3y ago
gruez 3y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ [2] https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-somerton-plagiarism.html https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/hbomberguy-interview-james-s...
bitcurious 3y 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-take-down-harvards-claudine-gay-b551f4a5 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/behind-the-campaign-to...
- OrvalWintermute 3y ago
  It isn't just her plagiarism. She has a very thin scholarly record. https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-has-no-clothes/ https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-ha... That this this thin record which she has, is apparently partially contaminated
greatpostman 3y 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 3y 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.
newsclues 3y ago
[flagged]
nvm0n2 3y 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 3y ago

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

andy99 3y 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 3y ago
  It’s not a flaw from Elsevier’s perspective to discourage authors from releasing free pre-prints.
  - frumper 3y ago
    It’s a flaw to label it plagiarism.
woodruffw 3y 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 3y 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.

asylteltine 3y ago

[flagged]

decremental 3y ago
[dead]
woodruffw 3y ago
Please don't insinuate. If you have something to say that you think we know, you should say it.
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]

matthewdgreen 3y 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 3y 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.
- wredcoll 3y 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!
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y 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.
- matthewdgreen 3y 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.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

justinclift 3y 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 3y ago

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

thedailymail 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Seems like quality is lacking in this case also, considering the plagiarism.

armchairhacker 3y 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).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mcenedella 3y ago

Why flagged @dang?

tacheiordache 3y 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 3y ago
Because of who the subject is, plain and simple. Seems to be a double standard here as is typical.
dang 3y ago
The usual reason: users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
- mcenedella 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

BOOTRACER 3y ago

[flagged]

tzs 3y 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-plagiarism-0 https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what-constitutes-plagia...

RickJWagner 3y 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.