Despite support from corporation, Harvard president Claudine Gay under fire over plagiarism allegations

Seems more like a fishing expedition by people trying to remove her for political reasons:

At no point in either paragraph does Gay use quotation marks or include in-text citations. Voss and Palmquist are not cited anywhere in Gay’s dissertation.

In an interview Monday night, Voss — who said he taught Gay methods at Harvard while he was a teaching fellow and she was a student — said the work was “technically plagiarism,” but described it as “minor-to-inconsequential.”

He added that similar descriptions of technical methods are common throughout academia.

“This doesn’t at all look sneaky,” Voss said. “It looks like maybe she just didn’t have a sense of what we normally tell students they’re supposed to do and not do.”

also

Rufo and Brunet also focused on Gay’s dissertation, writing that the paper “lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim” from a paper by Lawrence D. Bobo and Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. as well as other scholars without using quotation marks. They also alleged that Gay plagiarized political scientist Carol M. Swain and Harvard professor Gary King, who was Gay’s dissertation adviser.

But Bobo, King, and Gilliam all said they did not feel Gay plagiarized their work.

In an emailed statement, King — who holds Harvard’s highest faculty rank as a University Professor — called the claims “false and absurd” and “crazy.”

and this kind of hammers it home

In their Substack post, Rufo and Brunet wrote that Gay also plagiarized from Swain, a political scientist whose work revolves around race relations and politics, specifically citing a reference to a statistic on the House reelection rate.

Rufo and Brunet did not note that Gay cited Swain in the following sentence. Her dissertation reads, “Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%. In 1994 it was 92.3% (Swain 1997).”

more examples:

In a statement, Jeffrey B. Liebman, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the authors of the 2003 report, wrote, “I do not see any signs of plagiarism,” adding that four of his co-authors also do not have any concerns.

“It is not surprising when two researchers describe the same statistical procedure or the same government program using similar language,” Liebman wrote. “As the MTO research unfolded, lots of us contributed to developing and refining the language that we used for these basic descriptions, and all of us, including President Gay, had the right to use and adapt this common language.”

It sounds more like since the whole debacle with the congress hearings didn't push her out, they shifted to the 'plagiarism'. Sounds more like a witch-hunt to me, tbh..

The whole affair reminds me of the quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, one of the most cutthroat authoritarian politicians in history:

"Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him."

Has it never occurred to anyone in the press that a typical humanities dissertation is 250 - 300 pages long, and over the course of Gay's 25+ year academic career, the worst that a dedicated rat-f*cking operation could dig up was a few unattributed quotes that none of her colleagues found remarkable? She must be a candidate for sainthood.

There's also a particularly poisonous attempt to imply that a Black scholar must have cheated to arrive in a prestigious position. Whatever the thickness of her qualifications when applying, President Gay has been able to fulfill the duties of the role for the past 5 years. Tell me you're witch-hunting liberal academic leaders without telling me.

In an interview Monday night, Voss — who said he taught Gay methods at Harvard while he was a teaching fellow and she was a student — said the work was “technically plagiarism,” but described it as “minor-to-inconsequential.”

And

“Her dissertation and every one of the numerous drafts I read leading up to the final version met the highest levels of academic integrity,” he wrote. “If you were going to commit plagiarism, would you plagiarize your professor's work and expect to get away with it?”

Bobo, the dean of Social Science at Harvard, wrote that he is “unconcerned about these claims as our work was explicitly acknowledged.”

Heck, almost everyone listed in the article, excepting Swaim, claims they don't believe it's plagiarism. And all's fair, if Swaim believes she's been plagiarized she's allowed to raise concerns but where's all this coming from?

In a post on X Sunday night, right-wing activist Christopher F. Rufo said he and journalist Christopher Brunet intentionally released the story amid calls for Gay’s ouster as Harvard’s governing boards met

Ah, an activist. Personal bias recognized, I'm immediately dismissive of any right-wing activists.

Let's get conspiritorial thinking out of the way, maybe all these teachers don't want her plagiarism recognized because it's nice to have leverage on the president of Harvard. Good now that we've recognized that insane possibility maybe, like most of the people who've said it's not plagiarism have said, it's nothing.

Now, granted, those are some pretty big chunks but this isn't my field of academic study. I'll trust the people in the field saying it's no big deal over the guy just looking for his team to win the culture war he's waging today.

John McWhorter, in an NYT opinion piece, points out that her CV is relatively thin compared to her predecessors for her position.

None of this is particularly impactful for our current world at large, and Gay does seem an accomplished scholar in her own right albeit seemingly junior for her position?, but I do think an interesting point has been raised that her appointment in the first place might have been a little hasty. I think that what John is open implying is that the act of holding such a figure to a lower standard because they're a politically attractive representative actually is disrespectful of and does a disservice to URMs — which is the core problem of tokenization.

And truth be told, if a conservative figure, like, say, J.D. Vance, were discovered to have committed similar "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" for their books and papers, we (the liberal segment of society) would probably be all over their case.

Anyway, the amount of time and attention lavished by congress and media alike on university presidents is wasted. In a more enlightened society, our political and thought leaders alike would debate and seek answers or at least working political compromises on the deep philosophical questions that undergird our national problems.