[Action80]

Recently, Claudine Gay resigned from her position as the President of Harvard University. This resignation was perhaps fueled by charges concerning possible acts of plagiarism.
https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/

Who is charged with defining the act of plagiarism?

Should universities employ persons who have committed acts of plagiarism (more specifically as professors)?

You can read her resignation letter here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/claudine-gay-resignation-letter-harvard.html

[Lord Dave]

Depends on alot of things.

Example: if your janitor plagerized in high school... That shouldn't be a factor.
If you have a non-research teacher, not a factor.

But I wouldn't hire a researcher whose been found to plagerize.

[Action80]

What is a "non-research teacher?"

[juner]

No.

[Lord Dave]

What is a "non-research teacher?"

Someone who teaches a class but doesn't do any research projects.  I think this is most of them but I'm not actually sure.

[Pete Svarrior]

If you have a non-research teacher, not a factor.

Ooh, I strongly disagree! We're talking about universities, and part of a lecturer's job is to perpetuate academic integrity. If they cannot adhere to it themselves, then they do not belong in academia. They can be perfectly good educators outside of the old boys' club, though.

Academics, especially nowadays, are not just teachers. Knowledge is no longer difficult to obtain - you can find free resources covering any subject you'd like to a very advanced level. Universities are supposed to help you figure out how to best acquire and apply knowledge, and a large part of that is upholding the values that brought our current progress forward. These values may yet turn out not to be "correct", and perhaps the entire system will be overturned - but if that is the case, the revolution should come from outside of the system.

Who is charged with defining the act of plagiarism?

So, from a very pragmatic perspective, this is defined by each university's own policies. Of course, there is a general agreement of what does and doesn't count as plagiarism, and if an institution chose to significantly deviate from societal norms, it may lose various accreditations and statuses, but at least in theory they have some wiggle room.

[Lord Dave]

If you have a non-research teacher, not a factor.

Ooh, I strongly disagree! We're talking about universities, and part of a lecturer's job is to perpetuate academic integrity. If they cannot adhere to it themselves, then they do not belong in academia. They can be perfectly good educators outside of the old boys' club, though.

Academics, especially nowadays, are not just teachers. Knowledge is no longer difficult to obtain - you can find free resources covering any subject you'd like to a very advanced level. Universities are supposed to help you figure out how to best acquire and apply knowledge, and a large part of that is upholding the values that brought our current progress forward. These values may yet turn out not to be "correct", and perhaps the entire system will be overturned - but if that is the case, the revolution should come from outside of the system.

I can't disagree, tho I'd counter than a teacher who plagurized and regretted it would get the meesage across better than one who did not.

[Pete Svarrior]

I can't disagree, tho I'd counter than a teacher who plagurized and regretted it would get the meesage across better than one who did not.

Yeah, I can see why some path to "redemption" would be desirable. On the flipside, if you make it to the supposed higher echelons of education, are you not a little too "mature" to be making these sort of errors? I honestly don't know the answer here.

[Action80]

What is a "non-research teacher?"

Someone who teaches a class but doesn't do any research projects.  I think this is most of them but I'm not actually sure.

I was always under the impression nearly every subject taught at universities requires research. I am struggling with the notion a person could obtain a position as a teacher or professor at a university without conducting some sort of research during the process of obtaining a degree, regardless of subject. Consequently, that research would be detailed within papers submitted for review to receive proper credit for the class. The sources would need to be properly cited in either MLA or APA format. This process would be passed along to the next generation as a requirement.

Who is charged with defining the act of plagiarism?

So, from a very pragmatic perspective, this is defined by each university's own policies. Of course, there is a general agreement of what does and doesn't count as plagiarism, and if an institution chose to significantly deviate from societal norms, it may lose various accreditations and statuses, but at least in theory they have some wiggle room.

I posed this question due to this quote I found within the freebeacon article accompanying the OP:

"Canon, like several of the scholars Gay has quoted without attribution, insisted that she had done nothing wrong.

"I am not at all concerned about the passages," Canon told the Washington Free Beacon. "This isn't even close to an example of academic plagiarism."

I looked at the two instances provided and have to wonder if Canon understands what "academic plagiarism," actually is. Regardless, would Harvard have taken the statement made by Canon into consideration during any investigation of this matter?

[honk]

Gay resigned because a dishonest grifter and right-wing political operative named Christopher Rufo openly manipulated the media and the political establishment into treating this case like it was a super big deal deserving of several weeks' worth of headline news. Rufo is the same grifter who spearheaded the recent right-wing hostile movements against "critical race theory" and trans rights. For all his dishonesty, he is open about his manipulative tactics and the fact that he doesn't care about educational standards, the safety of children, or, as in this case, plagiarism. Rufo targeted Gay because he felt it would suit his Zionist, right-wing agenda to punish a university president he saw as not being harsh enough on pro-Palestinian protests, and also to send an anti-"DEI" message (that little buzzword suddenly being all the rage on the right is also Rufo's work) by ending the career of a black, female university president. You don't have to take my word for it. Take Rufo's. Here he is explaining to a media outlet that he's openly manipulating them for his own partisan ends:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618

Interestingly enough, Rufo deviates from his usual try-and-stop-me transparency by trying to downplay the role that Gay's race played in this story, apparently forgetting that in his answer to the preceding question, he had already admitted that this was all related to his primary objective to "eliminate the DEI bureaucracy." Because Gay is a black woman.

If you want to stick your fingers and pretend that this was all an organic concern that just happened to become nationally topical, then I'll give you a quick answer: Sure, she should resign. Plagiarism isn't tolerated from students, and a university president should be held to a far higher standard than any student is. But I'm not going to pretend that this was organic. To me, the fact that a cynical, dishonest political grifter continues to successfully manipulate the media (and by extension, all of us) into achieving his partisan goals is a far bigger and more worrying problem in this country than whether or not a university president is a plagiarist.

[Action80]

Should Harvard have performed a more thorough vetting of Gay's qualifications before hiring her or was her hiring an actual instance of DEI policies being implemented?

[Dr Van Nostrand]

Police departments, government agencies, hospitals, churches, colleges fuck up all the time and hire fucked-up freaks like sex predators, child molesters, arsonists, cannibals, etc. The political industry has one of the worst records for rehiring re-offenders.

It's just another human resources fail where someone gamed the system and played the people who took shit for granted.
Fire her, fire the people who hired her, fire everybody.

[Lord Dave]

What is a "non-research teacher?"

Someone who teaches a class but doesn't do any research projects.  I think this is most of them but I'm not actually sure.

I was always under the impression nearly every subject taught at universities requires research. I am struggling with the notion a person could obtain a position as a teacher or professor at a university without conducting some sort of research during the process of obtaining a degree, regardless of subject. Consequently, that research would be detailed within papers submitted for review to receive proper credit for the class. The sources would need to be properly cited in either MLA or APA format. This process would be passed along to the next generation as a requirement.

Ah, appologies for not being clear enough.

I meant someone who does no research while employed as a teacher.  As you pointed out, they would have had to do some research to have a high level degree.

[Tom Bishop]

The President of Harvard isn't going to be doing any teaching or research or interacting much with students in any way. It is an administrative position, to which financial crimes should have far more bearing than her plagiarism as a student.

As a executive officer of a corporation you are expected to do everything necessary to keep the corporation afloat, which includes to lying short of fraud to the tolerance of legality, suppressing wages, tricking consumers into giving you more money, cheaping out on your offerings, etc. It's not a position for an honest goodie two shoes like you all believe.

Looking at the plagiarism itself in the link in the OP, it doesn't look like she was plagiarizing someone's original opinions and passing them off as her own - which would be a far more heinous matter and what I would consider the equivalent of fraud. Instead, she was plagiarizing paragraphs containing background factual information about the history of laws, bills and legal subjects. She didn't even directly plagiarize either, but was rewording and adding onto sentences, although you can tell from the side by side comparisons in the link in the OP that the informational paragraphs are morphed versions of another work.

For those reasons I am going to go against the grain and say that this isn't too concerning.

[Lord Dave]

I haven't read enough about it but if what Tom says is accurate, then this is not a big issue.

A few paragraphs does not a paper make.  Sounds like she just needed to save time at some point or even remembered she read it somewhere.

Not something I'd have fired her for, let alone demand her resignation.  Not if it was as minor as Tom says.

[Tom Bishop]

The historical information she is plagiarizing in her work is generally text referencing or citing a third work where the information originally comes from. She credits the original source of the information, but not the verbiage of the intermediary source. The person who originally came up with the information is indeed being cited, which is what matters most.

MSNBC looked into this controversy and appears to be saying that Claudine Gay was really targeted because people didn't like her refusal to engage in radical politics. Harvard looked into her plagiarism and considered it to be relatively minor and didn't amount to misconduct, but radicalists escalated the matter -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rbIVkM7MJ8

@4:59

Harvard itself never accused Gay of plagiarism but it did investigate the allegations and found that they are, at worst, instances of inadequate citation.

They are not what the word "plagiarism" might make you think. Claudine Gay was not stealing anyone’s ideas nor was she presenting other people’s ideas as her own. Harvard didn’t conclude that any issues in her academic citations amounted to misconduct.

That would normally be the end of it. Here is possibly the ugliest part of this whole chapter. At America's universities, academics and speech and learning are not primary, money is. Bill Ackman is an academic billionaire hedge fund manager and a harvard alum. Ackman called for Claudine Gay’s resignation and threatened to pull his donations from the university over her response to the October 7th attack.

He called on the university to release the names of students who signed a pro palestinian statement in order to get them blacklisted from future jobs, stating none of the companies which he controls will hire a student who had signed the statement and nor should others.

Ackman is active on X, formerly Twitter. According to the guardian, in the past month alone, he’s Tweeted about gay, harvard, or both more than 100 times to his 1.3 million followers.

[Action80]

What would the consequence be if a university student was immediately found to have committed the same acts as Gay?

[Lord Dave]

What would the consequence be if a university student was immediately found to have committed the same acts as Gay?

Depends on alot of factors.
Freshman or doing a doctorine?  How does the professor feel?

Worse case, the professor fails the paper and tells them to try again next year.

[Tom Bishop]

The Right didn't get Claudine Gay fired. The Right piled on because they assumed that she was a leftist. But it was really the Left that did her in. Bill Ackman mentioned from the MSNBC segment, for example, is a Democrat. She was too conservative for their liking and they didn't like her politics. This is the primary reason she was targeted.

Politico admits that it was the Left that did her in -

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/claudine-gay-resignation-battle-column-00133820 - "The Right Is Dancing on Claudine Gay’s Grave. But It Was the Center-Left That Did Her In. -- Her fate was decided by folks on the center-left and the left. The only things conservatives had to do was fan the flames."

Read her bio and the criticisms about her carefully - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_Gay

She fired a Harvard dean for joining Harvy Winstein's defense team as a political statement and she was criticized for failing to condemn the attacks after the recent Hamas-Israel incident. She was also widely criticized because she said antisemitism is only bad if it crosses into bullying.

She simply wasn't far enough on the left. Liberals targeted her because she was too conservative for them.

From her Wikipedia page:

"In 2019, Harvard Law School professor and Winthrop House faculty dean Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. faced student protests after joining the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who was on trial for rape.[26] Gay called Sullivan's response to the controversy "insufficient," citing his "special responsibility" for the well-being of Winthrop residents.[27] Administrators including Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and Gay ultimately decided not to renew Sullivan's contract as Winthrop dean"

"After the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, Gay faced criticism, including from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers,[7][8] for failing to adequately condemn the attacks."

"When asked if a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jewish people would qualify as a violation of Harvard's code of conduct, Gay responded, "It can be, depending on the context." She later clarified, "Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action."[46] Gay's remarks were broadly criticized in the media."

[honk]

The Right didn't get Claudine Gay fired. The Right piled on because they assumed that she was a leftist. But it was really the Left that did her in. Bill Ackman mentioned from the MSNBC segment, for example, is a Democrat. She was too conservative for their liking and they didn't like her politics. This is the primary reason she was targeted.

Politico admits that it was the Left that did her in -

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/claudine-gay-resignation-battle-column-00133820 - "The Right Is Dancing on Claudine Gay’s Grave. But It Was the Center-Left That Did Her In. -- Her fate was decided by folks on the center-left and the left. The only things conservatives had to do was fan the flames."

While the article does make a few good points about the underlying politics involved, the main argument is essentially a quibble based on the fact that it wasn't conservatives who directly fired or demanded the resignation of Gay. Of course only the leadership of Harvard could do that. The involvement from conservatives that people have been criticizing in this case is the manipulation - the fact that right-wing grifters like Rufo managed to trick the media into treating this like headline news for weeks, leading to Gay's eventual resignation. If the point the author was making is that grifters like Rufo only have whatever power the media or the other institutions they try to manipulate let them have, then fair enough, but framing it in this "gotcha" way is very disingenuous on their part.