Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Shortest Tenure in University History
Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Shortest Tenure in University History
Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.
Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.
Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.
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It’s sad to me that simply bringing enough negative attention, whether it’s warranted or not, is enough to get organizations to cave. They had a third party investigate her writing and they found it didn’t fall to the level of plagiarism. The people she supposedly plagiarized all agree that the technical nature of what she was summarizing wouldn’t make it plagiarism. The majority of students support her and the work she was doing.
I’m curious if any other Harvard President has ever had this level of scrutiny on their work come years after the fact. Feels like it’s people dishonestly taking objection just because they want to see her removed and now they’ve succeeded.
I'm pretty sure the flimsy plagiarism matter is just the lever used to oust her after her poor handling of the students calling for genocide. That looked real bad for the school in the congressional hearing. That or a way to oust her without appearing to pick a side in that whole mess.
She simply refused to make a blanket statement that would exclude all nuance.
She essentially refused to agree to zero tolerance policies. Which, you would think that people would be against.
But it was trap, and the media successfully branded it as condoning hate speech, when that's not at all what her refusal to take the bait was about.
Damned if she did, damned if she didn't.
It wasn't the media at all though; it was fucking Elise Stefanik deliberately interrupting her prior response to hide the fact that her response was the same with regard to student speech vis black people or Israel.
Michelle Goldberg did a great write up of it in the NYT.
But let me correct myself. The news media in general did blow it by not catching on to and calling out what Stefanik did, but it wasn't universal as obviously some of us, including Michelle Goldberg, understood Stefanik's intellectually dishonest fake-out.
I think all presidents handled it very poorly. They didn't really push back much against the claim the students were calling for genocide. I think they agreed that the language was hateful, which, as far as I can tell, it was not. Considering their jobs, they should've handled it better. They should have protected their students from slander.
It only looked bad because the question itself was dishonest and meant to make the school look bad. The students did not openly call for genocide. They called for another “intifada” and repeated the “from the river to the sea” mantra (or whatever you’d call it). Both of these things would be protected by a free speech policy that, as she stated, requires things to be targeted and actionable.
Eh, us professors care pretty deeply about the plagiarism she did. Intent or even knowledge of plagiarism isn't necessary for disciplinary action in plagiarism cases at major research universities. Any one of these examples would be enough for my university's academic integrity committee to rule that plagiarism occurred:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html
And in the case of a dissertation, plagiarism is an automatic expulsion and degree retraction from my university. At the PhD level, students certainly know that what Dr. Gay did is plagiarism (a good rule of thumb is that five sequential words, even with paraphrasing, without citing the source, is plagiarism), and that plagiarism is completely unacceptable.
I already know of a student who made the argument that their plagiarism wasn't as bad as Dr. Gay's, so because Dr. Gay wasn't penalized, they shouldn't be penalized. Had she not stepped down, that line of argument likely would have snowballed out of control. The professors I know think her comments to Congress were out of touch, but all of us had been livid that she and Harvard were saying that she didn't plagiarize--any professor who looks at those examples will tell you that she did.
Her students were not calling for genocide and the questions were a trap along the lines of "when did you stop beating your wife?".
I think it's fair to say that she did not handle it as well as she could have done - directly calling out the nature of the question would have been better. But her refusal to throw her students under the bus is to be commended.
Harvard received the first plagiarism complaint in October. The investigation of the claims in that complaint came to its conclusion on December 9. Harvard said they supported her as recently as December 12.
Harvard University announced Tuesday that under-fire President Claudine Gay will keep her job — even after reportedly losing more than $1 billion in donations since her disastrous congressional testimony about antisemitism.
The Harvard Corporation — the university’s highest governing body — made its announcement Tuesday following night-long talks between Gay and university leaders, a source familiar with the decision told the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.
"As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University. Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the group said in a statement.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/12/news/harvard-expected-to-announce-claudine-gay-will-keep-job/
The Harvard Corporation expressed concerns about allegations of plagiarism in University President Claudine Gay’s academic work Tuesday morning, even as the board declared its unanimous support for Harvard’s embattled president, providing Gay with a path forward to remain in office.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a University-wide statement on Tuesday. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.” ... While the Corporation said it did not believe that the allegations amount to misconduct, it announced that Gay agreed to amend two publications.
“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” the Fellows wrote. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/corporation-raises-plagiarism-concerns/
That said, two additional complaints were submitted in December. One complaint was submitted on December 18 and the other was on December 29. I think the last one just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html
It's absolutely not flimsy- she's only written a dozen articles and there's been concrete examples of plagiarism in at least of a quarter of them. Here is one of 40+ examples of the plagiarism found:
Swain in her article:
“the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
Gay in her article:
"the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities.”
Swain in her article:
“Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent”
Gay in her article:
"Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%”
She never cited Swain in any way until she was forced to do so this year by the review board. If I pulled this in college in more then 25% of my essays I'd most certainly be in front of my department head in a very serious conversation, looking at suspension at least.
Edit: Lol, late breaking news! As of today plagiarism allegations now cover 50%! Half! of her papers as even more examples have come out literally a few hours ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html
And yet Swain seems to care about other things than the claimed plagiarism, which she didn't even mention in her call to have Gay fired. No, she cares a lot more that Gay wasn't vociferously pro-Israel and didn't expel the students for their pro-Palestine speech.
It doesn't matter one single bit what the people who she plagiarized think about her, if they're upset by it or not, or if they think she's a good person or not. That's not what plagiarism is.
She directly took language from the work of others without prior permission and claimed it to be her own. That's all the context that is taken for academic dishonesty- if I was accused of plagiarizing my friend's essay by my department and countered with "but my friend thinks I'm such a good person", I'd be laughed out of the room.
The examples you gave are also incredibly minor. I've taught students and dealt with plagiarism for years. Single sentence or partial sentence pieces like that are a minimal issue and, if considered one by the author, easily fixed with some quotation marks.
It's very obviously looking for a problem because it isn't the claimed plagiarism anyone actually cares about, but exists as a convenient excuse attempt.
Single sentence and partial sentence is a minor issue and totally understandable if it happens a handful of times (everyone forgets citations one point or another). But if it happens nearly 50 times in less then a dozen articles it's a very consistent pattern of academic dishonesty.
So, single or partial sentence issues less than 5 times in each article. Articles that are many, many pages long, as such published articles are wont to do, yes? Again, this just sounds like an "you should extend a reference to cover this as well" sort of suggestion and not a major issue.
So would you think it were a big deal if it were longer then a single sentence? Say like:
Bradley and Voss:
.. the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race's turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other's across the graph).
Gay:
The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race's turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.
Or like:
Canon:
The central parts of the VRA are Section 2 and Section 5. The former prohibits any state or political subdivision from imposing a voting practice that will "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." The latter was imposed only on "covered" jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, which must submit changes in any electoral process or mechanism to the federal government for approval.^3
Gay:
The central parts of the measure are Section 2 and Section 5. Section 2 reiterates the guarantees of the 15th amendment, prohibiting any state or political subdivision from adopting voting practices that "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Section 5, imposed only on "covered" jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, requires Justice Department preclearance of changes in any electoral process or mechanism.
Neither of those cherry picked quotes are egregious at all. They're one sentence long.
They’re not cherry picked, I’m just not going to list all 47 (as of today, more keep being discovered) instances of plagiarism here. The ones I gave aren’t even the close to the most egregious!
Would you prefer these:
Bradley and Voss:
the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race's turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other's across the graph).
Gay:
The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race's turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.
Gilliam:
Historically, politics has been a vehicle for upward mobility among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Minority political incorporation and the redirection of public resources that is hypothesized to come with it, should alter how people evaluate and relate to their local governments.
Gay:
Historically, politics has been an important vehicle in the mobility (and "mainstreaming") of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As a consequence, minority office-holding should alter how people evaluate and relate to government
The general rule of thumb is that five words, even with paraphrasing, of unquoted or uncited text is plagiarism:
I doubt any past Harvard prez has faced this much scrutiny, and I'm sure you would find plagiarism or worse among them if you did scrutinize them so extremely. That's not really an excuse though, and doesn't change the fact that the plagiarism issue is a real problem that wasn't going away so resigning was the only way to move past it.
That’s what I’m saying, though… I don’t think anyone actually thought it was a problem until they decided they wanted her out. The supposed plagiarism was reviewed twice by independent bodies and they both said they couldn’t find an “intent to deceive or mislead”. They said that the quotations were negligent but wouldn’t be considered plagiarism in those instances and would typically be allowed to be submitted for revision.
If she was trying to pass off someone else’s words or thoughts as her own, that would be one thing. Missing a citation for a technical description doesn’t seem to fall under that umbrella.
Yes, and I'm saying this isn't a situation where nuanced discussions about plagiarism matter in the end. Whether she was just sloppy or did it with intent, there's an issue that people can point to, and given the current context those people aren't going to stop. I think she is right that to serve the institution she had to resign, I'm not saying it's ideal or just, but the situation is what it is and I believe she did the honorable thing.
I agree. They wouldn’t stop. It’s just a shame that that’s enough to derail everything. Why would anyone want that job when the school will just bow to any kind of political pressure as opposed to actual, objective issues with the way she’s performing the job.
We all know that plagiarism was not the real issue here. It was a convenient excuse to call for her resignation, but it was the other thing listed above that was the real push by certain well known non-profit groups to get her fired.
For sure. I'm not saying it is the real issue, just that it is a real issue.
It's massive plagiarism actually. To the point she even copied the acknowledgement sections.....wtf.
The people she supposedly plagiarized all agree that the technical nature of what she was summarizing wouldn’t make it plagiarism.
I don't think that's correct. I haven't looked at the full list of people who were supposedly plagiarized, but at least one of them, Dr. Carol Swain, was calling for Dr. Claudine Gay to be fired.
This Carol Swain? Yeah, no, it has nothing to do with plagiarism, it has to do with Swain being pro-ethnic cleansing and is mad that Claudine Gay didn't expel all Palestinian students or some other extreme action to show loyalty to Israel.
Holy shit that lady is insane.
She even somehow managed to blame Obama for starting all of this?!? wtf?
Don't you know that Obama is personally responsible for 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina?
Fact: he did nothing to stop either.
I stubbed my toe the other day and muttered "thanks Obama".
I know your argument is of semantics but I’d say it's not relevant either way. The determination should be done by objective third parties.
And it was, supposedly.
The same third party board that said she didn't commit plagiarism while also forcing her to add dozens of missing citations to her work where she directly copied sentences from other articles... Which makes absolutely no sense.
It makes perfect sense. Negligence is not the same as attempting to pass off someone else's ideas as your own. The third party boards that reviewed her work found that she didn't properly cite those definitions from the sources, not that she was trying to pass off what those definitions were as definitions that she, herself, came up with.
It very clearly wasn’t negligence- she cited plenty of other sources in her work that she didn’t copy word for word. She only left out the ones that she quite directly copied language from and did so on multiple occasions.
The review board let her off easy, giving her the benefit of doubt towards her intentions because she was the esteemed president of the university.
That's just simply not true. All of the quotes are word for word, whether they're cited or not. That's what makes them quotes. The quotes that weren't cited were written in summaries of technical descriptions for ideas where even the people she quoted agreed that she didn't plagiarize. Saying the review board let her off is while ignoring the actual authors (with one notable, political exception) means you think there's some sort of conspiracy here and that's just not something anyone should take seriously.
So if your definition of a quotation is something written word for word, whether it is cited or even at all distinguishable from her own work (read them yourself, they very clearly aren't distinguishable at all), what do you call something where she very clearly doesn't copy the original text word for word but instead rewrites it to better fit in with her own prose without ever citing it? Maybe something like changing:
“...the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
to
"...the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities...”
It's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that the review board might've treated her differently from any random undergraduate because of her status within academia. That's just human nature, it doesn't even require intent to do so.
So you're going to ignore the fact that the people she cited didn't think it was plagiarism either. Again, the difference is in whether or not the quotation used was intended to be passed off as the author's own words which, in those cases, clearly weren't since they were in technical summaries and accompanying visualizations that were different from the original context. Saying "the definition of x is y and z" without citing the dictionary is negligence. It's not plagiarism.
If what you're describing isn't a conspiracy theory then it's also not a conspiracy theory to point out that no other former President of Harvard has had the same type of scrutiny brought against them and that she's being treated differently because of her status, right?
Also- so you say copying a definition (even when not word for word and completely indistinguishable from your own writing) isn’t plagiarism and copying an explanation of a graph isn’t plagiarism. That’s a bit of weird opinion but you do you. I just have a few more questions to prove your definition of plagiarism.
Would you also say that copying an analysis of a text isn’t plagiarism?
Gilliam:
This paper explores two models-symbolic politics and governing coalitions-that focus on how minority office-holding affects people's political orientations. In other words, after an extended period of minority empowerment, what is the distribution of political attitudes between and within racial and ethnic groups? Which groups and subgroups positively evaluate the results of governmental action and which groups will hold more negative views? What are the important demographic and political correlates of how citizens respond to minority empowerment?
Gay:
The central question of this chapter is "How does black representation impact attitudes?" More explicitly, what is the distribution of political attitudes between and within racial groups in black-represented districts? How do groups evaluate the presence of black incumbents? What are the important demographic and political correlates of how citizens respond to minority political leadership?
Would you also say that copying an explanation of a law isn’t plagiarism?
Canon:
The central parts of the VRA are Section 2 and Section 5. The former prohibits any state or political subdivision from imposing a voting practice that will "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." The latter was imposed only on "covered" jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, which must submit changes in any electoral process or mechanism to the federal government for approval.^3
Gay:
The central parts of the measure are Section 2 and Section 5. Section 2 reiterates the guarantees of the 15th amendment, prohibiting any state or political subdivision from adopting voting practices that "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Section 5, imposed only on "covered" jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, requires Justice Department preclearance of changes in any electoral process or mechanism.
How far are you willing to stretch the definition of plagiarism?
Yes, I’m going to ignore what some of the people she didn’t cite think, for two reasons. First because it doesn’t matter as to her intent at the time- they didn’t know her, she didn’t know them, they didn’t give her prior permission. Second because she’s the direct boss and controller of funding for many of them so there’s an inbuilt power dynamic there.
Have you read the papers at hand? They absolutely seem indistinguishable from her own writing. You’d never notice that it wasn’t- in fact it wasn’t noticed for years. She incorporates them directly into arguments and explanations as well.
I don’t recall any former president of Harvard needing to have an academic dishonesty tribunal review their work because they all cited their sources properly (it’s not that hard to do!). I’m quite confident that if they had they done that they would’ve been evaluated in the exact same way- other professors at Harvard in similar situations have gone through similar processes and been punished in the past.
So you're anti-semantic?
While that is true, I don’t think she actually addressed the substance of the plagiarism claims. She just issued a blanket statement calling for her to be fired.