Clovis Gay’s Resignance Highlights the Trouble with Regulating Academic Writing: Reflections on an American Agriestest Citizen
Gay was the first person of color and the second woman to hold the post at Harvard and has had a rise throughout her career and field of political science. She was persistently courted by the nation’s most prominent institutions in her early days.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubts about my commitment to confronting hate and to uphold scholarly rigor, two values that are fundamental to who I am,” she wrote.
The irony, Tomar said, is that Gay’s alleged failings are likely only now coming to light because of the endless amounts of data that gets fed into artificial intelligence programs, such as Chat GPT.
He believes academic leaders will also likely be outed in the same way. It’s wrong to focus on those caught violating an institution’s policies, even though he feels little sympathy for them.
It may be possible to retroactively discover what someone did in the 1990s. But ought we not to be slightly more concerned about what the person who was going to graduate next year is doing?” he asked.
Source: Claudine Gay’s resignation highlights the trouble with regulating academic writing
The Harvard Review of Ph.D. Publications: An Investigation of Dr. Gay’s Detection of Academic Plagiarism
The corporation added: “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.” The articles date back to 2001 and 2017.
On Monday, right-wing website the Washington Free Beacon reported that it found problems in four of Gay’s published papers, including her 1997 dissertation.
“Supervisors should bear some responsibility for mentoring and shepherding the student to ensure that the quality of the work that they produce is high,” he said.
Additionally, Ph.D. dissertations go through several steps of verification, including being reviewed by a supervisor, an examination committee and peers.
Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton says that plagiarism allegations are mostly handled manually.
Tomar began his career as a professional cheater during this pre-internet time. “It was really, really easy to get away with Googling and cutting and pasting before educators were really hip to it,” he recalled.
Without the plagiarism detection software programs that are now in use, professors were encouraged to use their intuition if something felt off with an assignment. They were urged to hold one-on-one meetings to help them assess a student’s grasp of the material.
The 1990s and 2000s were the infancy of the internet, and that’s how it was due to the absence of plagiarism detection technology. Physical libraries used card catalogs to conduct research. It was common for the papers to be written by hand and then typed into a computer. Back then, the only software tools that were available at the time were not as advanced as what we have today.
The alarm bells were raised less 20 years ago, according to Tomar. “It’s a no-brainer to me that she was just sort of right ahead of the curve of detection at the time.”
Gay’s writing went undetected for so long because Dave Tomar, who is a professional cheat, spent about a decade ghost-writing academic papers for undergrads and post-doc students.
Gay is not the first head of an academic institution unseated by allegations of plagiarism: Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned last year as Stanford’s president after an investigation found several academic reports he authored contained manipulated data. And in 2021, Robert Caslen resigned as president of the University of South Carolina after plagiarizing part of a speech.
The context to go around now that Dr. Gay is out is much more extensive than it was before. Her career is no longer a steady climb through faculty and administrative ranks to the peak of American higher education.