Harvard president may have plagiarized in half her papers, university finds - NYT - "Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, failed to meet her university’s academic standards in half of her 11 published articles, according to a report in the New York Times. The findings come in the wake of a request by Rep. Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, that Harvard turn over internal materials from an initial plagiarism investigation and suggesting that Congress could withhold public funding from the university if it determined that the school was applying a double standard... Harvard’s internal review of Gay’s work concluded that her articles had “instances of inadequate citation,” but not violations of Harvard’s research standards. The Boston Globe, which declined to call for Gay’s resignation regardless of the findings of the inquiry, criticized the statement as “seem[ingly] contradictory.” Other academics, the Globe wrote, “have raised concern that… the university is muddying what should be a clear-cut line,” adding that “for the professors who have to enforce plagiarism in the trenches, it matters what message Harvard sends about its guidelines... Levitsky, author of the 2018 book How Democracies Die, objected to the congressional inquiry into the matter, organizing a petition that Harvard "resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard's commitment to academic freedom."”
Liberals love oppressing schools based on the fact that most get government funding. Now they're going to complain about government overreach
Academic freedom means letting black women plagiarise
Harvard president’s corrections do not address her clearest instances of plagiarism, including as a student in the 1990s - "Harvard President Claudine Gay recently requested corrections for two of her academic papers, but she did not address even clearer examples of plagiarism from earlier in her academic history at the school, according to a CNN analysis of her writings... In addressing the allegations of plagiarism, neither Harvard nor Gay have corrected or acknowledged these earlier instances from when she was a student... Harvard declined CNN’s requests for comment to both Gay and the university. In a previous statement, Gay said, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”... “I think the feelings of the true authors are largely irrelevant,” said Michael Dougherty, a professor of philosophy at Ohio Dominican University who has written two books on plagiarism. “The way I approach it is [to] focus on the text, not on the feelings of those whose work was stolen.” “Conversations on plagiarism become very, very complex, and it just comes down to: is the work reliable? Are those who authored the words credited? And could a person tell that by reading?” he said. If it is unclear, Dougherty said, then the work should be retracted... In her 2012 article entitled, “Moving To Opportunity: the Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment,” published in the journal Urban Affairs Review Gay repeatedly cited a 2003 paper from eight economists but failed to attribute them in at least two specific places where she used similar language as her source. Plagiarism experts told CNN this is a type of plagiarism. “We call this kind of plagiarism a ‘pawn sacrifice,’” said German academic Deborah Weber-Wulff, a recently retired professor in computer science and expert on plagiarism and its software. “If you put the citation somewhere else, or you put the citation in and have the exact words, but you forget the quotation marks… in a way you’re telling people, I used this thesis, but I forgot the quotation marks. That’s usually also a sign that you need to look for more [examples of plagiarism].” “It’s really amazing how many people actually give you clues to where they stole the text,” she added... Gay borrowed language from Alex F. Schwartz’s 2010 book, “Housing Policy in the United States,” but attributed his work at the end of the paragraph, not sentence and did not use quotation marks. This, too, is “a species of plagiarism,” said Dougherty, the philosophy professor who has written two books on plagiarism. “And that’s where some credit is given to the source, but it’s not in a way that a reader can tell what part belongs to that source.”... The university’s review into Gay’s conduct was very fast, experts told CNN. Independent reviews into plagiarism typically last much longer—anywhere from six months to several years"
CNN supports white supremacy!
i/o on X - "In our elite institutions, black privilege and affirmative action are inseparable. What kind of blacks end up at Harvard (as either student or administrator)?
Answer: Intellectually-underqualified blacks from upper-middle class (or wealthier) backgrounds who obtain entry due to the lavish racial preferences of the Harvard admissions office.
According to The Economist, 71% of black and Hispanic undergrad students at Harvard come from wealthy backgrounds, and, extrapolating from the admission data made available in the Asian-American lawsuit, only about 1 in 20 of black undergrad applicants who were accepted would have been accepted if academic merit alone had been the only criterion. So it's this marriage of privilege and comparative mediocrity (embodied perhaps most perfectly in the person of Claudine Gay) that defines much of the black presence at Harvard. But it wasn't really this way until the 80s. The school started out with the noble idea of finding smart black kids from underprivileged backgrounds and bringing them to Harvard. In other words, its first efforts at affirmative action had a true social justice component: These were kids who were actually disadvantaged, not the privileged whiny progeny of black social elites (many of whom aren't even American). But there was a problem with this approach, as Heather Mac Donald and others have described, which Harvard later desperately tried to cover up: These disadvantaged kids too often behaved according to the most brutal racial stereotypes (especially those about criminality) associated with disadvantaged black kids, and Harvard eventually transitioned to its current approach of admitting blacks with whom it could be more socially and culturally comfortable. Over the past few weeks, it's been interesting to observe the remarkable transformation of an elite institution: It will go to extraordinary lengths to protect and retain a black woman (Claudine Gay) charged with plagiarism (and a strange indifference to advocacy of genocide on her campus), but couldn't wait to jettison a white man (former Harvard president Larry Summers) who had mildly stated something supported in the scientific literature. The contrast between the two could not be more instructive: Summers (Harvard's first Jewish president) is a brilliant, academically-influential, and accomplished man widely recognized in his field, while Gay (Harvard's first black president) has published a small number of forgotten and apparently occasionally-plagiarized journal articles that made no impact. (She has an publication impact score one might expect from a young assistant prof at a third-tier state school.) If given the choice, institutions like Harvard now prefer a black person from the upper 1% of the black group IQ distribution (an IQ of about 120), to — taking the example again of Larry Summers — an Ashkenazi Jew from the upper 1% of his group's IQ distribution (an IQ of about 145). They prefer a glorified DEI clerk to a genius because the clerk is from the most preferred group."
Aaron Sibarium on X - "Some important revelations tonight:
-Harvard’s “independent review” simply ignored Gay’s 1993 Origins article—which contained some of the most clear-cut examples of plagiarism—because articles in Origins rarely include citations or quotations marks. (Huh?)
-Gay violated Harvard’s Guide To Using Sources, which states that students can be disciplined even for unintentional plagiarism. But the violations don’t rise to the level of “research misconduct,” according to the review, because, while they were “regrettable,” they were not “reckless.” (Huh?)
-The review found that Gay’s dissertation contained three cases of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution”—that is, three cases of plagiarism. She is correcting those passages.
-In total, Gay has issued six plagiarism-related corrections across three different articles, including her dissertation. Harvard does not consider this an indication of “recklessness.”
-Harvard is withholding the names of the academics who conducted the review, making it impossible to scrutinize their biases or potential conflicts of interest.
-Harvard has not addressed the allegation that it retaliated against a complainant by retaining Clare Locke and threatening the New York Post."
BlueyAnon 去操你自己 on X - "The coverup is always worse than the crime. The rot at @harvard is far more significant than most realized."
Plagiarism: Harvard cleared Claudine Gay THEN investigated - "Harvard cleared its president Claudine Gay of plagiarism before it even investigated whether her academic work was copied, The Post reveals today. In a threatening legal letter to The Post in late October, the college called allegations that she lifted other academics’ work “demonstrably false,” and said all her works were “cited and properly credited.” Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest. And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record. The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages... The Post’s disclosure of how Harvard cleared Gay without investigating her, then aggressively tried to cover up the probe, thrusts the actions of the head of its governing body, billionaire Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker into the spotlight... The letter rounded up statements from academics using college letterheads — whose work The Post had found bore striking resemblance to Gay’s — to say that they did not believe they had been plagiarized. One of the academics, George Reid Andrews, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh whose work Gay had appeared to use in an essay without attribution when she was a graduate student at Harvard, told The Post Thursday that he stood by that statement — but that he did not know that it would be used to threaten The Post. And in the letter Harvard launched a bizarre conspiracy theory, that the plagiarism allegations were produced by The Post asking ChatGPT... In a particularly heavy-handed move, the letter also complained about The Post’s use of an anonymous source, a common practice in journalism, and threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons... it appointed a four-member sub-committee to determine what to do. They in turn asked three experts, all political scientists who are not at Harvard, to investigate. Harvard and Clare Locke never told The Post of this significant change in Harvard’s position... Clare Locke wrote a second letter denying Gay was a plagiarist on November 7 — when the investigation was active — repeating the claim the allegations were “false,” and not disclosing the probe’s existence... Harvard had decided to entirely ignore the 1993 paper Gay published, in part because of “its age,” and because the journal it was published in did not appear to demand citations at the time — even though The Post had asked for comment on 12 possible instances of plagiarism in it... a Nobel prize-winning economist and Harvard graduate, Vernon Smith, told blog Karlstack.com, “I see Gay as getting her post at Harvard because she was a diversity, equity and inclusion candidate, not on the basis of strong academic qualifications. She is a discredit to Harvard, and that is being revealed.”... “Harvard’s response strongly suggests that they had already decided to stand behind Claudine Gay, regardless of the evidence,” said Phillip Magness, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and co-author of “Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education.”. “They staged a rushed and non-transparent investigation behind closed doors, and appear to have reached a foregone conclusion of exonerating her. Unfortunately, it’s a familiar pattern in the Ivy League when plagiarism allegations implicate a ‘star’ left-wing faculty member.”... Harvard defines plagiarism in its handbook for students as “the act of intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by somebody else,” and says any source, whether an academic paper, website or other document “must be cited properly.” “Even if you write down your own ideas in your own words and place them around text that you’ve drawn directly from a source, you 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,” it says. The most recent figures, from the academic year 2020-2021 and reported by the Harvard Crimson, showed 47 findings of plagiarism by the college’s disciplinary body, while that year a record 27 students “withdrew” — in effect were expelled — for breaching the honor code, which includes plagiarism, exam cheating, and other infractions. And while students are told academic staff have the same standards for plagiarism, “research misconduct,” for which they can be disciplined, has to have been committed “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly.” Harvard said it did not find evidence in Gay’s work that she acted intentionally. One college academic said there appeared to be a double standard for Gay compared to students and researchers. “Just speaking from my own corner of Harvard, there is no question in my mind [that] if we uncovered that pattern of academic dishonesty in any of our researchers, including myself, they would be dismissed immediately,” Brendan Case, associate director of research of the college’s Human Flourishing Program told The Boston Globe. The left-leaning editorial board of Harvard’s hometown paper, The Boston Globe called Harvard’s statement on the plagiarism allegations “confusing” for saying Gay did not commit “research misconduct” but did need to make corrections. “If Gay didn’t violate any standards of research, why would she need to correct anything?” it wrote."
Wesley Yang on X - ""My entire career, I’ve been teaching students it’s wrong to do what Gay did, and I expect most writing teachers have done the same..." Three ways to resolve this conundrum:
1.) Lower the standards for everyone to accommodate Harvard's President
2.) Fire Harvard's President in order to preserve the standard applied to everyone
3.) Be hypocrites and maintain one standard for Harvard's president and another for everyone else"
Dr. Genevieve Guenther on X - "The right is going after Gay because they don't want the kids at Harvard to have any sort of an anti-racist education and they're not even trying to hide it. DON'T FALL FOR IT, FFS. Support Gay. Support DEI. Support anti-racism. whatever the number is now, I forget / n"
i/o on X - "Harvard and Gay's antiracist credentials are strong only if you believe that fighting racism involves a decades-long exclusion of thousands of Asian and white applicants that was so egregious that ultimately SCOTUS had to step in and declare it unconstitutional."
Carole Hooven on X - "Eloquent and heartbreaking. From Harvard Law Professor Mark Ramseyer's email to a Harvard list (with permission). I came for my PhD in '99, he came as a prof in '98. We were each publicly attacked for our views in '21. "Harvard is a vastly less tolerant place than it was when I arrived in 1998. The intolerance is a function of an increasingly large fraction of our colleagues. And we – the rest of us on the Harvard faculty – let it happen. The cancelling, the punishments, the DEI bureaucracy, the DEI statements, the endless list that we could all recite – all this happened on our watch. We saw it happen, but we did nothing. We were too busy. We were scared to speak up. We – we on the faculty – let Harvard become what it is. The Harvard that we have is the result of our own collective moral failure. The alumni who are furious are not trying to turn Harvard into something we do not want. They are trying to rescue Harvard from what we let it become. We as a faculty failed. That is why the alumni are speaking up. That is why we formed the Council on Academic Freedom in the first place." @cafharvard @sapinker"
Pratik Chougule on X - "Claudine Gay has done more to undermine support for DEI in academia than every right-wing think-tank in Washington."
i/o on X - "Which is why I want this thing to drag on as long as possible, sent into increasingly dizzying heights of absurdity, until it reaches its majestic denouement in a letter signed by Harvard professors denouncing college plagiarism codes as "violence" and "white supremacy.""
sam 🇺🇸 on X - "This woman’s career is something else. Phillips Exeter, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard. Big awards. Prestigious journals yet only 2,600 citations total for her race scholarship. You couldn’t create a better example of “diversity hire” in a lab. Every step of the way."
Dan 🉐️ on X - "My hope is that a student takes a firm stand and intentionally turns in a final full of glaring plagiarism. What ground does Harvard have to stand on?"
Noam Blum 🚡 on X - "Ben Collins telling people to ignore Claudine Gay's plagiarism because of the political motives of the person who brought it to light really tells you everything you need to know about him."
Nate Silver on X - "It's true that Congress investigating plagiarism at Harvard is a waste of time. What Congress should do instead is apply a much higher tax rate to private college endowments."
i/o on X - "Agree on both. In 2019, Harvard paid only $37 million in federal taxes on its $50 billion endowment — that's a tax of about 74 cents on every $1,000 of endowment."
The left keep whining about taxing the rich, but of course this is bad
More than 100 Harvard professors sign letter condemning president - "More than 100 Harvard professors have sent a letter to university president Claudine Gay, condemning her for issuing a statement opposing antisemitism on campus — claiming she was bowing to the interests of wealthy donors and alumni, and was infringing on the free speech of students."
Condemning anti-Semitism is a bad thing. The left only defend Jews when they can use that to shit on white people
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "EXCLUSIVE: Harvard provided racially segregated "affinity group" celebrations at its commencement event earlier this year. Whites and Jews were the only groups not provided with celebrations. The university has now deleted this page from its website."
Paul D. Thacker on X - "HAS HARVARD LOST ITS PRONOUNS? Harvard has dramatically modified its Diversity, Equity Inclusion office. And disappeared their webpage for pronouns. Google "pronouns at Harvard" & top hit redirect to https://t.co/RCpFkwX6eP Archived page https://t.co/rO85vRSEwu https://t.co/XZZ39nzRod"
Chaya Raichik on X - ".@Harvard deleted their webpage on pronouns. They’re frantically removing dozens of pages from their site"
Jacob Shell on X - "Wait...Claudine Gay comes from a Haitian ruling-class concrete industrialist family?? What a Cambridge-sized middle finger to all the lower-income kids, of any skin tone, who never get a shot in life, that *this* is the person Harvard pats itself on the back for "elevating.""
StopAntisemitism on X - "Another domino falls as billionaire Len Blavatnik (pictured here with wife Emily) pulls Harvard mega donation due to the school’s embarrassing failures fighting Jew hatred. Kudos to the Blavatniks 👏"
Miranda Devine on X - "Penny Pritzker and the rest of the Harvard board and community’s embrace of Claudine Gay truly is the Emperor’s New Clothes tale of our time. See how they lauded her “scholarship” and “integrity” a year ago. Admitting their purple prose was wrong will be too embarrassing."
Bill Ackman on X- "I find it difficult to believe that the @Harvard Corporation board could still be in unanimous support of President Gay. They must now realize that they made a bad choice and that their continued support for President Gay is not just enormously damaging to Harvard, but it is also incredibly destructive to their own reputations. When I first watched the train wreck begin to unfold at Harvard, I approached two friends on the Corporation board and requested a meeting with President Gay and the other directors as I thought I could help. My requests for a meeting were ignored. Weeks went by. I continued to push. Finally, I was offered the opportunity to speak with Penny Pritzker, the board chair. I was told: “This is the protocol.” The conversation with Penny was incredibly disappointing. It was clear that the board members had become deer in the headlights, were listening to bad ‘professional’ advice, and were unreceptive to input from outside the board room. So I wrote my first public letter to the board, and received no response. Not even an acknowledgment from President Gay or the board that they had received the letter. The situation got worse, and I was compelled to write a second letter. I got no response. The day after President Gay’s disastrous testimony I reached out again to my two friends on the board. One promised to call back and then ghosted me. The other did not respond to my texts, so I wrote a third letter. Now, I am not the only person to have written strong letters to the Harvard board. They must have received literally hundreds of letters, emails, and calls. I know because I have been copied and blind copied on many of these communications from some people I know and many people I do not. We are well past the point where Claudine Gay is the only one to blame for the mess that is Harvard. Ultimately, when management fails, the board needs to step in. It has failed to do so and nearly three months have passed. As a result, the reputations of the eleven individuals who comprise the board are in the process of being destroyed. It is sad to watch this happen as there are some very high quality people on this board. Why, you might ask, are they self destructing? The principal reason I believe is that they are afraid of being called racists. They have concluded that if they fired President Gay, Harvard’s first black president, they would be cancelled and deemed racists. They have failed to act out of fear. They would also have to admit that they made a bad choice in selecting Gay, and acknowledge that they ignored concerns raised about Gay’s scholarship and leadership prior to appointing her. Sometimes successful people have a hard time admitting mistakes, particularly when doing so will make the news. So they have stuck their heads in the sand and they have made matters much worse. Not only are they damaging Harvard’s and their own reputations, they are now materially damaging the black community. By not acting to fire Gay for transgressions for which no other previous president of Harvard, administrator or faculty member would survive, they are telling the world that lower standards apply to black people at Harvard. This is incredibly damaging to the many highly talented black faculty at Harvard. Sadly, some will now question the legitimacy of faculty of color at Harvard because apparently lower academic and leadership standards are being applied to President Gay because of her intersectionality status. In effect, the board’s failure to fire Gay delegitimizes other faculty of color at Harvard. This is very very wrong, and the Board needs to act now before more damage is done. Someone on the Board must understand all of the above, but has yet to break ranks. A word of advice: if you find yourself on a board which has lost its way and won’t reverse a disastrous decision for ego, personal fear, or other reasons, the best time to get off the board is now."
Dr. Eli David on X - "In plain English it's called “stealing”
In academic English it's called “plagiarism”
In @Harvard English it's called “duplicative language” 🤡"
Debate Over Plagiarism Allegations Against Claudine Gay Adds to Pressures at Harvard - The New York Times - "“As a Harvard student, the whole scandal from beginning to end has been pretty embarrassing,” David Vega, a Harvard senior, said on Thursday. “I just think it’s a bit of a rough look for us.”... the university said the panel had also looked at her 1997 dissertation, which had not been part of the original review, and found two additional instances of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Those instances also did not amount to “research misconduct,” the university said, but would be corrected in an update to Dr. Gay’s dissertation. Asked on Thursday whether the Harvard Corporation still stood by Dr. Gay, a spokesman for the university referred back to the Dec. 12 statement of unanimous support. Dr. Gay declined to be interviewed... In one example that drew ridicule, Dr. Gay appeared to borrow exact phrases from the acknowledgments section of another author’s book to thank her mentor and family in the acknowledgments section of her own dissertation... Still, the steady dribble of allegations has privately worried some faculty members who see a pattern of sloppiness unbecoming of a Harvard leader. And some have begun to speak out more forcefully, questioning whether Dr. Gay can effectively carry out presidential duties, including raising money from the widest possible groups of donors. “You have to be practical, not ideological,” Avi Loeb, a professor of science who was critical of Dr. Gay’s earlier congressional testimony, said on Thursday. “If she cannot accomplish the goals she needs to pursue as a university president, then it’s obvious what needs to be done.”... In a note to colleagues that he shared with The New York Times, Eugene I. Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology, wrote that Dr. Gay remaining as president was “unsustainable for Harvard.” “Claudine Gay is a huge liability for Harvard and by implication for higher education in the U.S.,” he wrote. “Her presidency is a huge Christmas present” to the right... Randall Kennedy, a Harvard legal scholar, said on Thursday that his support for Dr. Gay was “unmoved.” The allegations against her, he said, had been brought to light by “professional vilifiers.” He urged the university to “clarify the idea of plagiarism and distinguish between various levels of culpability.” He also suggested that Harvard leadership might decline to cooperate further with a congressional investigation into the university, distinguishing between “bona fide inquiries” and “bad faith efforts to harass, embarrass and intimidate.”... While the president of a university might be held to a higher standard than a student, “as to whether we should expect perfection from them, the answer is no,” Mr. Swinton said.
I like how if the right wing points out facts, we need to be suspicious of them. Basic logical fallacies are good when they suit the left wing agenda
Students at Harvard are pretty much being given permission to plagiarise, since a lower standard applies to them