Harvard president should be held to standard, resign
She plagiarized
I take no joy in saying this, but Harvard President Claudine Gay ought to resign. Her track record is unbefitting the president of the country’s premier university. Remaining on the job would send a bad signal to students about the gravity of her conduct.
This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.
Gay’s missteps did not seem to involve sweeping appropriations of carefully crafted words or thoughtful ideas but a failure to put mostly boilerplate language inside quotation marks.
Moreover, plagiarism in the digital age is a therebut-for-the-grace-of-God event; every writer should worry about the risk of the accidental cut-andpaste. I like to think I’d recognize and remove any language I hadn’t written, but who can be certain? It is always best to cite and even over-credit the work of others. Charitableness begins at home.
And yet. The instances of problematic citation in the work of Gay, a political scientist, have become too many to ignore. Some go well beyond routine use of the same language. The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported that
“in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences — even entire paragraphs — with just a word or two tweaked.”
Harvard’s own material underscores this conclusion. “Plagiarism is defined as the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else,” its manual for students advises. “If you turn in a paper … in which you have included material from any source without citing that source, you have plagiarized.”
Perhaps the most disturbing example is Gay’s borrowing of words from another scholar, Jennifer L. Hochschild. In her acknowledgments for a 1996 book, Hochschild described a mentor who “showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor” and “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”
Gay’s dissertation thanked her thesis adviser, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor,” and her family, who “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”
Now, can I just say? Acknowledgments are the easiest and most fun part of writing a book. Why not come up with your own thanks? What does it say about a person who chooses to appropriate another’s language for this most personal task?
Harvard said it launched an inquiry into Gay’s conduct after being contacted by the New York Post in October about plagiarism allegations. It said an independent panel of three respected political scientists with no ties to Harvard had examined Gay’s published works and found instances of “inadequate citations” that, “while regrettable, did not constitute research misconduct” because there was no evidence of intentional deception or recklessness.
It said Gay had submitted four corrections to two articles and, after questions were raised about her dissertation, promised to update that document as well to fix “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Most of the scholars involved told the Harvard Crimson that they were untroubled by the conduct.
Really? Here’s what Harvard tells its students: “Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.”
And this: “When you write papers in college, your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors.” Which raises the question: Is the university president’s work being held to the same standards? It sure doesn’t look that way.