The Havard Crimson writes, “Growing plagiarism allegations plagued the final weeks of former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tenure, setting the stage for her resignation Tuesday afternoon. The allegations — many of which are individually minor but span Gay’s entire academic career — cast scrutiny on her scholarship. Many within and without the University have argued that she ought to be held to the same standard as Harvard’s own students and faculty and called for her resignation. … The new claims involve Gay’s 1997 Harvard dissertation and one previously unaddressed academic article — ‘The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,’ published in 2001 by the Public Policy Institute of California — in which Gay used a description of the Voting Rights Act which closely mirrored a description in a 1999 book by David T. Canon. But Canon, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told the Free Beacon that he is ‘not at all concerned about the passages.’ ‘This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism,’ he said. … Following an independent review, the Corporation announced that though instances of improper citations had been identified in Gay’s scholarship, they did not violate Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”
And then from the AP, “Reviews by Harvard found multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations, including several instances of ‘duplicative language.’ The university concluded the errors ‘were not considered intentional or reckless’ and didn’t rise to misconduct. But the allegations continued, with new ones as recently as Monday. … Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.”
As someone who has written countless research papers at university and a dissertation for my doctoral work, this plagiarism “scandal” intrigues me. First, I should note that these “charges” of plagiarism are being ginned up by a right-wing racist troll (Rufo). I find it rich that conservatives, who are hostile to learning and enlightenment, think they understand the scholarly process. They, like the rest of their brethren moronic base, apprehend nothing. Conservatives and the conservative hoards of zombie followers (RepubliKKKlans, MAGA morons, evil evangelicals, and QAnon kooks) are too f***ing dumb, which is why they’re always so offended by smart people and aggrieved because they were at the bottom of their class in high school or community college, or they are dropouts altogether and never succeeded at much in their lives. So it’s ironic that these people should nitpick claims of “plagiarism” against a real scholar and the world’s best university.
In short, plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work or idea as your own. Failing to credit someone’s work can be overt or subtle, and the subtle form of plagiarism is difficult to detect and unintentionally avoid. (And it’s not always obvious where someone else’s idea ends and a researcher’s new idea begins or where a similar theory overlaps. A researcher can arrive at the same idea as someone else but may not know it. Is that person plagiarizing?) Nonetheless, overt or direct plagiarism is rather easy to catch. Anyone who has run their paper through Turnitin understands the score they receive is based on matching phrases and sentences to existing works. Exact matches better be in quotation marks and accompanied with a citation. And near matches should also include a citation. And, ideally, the amount of “matching” — even if adequately sourced — should be relatively minimal compared to the rest of your work since a research paper is supposed to be mostly your ideas and your wording, not so heavily based on others. It would appear that Dr. Gay was a bit sloppy in this regard, which is why her allegations of plagiarism (“duplicative language”) were not considered intentional and egregious misconduct.