Originally published at: Harvard president under fire for more alleged plagiarism - Boing Boing
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A reminder: while the Genitive Fallacy is a thing (an argument is not necessarily wrong or right because of the person who states it), there is such a thing as a poisoned well.
“Mr Rufo” is not some disinterested commentator, or even some HBomberguy making an argument to improve discourse.
He is Christopher Ferguson Rufo, a known ratfucker whose major bugbear has been attacking black people in america using the canard that Critical Race Theory is some “white people are evil” indoctrination which is taught in kindergarten.
He should be presumed to be lying about everything he says until proven otherwise. Especially when it looks like he’s weaponising one African-American academic against another.
I’m with Charles Fried, quoted in the article:
“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”
“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”
Sure, investigate. But remember where these “anonymous complaints” are coming from (that is: known malevolent bad-faith actors). That these accusations are not coming from even the pretence of caring about ethics in video game journalism academia (the person pushing this, the person quoted as the source, is the person who wants to shut down the entire field of race studies, and rails against “DEI Empires”, by which he evidently means any situation where non-white-cis-hetero folk are valued on their merits).
That people in theory in the center of this are calling it A Lynch Mob.
Also: here is a version of the article which doesn’t require sending traffic or money to the NYT to be able to read.
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It appears likely that two things are true:
- President Claudine Gay is guilty of plagiarism.
- A bunch of malicious right wingers who don’t really care one way or another about the plagiarism are trying to use it to destroy her and everything she represents.
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No, it can just be 2. You don’t have to evaluate it on the merit, considering the source. You don’t, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to em.
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Mark, catsidhe is right. At the very least this post should probably be amended to note that the person pushing this is a known extremist ratfucker, of the let’s-deport-the-coloreds-and-gas-the-you-know-whos type. He’s a Nazi, if we’re not being plain enough.
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I’m not sure #1 is actually true.
Plagiarism is typically copying on the scale of paragraphs, or taking key ideas/insights without attribution.
What’s the allegations here? The NYT article has two examples. First is the sentence Since the 1950s, the re-election rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.
That’s not plagiarism, that’s a missed citation (you wouldn’t deliberately put an un-cited fact in a paper like that). Mildly sloppy by her and the journal’s reviewers, but far from uncommon.
The other example:
In one example that has drawn particular attention and online ridicule, the acknowledgments of Dr. Gay’s dissertation appear to take two sentences from the 1996 book acknowledgments of another scholar, Jennifer L. Hochschild. Dr. Hochschild wrote of 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.”
In Dr. Gay’s dissertation acknowledgments the next year, she thanked her family, who “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.” And she thanked her thesis adviser, Gary King, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.”
I’m sure she’s not the first person to have unintentionally recalled instead of composed for a couple of sentence.
If these examples are what counts as plagiarism I doubt many authors would be innocent.
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Astounded that anyone would quote Christopher Rufo without recognizing that he is a right wing propagandist who publicly stated his strategy of smearing on his public twitter account!!!
A person who would uncritically retail this smear should be careful that they aren’t ripped off by the Federal Wallet Inspector.
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yeah, those – to my mind – function as aphorisms. no one would expect me to cite “a penny saved is a penny earned” or “a stitch in time saves nine.” i mean, really now.
and the fact they are searching for any handle to bring her down, and that this “plagiarism” is the worst thing they can come up with: she must be a freaking paragon.
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… those look like boilerplate acknowledgments we could probably find in thousands of sources
Is there some other connection between those two works, or are they just grinding through Google Books for every phrase she ever wrote 
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I think maybe technically guilty of plagiarism in a way that doesn’t really matter, based on the linked article from Stephen Voss. The other examples are openly pathetic – who even cares whether someone copied a sentence of how they thank their adviser? That’s 100% just repeating what a machine checker was able to find, and shows just how much this is throwing anything against the wall.
Stefanik’s stupid gotcha questioning didn’t quite do all that was hoped, so now Rufo is trying something else. It’s a shame anyone is taking it so seriously instead of looking at the accusers.
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It seems that none of these accusations come close to touching her actual scholarship. A sentence on background (stating that incumbents tend to be re-elected, c’mon of course) and stuff in the goddam acknowledgements of her goddam dissertation? This is grasping at the most whispy of threads. And the accuser is a fucking Nazi who pretty much just wants to bring down a successful Black woman.
Nothing on her scholarship. Nothing.
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Neither is Carol Swain, from the linked Tennessean article:
Swain appeared on CNN and wrote several columns for news outlets after coming to Vanderbilt in 1999 to teach law and political science. Her remarks — about Islam, Black Lives Matter and other hot topics — regularly sparked controversy.
Students protested in 2015 after Swain said in a Tennessean column that Islam “poses an absolute danger to us and our children.” And after a 2016 CNN appearance when Swain called the Black Lives Matter movement “a very destructive force in America,” Provost Susan Wente said in a statement that Swain’s views “in no way represent those of the university.”
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Yeah, the part I bolded is pretty important. I might even add the word “novel” in there. We haven’t seen her claim anyone else’s work as her own. The sentence she is supposed to have lifted is common knowledge. It might be bad practice to not put a citation there, but that sort of thing is a discipline specific practice. I don’t think that anyone would bother with anything that commonly known in my field. (Unless you were trying to show that it’s actually wrong, of course.)
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In that case hopefully someone will turn up a bunch of similar examples from Mr. Rufo’s written work soon.
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This is just inaccurate and disingenuous. The first plagiarism accusations from a week or two ago were literally inadequate citations. She did not claim someone else’s work as her own. The writing made it clear what source it was from. The citations were just messed up. As someone who is currently working on my Advanced Writing Requirement to graduate law school, this is actually really easy to do. Legal writing is insane, and the citations are ridiculous. Sometimes, you end up with one paragraph of actual writing on a page, because 3/4 of the page is taken up with citations. It is so easy to miss one, or misattribute one, or get the format of the citation wrong in such a way that makes it hard for someone else to verify the source.
Also, a student who makes the same category of mistake is not going to be kicked out of school for plagiarism. I had a meeting with my professor just today to go over revisions for my paper, and I asked her about some of my citations, especially about the format, and she made it clear to me that as long as I did cite it, and made a good faith effort to cite it properly, she wasn’t going to make a big deal out of formatting errors or other minor mistakes. Do you know who else wasn’t kicked out of law school for this technical category of plagiarism as a student? Joe Biden. His might have actually been genuine plagiarism, but he claimed at the time to just not understand how to cite everything, and Syracuse gave him the benefit of the doubt.
This post is bullshit.
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I hope so, but what real difference would it make? We already know Rufo is a dishonest sack of rancid crap and so should already not be taking his attacks seriously. I hate that somehow these right-wing liars are never just brushed off no matter how many times they shriek wolf at butterflies.
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When Chris Rufo, a man working hard to destroy education on every level in Florida, announces his desire to destroy education in other states as well, the thing to do is not consider maybe he’s got it right this time and giving his views more publicity. The thing to do is to tie even more weights around his ankles before dumping him into the North Atlantic.
I expect the New York Times and the Washington Post to act as obedient stenographers for the right wing. I would prefer that other publications were more discerning.
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Right? Bummer that some no longer seem to read what the Peanut Gallery has to say about their posts.
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Yeah… FTFY
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And now the Republican-run House Education Committee will conduct an investigation into allegations that Claudine Gay committed plagiarism. Because picking over five suspect sentences in decades-old academic work is very clearly the most important task that the Education Committee has to do, and an entirely proper use of state power.
These fucking people.
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