The search committee for the new president certainly will have a number of factors it must consider. “Less controversial” may be something they say in hushed tones, but only because they can’t say “white male.”
The same criteria may well be used for the members of the committee itself.
So perhaps it would be worth considering this:
And as far as antisemitism, requiring her to vow to suppress speech on campus is not demonstrating antisemitism, it’s just right-wing talking points.
Yeah, I read that part. I think accepting that as not plagiarism is pretty tough, and “duplicative language” is a first I’ve heard in any part of my short-lived academic career. It is plagiarism. But as Gay didn’t explicitly claim the idea as her own, I don’t think it’s grave enough to lose a job either.
It was corrected, and the citation was made in the original thesis. Swain’s “livid” response is an overreaction, and there is an obvious motivation for the use of the language.
She didn’t, actually. The excerpt that was cited as a gotcha was pulled out of the context of acknowleding the author and work she had supposedly plaigarized. What bullshit.
Ok, just to understand, we have a University panel specifically tasked to look into this (what appears to be trivial) case. They concluded that it was not plagiarism. And then we have an internet rando stating categorically that this panel was wrong, it was, as a matter of fact. plagiarism. After due consideration, I think I know where I am putting my (very not-academic) lot with. Why you choose to die on this hill baffles me, though.
You keep contradicting yourself.
Either you believe the woman is guilty of legitimate plagiarism, or you don’t.
I don’t listen to radio and not parroting some rando specialist. I went to college and grad school. From that training I think it’s plagiarism. It’s very easy to either paraphrase and quote, and in this case she made that mistake of not doing it the right way. It’s serious to get a student into trouble, but given what’s been quoted, it’s not serious enough to get someone fired. If I had to die on a hill, I’d rather not on a made up phrase of “duplicative language”, because that IS a pile of manure if I ever see one.
Just to be clear, I’d be perfectly happy with Claudine Gay being Harvard president, and her appointment has very little with my, world view, well-being, and happiness.
Appeal to authority; denied.
Then why argue ad nauseum about the topic, which you just claimed has no actual relevance to your personal life?
Again, that’s a contradiction.
definitely because she is a woman of color, and because she wasn’t embracing their reactionary world view.
Gay’s research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity
I mean… so did many of us… some of us have even written dissertations… what’s your point?
Eh…probably not that much trouble. I just wrote a 25 page paper for law school, and I was obsessing about details of how to properly cite everything, and my advisor told me to stop. That as long as I’d made a good faith effort to cite things properly, she wasn’t going to quibble over technical specifics. I keep hearing people claim, without evidence, that a student would be expelled for a similar infraction. Joe Biden was found to have plagiarized part of a paper his first year in law school, and they slapped him on the wrist when he claimed he just didn’t understand how to properly cite things. Then he plagiarized an entire speech in the Senate, which derailed his first Presidential campaign, and then everyone collectively said, “meh” when it was brought up again a few years ago.
Claudine Gay did not try to pass off someone else’s work as her own, regardless of whether what she did do technically meets anyone’s definition of plagiarism or not. Personally, I don’t think she should resign. I’m not in her shoes, and I’m sure she’s sick and tired of the attacks and doesn’t want to deal with it, so I don’t blame her for resigning, but I don’t think she should. I think she should force Harvard to fire her, if they think this is an infraction serious enough to lose her job over. I think people on the right do this shit all the time, and they never resign, and never admit fault, and just once, I’d like to see someone on the left refuse to put up with this bullshit.
So, I found the full complaint which seemed to have been eluding me previously.
It’s kind of all over the place. Some of the highlights seem like they might be worse than those that have gotten attention, some don’t seem like plagiarism at all.
Also, a previous article on the Crimson has done the work of selecting a few:
Picking an example:
I mean, there is a real question whether either of them is doing what they say they are doing in that quote, but in the end, both are just doing some blather about including county level data in their linear regression. (i.e. Gay’s alpha_{is} term and Freedman and Owen’s X_{it} terms.) Probably both from the census bureau, because where else are you going to get it. I don’t particularly like the blather aspect b/c there is a lot of stuff in this county level data. Maybe what you include matters! Gay did seem to do some kind of sensitivity analysis/robustness check, which is good and I don’t see it in the other paper, but I’m not going to take the time to examine it in detail.
Anyway, we won’t really find out if there was meaningful plagiarism here because the Harvard Corporation first defended her without meaningful inquiry and is now firing her without meaningful inquiry.
Exactly, that’s my argument! How dare they use authority without citing me! This poster is plagiarising me! Also, they ripped my argument out of context and perverted the meaning! I was mansplaining to them ex cathedra that it isn’t plagiarism.
SCNR.
It feels like this one of those discussions which is getting very long very quickly and then gets compressed to a very short one by a friendly reminder from @orenwolf.
I stil wonder, however - why did @frauenfelder invite to dinner that way?
… what idea was that exactly 
Some white dudes whined a bit, mad that a Black woman was in one of their office. Of course, they removed her, because people in power will always roll over for white supremacists. Always. Until we make sure that they no longer do that.
“Sorry, Could Not Resist.”
Understandable because it seems:
This is a situation where an individual seems to actively want to believe the worst about someone based only on unreliable info and flagrant bigotry, yet they don’t want to be seen as “a bad person” for automatically just assuming that the bigots are ‘correct.’
That still doesn’t represent plaigarism. If I wrote in my disseration:
“I construct a county-level measure that captures the incentives that developers have to build hospitals in rural communities”
Have I plaigarised Freedman and Owens? I’m writing about a very different measurement and a very different analysis and describe it in a way that just makes sense. - much like Gay did.
The real question with plaigarism is whether the writer is putting off someone else’s work as his or her own. Gay didn’t do that. Neither did I, even though the turn of phrase I used in the first sentence of this paragraph has most certainly been used to discuss plaigarism before. I may have even read it from another author a couple of decades ago - it doesn’t mean I stole it. One doesn’t plaigarize Frank Lloyd Wright just by piling bricks on top of each other offset by a half-length overlap and binding them with concrete.
this has been the line but you could write an Onion headline about that guy tweeting something like “we will declare war against the sun, inculcate center-left media with our agenda and then force it to rise”
one thought on that: really, she’s got to do whatever she needs to do to have a safe, and fulfilling life. it’s up to the (white) people around her – media, harvard, etc. – to make the leadership position safe for her.
if they didn’t realize the right wing would be gunning for her, then they have chosen to ignore how racism works in this country. that they didn’t make her feel like she could stay; the problem is with them, not her.
( eta: a completely random parallel: it’s like when disney made finn a central character, but then provided no backup for john boyega when he was attacked online. disney wanted cast diversity to attract a wider audience, but they weren’t willing to do the work to support the actors. )
