Since the infamous day when a hostile Congressional committee grilled three female university presidents about anti-Semitism on their campuses, one of the three (from the University of Pennsylvania) resigned, and pressure has been building to force out Harvard’s President Claudine Gay.
The three were asked by a pugnacious Rep. Elise Stefanik if a call for genocide against Jews on their campus would violate college policy against bullying and harassment. They all answered that it depended on the context.
Rep. Stefanik and her fellow Republicans were appalled and treated their responses as an outrage. The three women tried to backtrack, but they faced a disastrous backlash, as though they endorsed genocide against Jews.
Stefanik tweeted her triumph over the three presidents of prestigious universities:
“One down. Two to go,” Stefanik wrote in a post on X after Magill announced her resignation.
“@Harvard and @MIT, do the right thing,” Stefanik added. “The world is watching.”
Now the rightwing hate machine has trained its guns on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president. Led by the infamous Chris Rufo, who knows how to manufacture crises and smear campaigns, the effort to oust President Gay has focused on allegations of plagiarism in her 1997 dissertation and her published articles.
Apparently the House Committee will now investigate Dr. Gay for plagiarism. I truly don’t understand how the question of plagiarism became a fit subject for a Congressional investigation.
The charges thus far have come from Rufo, the rightwing Washington Free Beacon, and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The Washington Free Beacon gave concrete examples from her work, but without putting them into context (I.e., did she name the authors whose work she was citing in the body of the text?).
Having reviewed the allegations, I concluded that they were surely embarrassing to Gay, but none was so egregious as to destroy her career. In a few instances, she cited the authors of a paper, then took a quote from the cited work without inserting quotation marks. She is making corrections and adding quotation marks.
The campaign against Claudine Gay shows rightwing cancel culture at its zenith.
My view: any decision about Dr. Gay should be made by the Harvard Corporation, not by a rightwing lynch mob and not by a vengeful Congressional committee. Rufo and his friends would like nothing better than to claim victory over America’s most prestigious institution of higher education.
If I were a member of the Harvard Corporation, I would vote to support her.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There’s also the personal vendetta by Stefanik after she was removed from a committee there for telling lies about the 2020 election.
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Elise Stefanik is a piece of work. Her professors at Harvard predicted a bright future for her. She was clearly going to have a career in politics. She presented herself as a moderate, a voice of reason, a beacon of intellect and thoughtfulness. But when the party went for Trump, she changed her tune and went full-MAGA, even echoing the Big Lie. She has no principles.
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Of course Diane Ravitch supports Claudine Gay. The current version of Diane Ravitch is purely a tribalist who is fully immersed in identity politics; Ms. Gay is a prominent leader of that tribe, the only reason she received her current position. Ms. Gay has been exposed as an intellectual lightweight whose scholarship doesn’t come close to reaching the level that was previously expected for a President of Harvard. Moreover, she has been exposed as a serial pliagarist, supposedly the worst accusation that can be made about someone’s scholarly work.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/claudine-gay-and-my-scholarship-plagiarism-elite-system-unearned-position-24e4a1b1
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Thanks a lot, Paula. Nice comment from a total stranger. I have never been called a “tribalist” before. I’ve never met Claudine Gay so am happy to learn that she is a leader of my “tribe.” My view is that President Gay is being harassed by rightwing zealots, and that Congress has no role in deciding whether her academic credentials are good enough for Harvard. That’s overreach. That decision belongs to the Harvard Corporation, not Elise Stefanik.
The Republicans are quite willing to insert themselves into our bedrooms and our doctor’s offices. I prefer that they do their job and fix our broken healthcare system and tax structure, for example.
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Well said, Diane. Wow. The trolls are out in force these days, huh?
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Bob Shepherd, I wonder how many of those Trolls are paid to be Trolls by Putin or a MAGA RINO billionaire out to destroy our Democracy and turn it into a dystopian, libertarian theo-fascist nightmare.
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Swain served on Trump’s 1776 Commission. I would not trust anyone who committed herself to that mythologizing of history.
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Being a democrat means never having to say you are sorry!! Obama also made a phone call encouraging Harvard to leave their identity hire in place. 😂
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Why do you call Dr. Gay an “identity hire”? She was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and well-respected. You don’t like Blacks or Black women?
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And Diane goes straight for the race card. 😂 Diane, Gay’s qualifications were extremely light, and plagiarized to boot, or had a lot of “duplicative language.” Lol. Anyway, there are hundreds of more qualified black women. Carol Swain, for one. Condoleeza Rice for two.
I have to hand it to you lefties, you sure know how to circle the wagons. I predict that you all will wait until the worst has passed and then Gay will quietly resign “to spend more time with her family.”
Anything for the revolution..right?
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Yes, we definitely need more war criminals as presidents of universities. ROFL.
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Until found guilty of plagiarism in court, our laws say innocent until proven guilty.
Traitor Trump and his MAGA RINO barbarian monsters rely on innocent until proven guilty when they are in court.
But MAGA RINOS decide Democrats are guilty just because they are Democrats without at rial.
Still, Traitor Trump has already been found guilty of rape and fraud in two separate trials.
The fact that the traitor’s lawyers are appealing both cases doesn’t change the fact that he was FOUND GUILTY.
The president of Harvard has only been found guilty by MAGA RINO vigilantes.
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I haven’t followed the ins and outs of all the charges and counter-charges — but simply on general principle I know academic politics is fraught with enough adverse influences on its own and it would be extremely unhelpful to set of precedent of bringing congressional Realpolitik into it.
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edit: a precedent
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You got it right the first time.
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Agreed, Jon
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There is a difference between plagiarism and improper citation. As a lifelong editor (I actually wrote a best-selling book on writing research papers, textbooks on grammar and usage, and style sheets for use by professional editors in major publishing houses), I can attest that most people, including academic professionals, are not highly skilled at accurate and proper documentation. And there are lots of rules and conflicting styles and many gray areas. Consider this:
Lincoln called upon us to oversee a new birth of freedom so that our founding principle and our country, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, would not perish from the Earth.
I cited Lincoln, but I did not put quotation marks around his exact words. I did not write,
Lincoln called upon us to oversee “a new birth of freedom” so that our founding principle and our country, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would not “perish from the Earth.”
One could be pedantic about this and argue that in the first instance, I committed plagiarism because some of Lincoln’s words were used without quotation marks around them. But one could also argue that I did indeed cite the source generally and that I was relying on my readers’ knowledge of the text to get the rest of it. Or perhaps I was simply writing a long paper and was, in this instance, less attentive than I could have been.
I don’t think my career should be ended because of that.
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It does seem clear that no students at Harvard who commit any similar errors relating to citations/quoting/paraphrasing should be subject to any academic discipline.
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Well, you or your TA mark the paper and give it a lower grade. That’s what happens unless it is CLEARLY THE CASE that the student has intentionally plagiarized or has simply not bothered to attempt to avoid plagiarism.
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Why should it receive a lower grade? Shouldn’t the student be given the opportunity to correct the error, like Ms. Gay was?
If she wasn’t disciplined or subjected to any negative consequences for this, I don’t see why students should be.
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Because part of the job of the professor and TA is to teach students how to do documentation correctly and to incentivize them to do this. And you know that, Flerp.
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This is so even if in the real worlds of academia and publishing, people make egregious errors in documentation ALL THE TIME.
I have often found that those who complain about other people’s grammar often frequently violate rules that they don’t know. LOL.
It would be amusing to have access to Chris Rufo’s college papers and do go through those with an eye to proper documentation.
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FLERP,
You’re trying to reason with people who will mentally contort themselves into pretzels to defend someone in their tribe. Religious conservatives who cult worship Donald Trump also do this all the time.
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That’s how I wound have handled it when I was a TA or an AI, true, but I think there are optics problems when students get grades lowered for citations errors that the university’s own president committed repeatedly. It’s a bad look.
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I should have my grade lowered for the autocorrect errors in that comment.
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The kind of plagiarism that Claudine Gay was accused of isn’t rare among scholars.
Famed historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin
Princeton Professor of History Kevin M. Kruse
Harvard Professor Jill Abramson
Harvard Professor Lawrence Tribe
Was Harvard Professor Alan Dershwitz subject to academic discipline when he was credibly accused of plagiarism, and his defense was that he only used so many long quotes from a thoroughly discredited book without attribution because he went back to the original sources and was really quoting those original sources and he just happened to make the exact same mistake as the writer of the totally discredited book he was supposedly not plagiarizing did!
Was Ian Ayres, the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale’s School of Management, subject to academic discipline? Doesn’t appear so.
“Several passages in Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres’ ’81 LAW ‘86 newest book are unattributed verbatim reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of passages from various newspaper and magazine articles published in the last twenty years, an investigation by the News has shown.
Ayres’ ninth book, entitled “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart,” was published in August by Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. The News found nine passages in the book similar to or the same as sentences from articles printed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune and Fast Company magazine.
Ayres, the William K. Townsend professor at the Law School and a professor at the Yale School of Management, said he plans to make changes to future printings of the book……
Although Ayres uses endnotes to cite his sources, sentences from many of those sources were printed without quotation marks or other in-text attributions. Of the passages identified by the News, only one is a verbatim reproduction of text published previously by another author. Other passages substitute words or clauses into sentences written by others or omit words or clauses.
A Law School official familiar with the situation said the school has found no evidence that Ayres intended to copy the work of other authors.”
If a white scholar isn’t severely punished, it is because their mistake was unintentional and often characterized as a minor quibble. If others who aren’t white aren’t severely punished, it is supposedly because they are a lousy scholar unworthy of their positions who always get passes.
The fiction is that white scholars never get a pass, when that is far from true, but it is true that their wrongdoing is often minimized and soon forgotten, while the supposed academic “crimes” of people like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Gay are characterized as completely discrediting.
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Bob, just saw this.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/?s=09
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I do hear you, FLERP, but I also know how common such errors have been in work by respected scholars whom I have edited over my career. A lot of people make serious mistakes with documentation form.
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The whole hearing in The House was an attack on higher education and women. The extremists in The House do not want to govern or lead. They are interested in creating a media sideshow.
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They don’t want to be leaders. They want to be Instagram influencers. When you re-frame like this, many pieces fall into place.
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Stefanik and the other GOP committee members were an embarassment. These 3 women responded in a civl manner as a typical academic, then they were attacked. These 3 women had to have a great background to achieve what they have achieved. Why are you so angry? Stefanik and her GOP colleagues don’t seem to be angry about the violence perpertrated on police, election workers and judges in this country. Everyone needs to treat others with respect even though you may disagree with them. Instead of using this meeting as an opportunity to discuss how to work together to address the issues, they just yelled at the 3 women. This isn’t going to solve the problem of anti-semitism nor is it going to address the Israeli-Hamas war.
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There is a huge difference between technical plagiarism and intentional plagiarism, that is passing off something you say or write as your own ideas or words, pretending they are your own. Most academic writing includes some technical plagiarism especially writing in the academy. Nobody is going to read it. Writing for public audiences is when plagiarism becomes serious, when someone is deliberately trying to steal someone else’s ideas. Who is going to read dissertations?
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/writing-history
This is a 2002 PBS Newshour transcript on plagiarism with a focus on rules at Harvard at the end of the transcript. I used to show the video to my first year college students to emphasize how serious this issue is in academia.
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To many of us–folks who attended places like Ohio State, or no college at all–Harvard is a symbol of part of what’s great about America. Glad you are standing up for her!
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I was surprised to see Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post call for Gay’s resignation. She, too, points to plagiarism as cause. On the other hand, there’s this guy, a billionaire who’s annoyed the board won’t bend a knee in the general direction of his money.:
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Christine,
I too was surprised by Ruth Marcus’s column, probably because I usually agree with her.
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Yeah there is a well organized smear campaign against the organizers ( and participants) of the Many rallies/ demonstrations across the US calling for Permanent Ceasefire Now and Solidarity with Palestinian people . Conflating support for ” Intifada ” ( literally ” shaking off ” Occupation) with Calling for Genocide of Jews ! ( Leaving aside that Many of those at the Demos are Jewish themselves ! )
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Just to be clear, I don’t support Intifada, which was a campaign of terrorism against Israelis (setting off bombs in pizza parlors, open air markets, and buses to kill innocent civilians).
Sure, there are Jews saying “from the river to the sea,” a line from the Hamas charter that clearly states that all the land that is now Israel should be Islamic. That implies the elimination of Israel. That’s ridiculous.
The root of the violence is the refusal by jihadists, Islamists, and terrorists to accept Israel’s right to exist.
Israel exists. It will continue to exist. There will never be peace until Israel and its neighbors co-exist. Israel is a tiny nation that has turned the deserts into fertile land. It exports fruits and vegetables. Its technology is world class (Israelis invented Waze and many other new technologies). Israel has world-class medical facilities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_inventions_and_discoveries
Imagine a peaceful Middle East where the nations shared and prospered.
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Isn’t Claudine Gay the one who said she wouldn’t end legacy admissions until after her granddaughter was admitted, or was that someone else? If she was, I must admit it’s hard to feel sorry for the selfish.
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I don’t think so. She has a 17-year-old son, no granddaughter.
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of course you would, shes a lesbian plagiarized her doctorate and her views are deplorable. shame on you!!!!
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Christine Gay is married and she and her husband have a son. If she were a lesbian, that would be okay with me.
“Gay is married to Christopher Afendulis, an information systems analyst at Stanford University’s Department of Health Research and Policy. They have a son who was born in 2006.” Her husband is of Greek origin. He’s white, which I am sure is of great importance to you.
Her views are mainstream, no different from the editorial board of the NEW YORK TIMES. She did not plagiarize her doctoral dissertation.
Jealous much?
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