A Note on the College ‘Study about racial hatred’ by L. Gay, J.M. Magill, and Alan M. Garber
Gay, along with the other presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, were stumped by the questions about their policies in cases where students advocate genocide against Jews. Penn’s president, Liz Magill, resigned after that testimony, but Harvard’s highest governing board initially rejected calls that Gay be removed.
I will be stepping down from my position as Harvard’s president, due to my heavy heart and deep love for the school. This is not a decision that I made quickly. I have looked forward to working with many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries and it has been hard beyond words. After consulting with members of the Corporation, I decided that it would be in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community could focus on the institution rather than me.
Gay’s departure follows heightened scrutiny of allegations that she plagiarized parts of some of her published works and in the wake of a controversial appearance before Congress last month.
In a statement Tuesday, Harvard’s governing board named Alan M. Garber, the university’s provost and chief academic officer, as interim president until a new leader is chosen.
Gay is the first person of color and the second woman to hold the post at Harvard and has had a remarkable rise in her career. Even in the early days of her career, she was repeatedly courted by the nation’s most prestigious institutions.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am,” she wrote, “and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
Claudine Gay’s resignation highlights the trouble with regulating academic writing: Tomar says he’s glad to hear about gay’s failures
Tomar said that Gay’s alleged failures are likely only coming to light because of the endless amounts of data that gets fed into artificial intelligence programs.
He thinks that a lot of academic leaders will be outed in similar fashion. And while he feels little sympathy for those who are caught having violated an institution’s policies, he says that’s the wrong thing on which to focus.
We could retroactively know 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.
It has been a difficult time for Harvard, with the Harvard Corporation noting that Gay had acknowledged “missteps.” The university said that a few instances of inadequate citation had been found after an initial review of Gay’s published writings.
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,” Eaton said.
Additionally, Ph.D. dissertations go through several steps of verification, including being reviewed by a supervisor, an examination committee and peers.
Source: Claudine Gay’s resignation highlights the trouble with regulating academic writing
A Comment on Gay’s Unpublished Paper “Plagiarism in Higher Education,” by Dave Tomar, J. C. P. Tomar
There are still allegations of plagiarism handled manually, according to the author of Plagiarism in Higher Education.
Tomar started his career as a professional cheat. “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 told to hold one-on-one meetings to check students grasp of the material.
That was largely due to the absence of plagiarism detection technology, he said, noting that the 1990s and even early 2000s were the nascent days of the internet. Physical libraries have card catalogs. It wasn’t unusual for papers to be written out by hand, then typed into a computer or word processor. And the few software tools that eventually became available back then, were nowhere near as sophisticated as what exists today.
In the past, there was less alarm bells raised, according to Tomar, the author of The Complete Guide To Contract Cheating In Higher Education. “It’s a no-brainer to me that she was just sort of right ahead of the curve of detection at the time.”
Dave Tomar said it’s understandable how Gay’s writing went undetected for so long.