City-Journal, arguably the best of the conservative websites, has extensive coverage of the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, whose presidency of Harvard was already on shaky ground following her awful testimony before Congress regarding the burgeoning anti-Semitism on campus. It is too detailed for me to summarize correctly, and if I cut and paste sufficient amounts of the piece I’ll be plagiarizing, so you should read all about it here. (You may have to register, but access is free.)
Disgustingly, the New York Times and the Washington Post have not reported this yet. That’s outrageous, and one more screaming example of how the Left circles its wagons any time an ally seriously screws up. Harvard is to progressive indoctrination in education what the Times is to progressive propaganda in journalism, but the last thing the mainstream media needs now is another Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. Harvard is very much in the news already for it’s ugly role in the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck; Gay is now a central figure, and for the plagiarism development to be given the “nothing to see here” treatment by the news media is spectacularly foolish as well as unethical. [Update: This afternoon, after Harvard mentioned the plagiarism issue, both the Times and the Post finally reported on it its digital editions.]
But I digress…I had initially assumed that the accusations that Gay had violated Harvard’s own policies on citations, credit to other scholars and plagiarism were like past attacks on controversial authors like Ann Coulter, technical but non substantive, the sort that could be dug up on many published public figures by those seeking to damage their reputations. I was mistaken, however. Gay’s violations are substantive and substantial. Moreover, Gay appears to have appropriated material from one of the most significant scholars in the field of racial issues in American, now retired Vanderbilt professor and author Carol Swain.
Swain has reviewed the alleged examples of Gay lifting her analysis and words without attribution, and is not sympathetic to Gay at all. She tells Christoper Rufo in an interview also at City Journal,
What is bothering me is not just that there’s passages she didn’t put in quotation marks. When I look at her work, I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work. It bothers me because I know that my work was a big deal in the early 1990s. And I started falling out of favor in 1995 when I started criticizing race-based affirmative action. I thought affirmative action should be means-tested and race-neutral. When I started putting those ideas out, that’s when I started falling out of favor and getting labeled as a conservative, even while I was a Democrat, and blacks started attacking me, calling me a “sellout”…There seems to be a pattern because it’s not just two cases from my work. There are instances that you point to from other people’s work. At best, it was sloppiness, but it would be considered plagiarism if you lift sections of other people’s work and you pass it off as your own…She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure…
Asked whether she believes Gay should be removed as president of Harvard, Swain replies, “The board of trustees needs to deal with those issues. They need to apply the same standards to her as they would apply to a white person under the same circumstances. A white male would probably already be gone.”
If the only controversy Gay faced was the backlash over her performance under questioning by Rep. Stefanik, I think she would have survived—she shouldn’t have, but she would have. She might survive anyway. Nearly 800 black Harvard alumni issued a letter to the university’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, stating their support for her. Of course they did: bias makes you stupid. They are being loyal to a group member; they are not thinking about what is best for the university, just as Harvard was not when it made choosing a DEI warrior a priority in its search for a new leader. Now about 700 faculty members have also signed a letter supporting Gay, and the Harvard trustees and directors think they have cover. Thus they announced this morning that Gay was still president.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University. Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Crimson reported. It’s a cowardly decision and an irresponsible decision, but a predictable one. Now it is up to Gay to do the right thing and quit. Maybe that’s already the plan Harvard has in place.
Both she and the university are in a hopeless situation if she doesn’t fall on her metaphorical sword. No Harvard president, not even poor Nathan Pusey, who was vilified for calling the police riot squad to handle protesting students who had taken over the administration building in 1968, has turned himself or herself into such a burden to the university. Jewish students cannot trust her. Harvard will lose contributions and alumni support (the Alumni Association also announced support for Gay, but that’s misleading). I have talked to many alumni, so far, all Democrats. They do not see how Harvard recovers from this until a new president is in place. Now, in addition to being exposed as incompetent and a large part of Harvard’s progressive indoctrination problem, the most prestigious university has a tarnished scholar at the helm.
Gay has to prove that she has courage and ethical values by doing what is best for the university. I feel sorry for her; few things are worse than receiving a life-defining honor and having to abandon it in disgrace. However, if she cares about the institution she leads, if her values and priorities are ethically aligned and if she is capable of analyzing the situation objectively and doing what must be done, she will resign.
I hope she is up to the challenge.
Update: Harvard also addressed the plagiarism issue today, saying,
“University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles. At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
Morons. She is being allowed to revise a 1997 dissertation that has included violations of Harvard’s attribution requirements for 26 years, because the school lacks the integrity and courage to take the responsible action to correct its own mistake.
This will not end well.
Ethics Alarms 
This additional revelation of plagiarism is not surprising. The race studies, DEI, etc. phenomena are part of a widespread societal hustle, rooted in and spread from academia. Do we expect those who made names for themselves and advanced their careers as hustlers to have been honest hustlers?
So, will Harvard students get the ability to “correct errors” if caught cheating or plagiarizing? If not, why not?
What does this say about the Harvard dissertation committee that reviewed, approved, and endorsed her doctoral dissertation? Didn’t they check it? Did they vet the source materials? If so, how did it escape them that she lifted large parts of Dr. Swain’s work without proper attribution? Aren’t they supposed to ensure that doctoral candidate are, in fact, worthy of the degree?
jvb
That was my point on an earlier post, but this info from Swain makes it much, much worse.
(1) The dissertation had plagiarized material. That is sloppiness on her part and on her the part of her entire committee. She is in a trendy field and she plagiarized passages from the biggest, trendiest people in the field. Someone had to know and not care. OK, they could have known and not said anything because they didn’t think Gay was capable of doing any better and to say something would destroy her chance of ever earning a doctorate.
(2) The amount of the plagiarism suggests that the dissertation itself wasn’t original enough to warrant a doctorate. Again, this is a trendy field and the committee should have been able to distinguish original research from rehashed ideas from leaders in the field. So, a marginal dissertation, a marginal doctorate if not one that should have been refused a defense. Again, why was this allowed? Either Harvard faculty really aren’t knowledgeable about their own fields, or they didn’t think Gay was capable of anything more, and they decided she had to be awarded a doctorate anyway.
(3) This person with a marginal, at best, doctorate then goes directly to a faculty position at Stanford. Normally, your dissertation would need to be substantial to the field to get such a position. Most people would need to do a postdoc or work as a faculty member at a lesser institution for some time, doing substantial research before getting such a position.
(4) Swain’s position is that Gay’s entire career has just been rehashing Swain’s work. So, nothing really original. This normally isn’t enough to get tenure at Stanford. Her tenure at Stanford then resulted in the Presidency of Harvard.
This suggests that Gay really should be teaching at a community college somewhere, not President of Harvard, if ability and accomplishments matter.
There is, however, and alternate explanation. It could be that these entire, trendy fields are garbage, with no actual scholarship or research. If these fields are just rehashing the same ideas over and over again with no research, no new information, and no analysis, then Gay’s career is just normal for them. It does raise the questions as to why these fields exist, what use are they, and why anyone in these fields should be taken seriously, much less promoted to President of Harvard?
“There is, however, and alternate explanation. It could be that these entire, trendy fields are garbage, with no actual scholarship or research. If these fields are just rehashing the same ideas over and over again with no research, no new information, and no analysis, then Gay’s career is just normal for them. It does raise the questions as to why these fields exist, what use are they, and why anyone in these fields should be taken seriously, much less promoted to President of Harvard?”
That is my thought as well. I lump it in with social justice and reparative rights.
jvb
I am not sure what to think of allegations of plagiarism.
I am probably both stupid and smart in this regard.
I attended St. John’s College. Plagiarism was hardly an issue. Everything you wrote was supposed to be original. If you wrote about Plato, it did not matter if you failed to attribute criticisms to Aristotle.
No one would plagiarize Aquinas when criticizing Aristotle.
If you plagiarized Plotinus in commenting on Plato, who would know?
The idea was not to research things, it was to think things.
(Amusingly, I attributed to Jesus a quote that was actually one of Rabbi Hillel. Who knew?)
Going into grad school in Philosophy, I was delightfully amused when my Logic Professor was surprised at my course essay. He expected a “book report” sort of essay, while I gave him an original response to the the work. I did not cite anything. Why should I? The thoughts came out of my head, and my name was on the front page of the paper.
Then, I had my Master’s Thesis. I was working with one of the most accomplished authorities in Kantian Ethics/Morality. Working with this individual was the main reason I went to this school. I analyzed the moral systems of Kant and the Stoics and how they addressed Cosmopolitanism (the antiquated term for “DEI”).
My advisor, whose name will remain unnamed, was skeptical about my thesis. The DEI verdict on Kant was that he was a racist who anthropologized racism and, essentially, created racist anthropology. It’s not an entirely unjustified opinion; I just asserted it was essentially wrong.
When my thesis was finished, he said it was not done. He had all kinds of criticisms and told me that I needed more time. I was scheduled to go to Law School in the Fall (a decision precipitated in no small part to the dearth of pecuniary gain that could be had by the argumentation of frivolous matters, a risk that is less occasioned upon those in the legal field).
I doubled down on my thesis. His critique pushed me to do better. I read more. I thought more. I wrote more. (I often remember this time as one in which I wrote freely and without pressure for 2 hours every morning, for months at a time; it was a time with no distractions.).
I got done with my thesis several months later. I was very happy with it, but have since caught a few stray typos (take note Jack).
My advisor? He said he was surprised that I had written a convincing thesis on my point. Keep in kind, he “wrote the book” on Kantian morality (except, of course, for Kant, who literally wrote at least 3 books on Kantian Morality).
He was even so blunt to say, “Did you plagiarize this?” He did not think I could demonstrate what I did. It was too good. This was 1996; it was probably too early for the sorts of internet searches we would have today.
I told him that I was flattered that he thought I coped someone, but Kant would say that I should be offended by the accusation. I do not believe he got my reference, but he had not been immersed in Kant for the prior 8 months. Hell, today, it would take me a good bit of time to find the reference I had in kind.
He believed me. He warned me that I should beware of others who might want to steal my ideas and said it would be a good start to a Doctoral Thesis. I got my Masters in Philosophy and went into Law School a few weeks after graduation, a graduation I missed because…what did I care?
The sad ending: (No, it is not that I ended up in Law School, I think.). I went back to visit my alma mater a few years later (10 years?). I called my old advisor to see how he was doing. I spoke to his wife. I told her I wanted to see him. She said he had had a stroke a few years earlier. She wanted to know why I was calling. She sounded like someone who had served as a gatekeeper for many people seeking to take advantage of him.
I told her (as I recall) that he helped me write a thesis on Stoic and Kantian ethics. When I called back a few days later, she said that he said that it sounded like a really interesting topic for a thesis, but he was not taking visitors.
That was the second time in my life that I was rebuffed by a dying man regarding a meeting.
RIP-Denis
RIP Roger
-Jut
Fascinating story, and Comment of the Day, Jut. Thanks.
“Inadequate citations,” Lack of quotation marks. I wrote theses for three Master’s degrees One in the era of typewriters and carbon paper, before Word. Whenever my advisors found not only inadequate citations, misspellings, or a wrongly placed comma it was red inked, and back to the typewriter I went.