Update: Claudine Gay Resigns, Calls Critics (Get This) Racist

Update: Drip, drip, drop.

Her resignation letter is at the end of the post, after the fold.

The original post follows:

"Some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet."

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50.

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.

That article, "The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California," includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon's 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.

She also copied his footnotes.

Before the holiday, the Washington Post's ultra-leftwing opinionmonger Ruth Marcus called for Gay to resign.

She plagiarized her acknowledgments. I take no joy in saying this, but Harvard President Claudine Gay ought to resign. Her track record is unbefitting the president of the country's premier university. Remaining on the job would send a bad signal to students about the gravity of her conduct.

This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay's accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor.

Why does this matter? The fucking evidence is her own "work." You don't need any "conservative ideology" to see she has serially plagiarized throughout her very undistinguished "academic" career.

You know, sometimes conservatives will reject a claim only because a liberal is claiming it, and liberals will -- sometimes correctly -- note that this constitutes a rejection of empirical evidence.

Note that conservatives rightly reject leftwing speculations, suppositions, and interpretations of claimed facts, all of which can and nearly always do evince a maliciously partisan reading of the available evidence. But sometimes we also reject actual evidence because we know the people offering it always lie. And when we do that, the left screams that we're "cultish" and "closed-minded."

And yet leftists do this every single day. Not only do they do it, they admit doing it -- proudly. They are proud to reject objective, empirical, irrefutable evidence for no other reason that they people discovering it are "dirty" and "deplorable."

Some cults are Righteous and Holy.

This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn't possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.

No one said that -- that's malicious leftwing ventriloquism of their own bigotries into the mouths of the right, as usual -- but, as it turns out, she is scorchingly unqualified.

In addition, the initial reports of plagiarism seemed small-bore. Gay's missteps did not seem to involve sweeping appropriations of carefully crafted words or thoughtful ideas but a failure to put mostly boilerplate language inside quotation marks.

"Boilerplate language"? She means that Gay copied mundane language, which is the hardest kind of language to write, because it is mundane and boring. So all she did was steal someone else's work in writing this boring stuff.

So, no big deal. She's just stealing the hardest stuff to write, that's all.

Moreover, plagiarism in the digital age is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God event; every writer should worry about the risk of the accidental cut-and-paste. I like to think I'd recognize and remove any language I hadn't written, but who can be certain? It is always best to cite -- and even over-credit -- the work of others. Charitableness begins at home.

When it happens 40 or 50 of 60 times, it's not "accidental." It's her Modus Operandi. It's SOP.

And yet. The instances of problematic citation in the work of Gay, a political scientist, have become too many to ignore. Some go well beyond routine use of the same language. The Washington Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium reported that "in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences -- even entire paragraphs -- with just a word or two tweaked."

In her 1997 doctoral dissertation, for example, Gay quoted from a paper by Bradley Palmquist and D. Stephen Voss, then her colleagues in the Harvard political science department, about turnout rates among Black voters. "This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias," they wrote. "If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race's turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other's across the graph.)"

Gay's dissertation -- which nowhere cites Palmquist and Voss -- contains nearly identical language. "This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias," she wrote. "If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct's racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race's turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph."

That's not sloppiness. That's plagiarism. Harvard's own material underscores this conclusion. "Plagiarism is defined as the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else," its manual for students advises. "If you turn in a paper ... in which you have included material from any source without citing that source, you have plagiarized."

Perhaps the most disturbing example is the least academic -- Gay's borrowing of words from another scholar, Jennifer L. Hochschild. In her acknowledgments for a 1996 book, Hochschild described 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."

Gay's dissertation thanked her thesis adviser, who "reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor," and her family, "drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven."

Now, can I just say? Acknowledgments are the easiest, and most fun part, of writing a book, the place where you list your sources and allies and all the people who helped you get the manuscript over the finish line. Why not come up with your own thanks? What does it say about a person who chooses to appropriate another's language for this most personal task.

She's stealing the hardest stuff to write, and the easiest stuff to write.

And she does not have a voluminous academic record -- she's only published, what, 11 total papers (papers, meaning journal articles and notes, not books) in her career, which is impressive only in the depth and breadth of its singular unimpressiveness.

So it's not like she's produced millions of words and, whoopsie, she goofed up 60 times.

No, she's produced mere thousands of words and stole a substantial fraction of that very low "academic" output.

But because you noticed this -- Do Better, Bigot.

The Bee:

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:30 PM

| Access Comments