Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position on Tuesday, ending a six-month tenure marred by allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

Gay had come under pressure to resign from Harvard's Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, while also facing several allegations of plagiarism for her academic work in recent months.

  • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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    9 months ago

    Her work isn't in my area, but from what I've seen of the accusations, it's a stretch to call it "plagiarism." There are a number of places where her citations were a little shoddy (especially in her early work and PhD dissertation), but those all seem like what are basically instances of her not being as careful as she could have been rather than actual plagiarism in the strong sense. Most of the accusations revolve around some cases where she ambiguously paraphrased material without making it super clear what was and wasn't a paraphrase. It was all cited, but not as meticulously as it probably should have been. There's not even an accusation that she stole ideas or concepts, or tried to pass the work of others off as her own--again, from what I've seen.

    The consensus among academics I know is that she should have been more careful, but that nothing she did rose to the level of real academic dishonesty, nor was it even necessarily really outside the norm for a grad student or new faculty (especially at the time). Before the ubiquity of digital tools, it was much more common to do stuff like this, as it wasn't always easy to keep track of where ideas or phrasing came from. Technical language in particular was pretty easy to inadvertently "paraphrase," as there are only so many clear ways to explain technical phenomena. Standards about this stuff were more lax 25+ years ago.

    This is all to say that she's almost certainly been pressured to resign entirely as a result of Zionist cry bullying, and not because of actual academic misconduct. The "plagiarism" stuff was just a kind of pretext to give the push a veneer of being apolitical. If you dug into most people's work from the same time period, you'd almost certainly find a few similar instances for pretty much anyone. This is really similar to the phenomenon from a few years back when right wing shitheads would dig back through the twitter accounts of journalists they didn't like until they found some off-color bad taste jokes from when the person was 20 years old, and then make a big fuss about the journalist being a secret pedophile to get them fired. It's disingenuous by design.