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Harvard president to resign

The Crimson reports.

Gay's resignation letter to the Harvard community:

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries. But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

It is a singular honor to be a member of this university, which has been my home and my inspiration for most of my professional career. My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis. 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—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

I believe in the people of Harvard because I see in you the possibility and the promise of a better future. These last weeks have helped make clear the work we need to do to build that future—to combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth. I believe we have within us all that we need to heal from this period of tension and division and to emerge stronger. I had hoped with all my heart to lead us on that journey, in partnership with all of you. As I now return to the faculty, and to the scholarship and teaching that are the lifeblood of what we do, I pledge to continue working alongside you to build the community we all deserve.

When I became president, I considered myself particularly blessed by the opportunity to serve people from around the world who saw in my presidency a vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging—their sense that Harvard welcomes people of talent and promise, from every background imaginable, to learn from and grow with one another. To all of you, please know that those doors remain open, and Harvard will be stronger and better because they do.

As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education. I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for—and to our capacity to serve the world.

Sincerely,
Claudine Gay

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Comments

The way some of the newsies were reporting about this 'scandal' made it seem like this was some huge national tragedy.

Um.. Look I have no love for harvard, but the media really wanted to see her walk the plank for this. And what what? She plagiarized some paper she wrote in 1997. jfc.. this whole thing seemed like an internal harvard HR issue and not some public one.

But since people love to rag on harvard so bad... so here we are.

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I think we can agree that Gay's big mistake was not missing a citation here or there. Her big mistake was not prioritizing donors' interests. After all, the job of a University President is not running the school (that's the Provost's job) but fundraising from donors.

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Try "her dissertation and half the papers she listed on her CV, over three dozen papers total"

She's a habitual cheat.

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Did she improperly cite a portion of her dissertation? Yes. Would she get away with that today? Maybe not, it's easier to catch. Did her advisors do her a disservice in not catching this? Probably.

Does it matter? Ask yourself: would the same thing have happened to Larry Bacow or Larry Summers?

As for the whole antisemitism thing, just, ugh. Did she make a statement she shouldn't have? IDK, maybe, politics-wise? Probably because after George Floyd she wrote a statement which was well-received at the time. This time she tried to toe a very reasonable, but very thin, line and the right and left pushed her off of it. I don't envy someone in that position, having to deal with a bunch of 18-year-olds who think way too much of themselves putting out statements which get branded with Harvard and then the president has to walk back what the fringes of the campus said.

In retrospect, she and the other college presidents should have gone to Congress and said something like "you realize that we're dealing with 18-year-olds here, right? With kids whose brains are less-developed than members of Congress? This is a waste of our time and a political circus you're putting on, and we're not going to participate." But they took the advice of attorneys and gave milquetoast statements and got rolled by Elise Stefanik.

Meanwhile there was an unholy alliance between the far left and far right trying to take her down, digging up the plagiarism accusations to add fuel to the fire. I'm sure she said "this wasn't the job I signed up for and I don't want to deal with this shit" and it's hard to blame her. Now they'll all take a victory lap at having ousted the first Black president of Harvard.

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Clearly some assholes were out for blood but that shouldn't make credible accusations less credible.

Yes, other university presidents have been forced to resign for "poorly attributed scholarly work". Given Gay's background, she knew this as well as anyone. What she did was just as wrong in the mid-90s even if it was less likely to be caught.

If a doctoral candidate would be denied a degree for a similar academic violation, the president of that institution should be held to the same standard.

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If a doctoral candidate would be denied a degree for a similar academic violation, the president of that institution should be held to the same standard.

I agree with this, mostly.

But then there are more questions: if we apply it to Gay 26 years after the fact, do we apply it to everyone 26 years after the fact? Should she lose her tenured professorship, or just the presidency of the college (which, really, has less to do with the plagiarism than the presidency)? Should any other professor where this is found lose their job? If we're going to take away any Ph.D. where this happened, shouldn't we start with Gay?

This is a learning experience for pretty much everyone in academia to dot all their I's and cross all the T's. And I'm sure that Harvard will be octuple-checking the dissertation of the next presidential candidate as part of their vetting. But how far do you go? What if one of their grad students 25 years ago was first author on a paper where there was a similarly small level of plagiarism? Should they be ineligible for catching that? Where's the line? It's probably somewhere between misplaced quotation marks and basically an entire book, which can also, it turns out, get you kicked out of Harvard (and your book pulped).

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But then there are more questions: if we apply it to Gay 26 years after the fact, do we apply it to everyone 26 years after the fact?

Yes, strip the professorship and Ph.D of anyone who is found to knowingly plagiarize on their scholarly work, irrespective of how far in the past that was.

The world is not lacking for university professors or Harvard deans -- there are others who also have unique backgrounds who played by the scholarly rules.

If anything, keeping Gay around is a kick in the teeth to all the talented people who are are vying for coveted professorships.

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that one of the guys Gay is accused of plagiarizing said he thinks what she wrote is "not even close" to an example of academic plagiarism

the Washington Free Beacon itself admits that there are only so many ways to word the kind of technical passages she is accused of lifting

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keeping Gay around is a kick in the teeth to all the talented people who are are vying for coveted professorships.

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Except she lifted entire paragraphs, not just a sentence or two. And in both cases, she'd insert a word or phrase. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she did it across dozens of papers.

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If it weren't for those meddling kids ... Jews... Republicans.

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That one of the people she allegedly plagiarized is livid.

But to some, the issue is plain: Dr. Gay committed plagiarism — a word which does not actually appear in the Harvard board’s initial statement on Dec. 12 — and Harvard should admit it.

Carol Swain, a political scientist who retired from Vanderbilt University in 2017, said that she was “livid,” both at Dr. Gay’s use of her work and Harvard’s defense of her.

“I also have a concern that Harvard University decides it gets to redefine what plagiarism is when it suits its needs,” she said. “That to me is unacceptable.”

FWIW, this is not just an issue with Gay's dissertation, but also with published journal articles.

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In the dissertation, Mr. Rufo said in his newsletter, Dr. Gay used Dr. Swain’s work at least twice with no citation. In one example, Dr. Gay wrote, “Since the 1950s, the re-election rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.” In an earlier book, Dr. Swain had written, “Since the 1950s the re-election rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90%.”

I mean, is that novel research? Does it require a citation? If someone calls you out on that, it's kind of just statistics. You could say "yeah, I looked it up myself!" There's literally a wikipedia article about this phenomenon which says it has been going on since the 1970s. There are 18 cited articles in that article, none of which come from Carol Swain. This is probably a case of GPT finding a similar sentence. Neither of them proved Fermat's last theorem. Maybe someone should ask Carol Swain why she didn't cite her sources!

Carol Swain is totally normal, too. No wonder Christopher Rufo found her.

There are only so many ways to say that since the 1970s, 90% or more of House members have generally been reelected. I changed the wording there from the examples but it's clunkier. But if this is the best example they can find, it certainly doesn't seem particularly damning.

This is a mountain out of a mole hill but you know I guess we should go back to good, white, male presidents of Harvard like God intended.

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@Ari - I didn't go back to research all the examples from journal articles. I do think it's unreasonable that Gay wasn't being held to the same standards that students are - the things she did would have gotten undergrads suspended for one or more semesters. I have not pushed for her to resign.

I'm appalled that you see my comments as implying "This is a mountain out of a mole hill but you know I guess we should go back to good, white, male presidents of Harvard like God intended." I don't give a damn about Gay's race or gender (btw, Harvard's already had a woman president). I do care that her claim to champion free speech is belied by actions she took as dean to force out faculty whose views she disagreed with.

[N.B. I've worked at Harvard for almost two decades and the worst president during that period was white, male, obnoxious Larry Summers. I think Larry Bacow was the best during that period - he may be a white male but he's also the first Harvard prez who was the child of immigrants and his parents were Holocaust survivors and, more importantly, he had plenty of experience at non-Harvard excellent schools and therefore understood that Harvard isn't God's gift to humanity.]

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I do care that the New York Times can only find one person who is critical of her an that person just happens to be a right-wing nutjob and the plagiarism they cite is pretty clearly not plagiarism. Who reads the Times? Donors and Corporation members.

They'd be better off reading The Crimson, where there's a lot more nuance.

Hell, they'd be better off reading the UHub comment section.

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@Ari - when you say the NYT can only find one person who is critical of Gay, please note that - as the Crimson says - "... The New York Times reported that academics more skeptical of Gay’s offenses refuse to go on the record, likely because of her powerful position."

Academia is a small, petty world. Saying something openly against a big name in your field can have severe career repercussions.

I agree that this Crimson piece is very good and has a lot more nuance. You should pay attention to what they say on both sides, not just what you agree with. You should also avoid casting aspersions of racism/sexism at people just because they disagree with you. Those of us who are connected with Harvard know more about the situation and people involved than those just getting their info from newspapers of any political slant.

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The president of Stanford resigned last year after getting caught for years of “questionable research practices.” So yes, white guys get the same scrutiny.

And it wasn’t just her dissertation, but multiple papers.

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It was not just one paper, she was pretty much revealed to be a serial plagiarist for most of her career across a number of papers if you have been paying attention.

Seems to be an important thing to care about in Academia? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay.html

Never mind the utterly hypocritical embarrassment she was shown to be dealing with events as of late.

A witch hunt this was not, good riddance.

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They "someone" you speak of is none other than Christopher Rufo, who certainly is concerned about academic integrity and has no ulterior motive.

It doesn't excuse plagiarism, but it is certainly a witch hunt.

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People should be more concerned about the actual allegations and less about the people who are making them. Sometimes bad people make a good point. No one is helped by denying that.

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This is totally normal and how all accusations of plagiarism are handled.

https://twitter.com/EliseStefanik/status/1742248083721978129

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The plagiarism thing was real and verifiable. All the other stupid stuff is not.

You don't need to be on team MAGA to see a problem with Gay's scholarly work and question if she should remain in a leadership role in Harvard. You don't have to support or defend Stefanik, Rufo, etc. They are still bad people.

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And it's unspectacular.

Gay probably plagiarized.

But rather than having a reasonable examination of whether the plagiarism was bad enough she should step down from her position, the Times was writing articles accusing her of plagiarizing someone else who she quite clearly hadn't because it wanted to create a controversy because it was the only person in academia they could find who was critical (never mind that the person in question stepped down for academia seven years ago because she herself was protested by students and defended by her college).

The coverage in the good news media (The Crimson and UHub) has been far better.

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There was only one person in academia who was willing to be quoted in a national newspaper as being critical. It was implied that there are indeed people who are critical but don't want to say so publicly. Publicly criticizing the president of a major university in a controversial situation can be hazardous to one's academic career.

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I'm sure the...*checks Google Scholar*...18 papers that cite her PhD dissertation at all will give a flying fuck that she copied her acknowledgements from a similar paper.

Whew.

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Welcome to the new McCarthyism !

Driven by pressure from billionaires like Bill Ackman

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Hmmm. That is all. Magoo.

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Today's resignation does open up the spot for Magoo to be named president. I think we can be quite certain that Magoo does not plagiarize!

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Maybe she can oversee a higher learning institution in Palestine.

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We're not going to leave so much as a kindergarten standing upright, but that's what those Gaza kids deserve for probably growing up to be or at least live near violent killers

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A guy ran a whole body part Etsy store and this is the shit you're all (pretend to be) mad about for weeks? Clown shit.

This is an unserious country.

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This Boston. We're capable of being mad at more than one thing at a time.

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You all are transparently one dimensional. That body part scandal was over in like 3 days.

The anti-Claudine Gay rage has been churning non-stop since mid-October.

No multitudes detected.

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dances to the tune of right wing white-supremacists.

Remember the constant barrage of front page articles last summer about the Stanford president forced to resign over much more egregious academic sins, including falsifying data?

Yeah, there wasn't one.

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No, I remember the big papers (NYTimes, Boston Globe, etc) devoting a lot of time to the story. It was a similar case of waiting to see if she'd resign even if that has no relevance to anyone outside of academia.

And was also much ink regarding all the crap happening at Liberty University in the past few years. And before that about Larry Summers' antics back when he led Harvard.

Stories about drama at well known universities get clicks. It's giving the readers advertisers what they want.

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If you think the intensity, frequency, and above the fold coverage of Gay was in in any way similar to the the coverage of Larry Summers or Tessier-Lavigne. They didn't even cover Tessier-Lavigne until he resigned.

Is that a lot? To provide a comparison, we would need a benchmark of a university president accused of academic misconduct at a very prestigious institution. As it turns out, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne faced more serious accusations of academic misconduct involving data manipulation. A formal investigation was announced in November of 2022, and he was forced to resign in July of 2023. So, how many articles did the Times write about the topic prior to his resignation? Zero. And zero is probably the right number, because this is not national news until an actual resignation. But that is not the standard being applied to Gay, because the campaign is not about academic misconduct

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-campaign-to-remove-the-president

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see: any time the mayor does anything at all

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Or was she forced out?

It's all a show

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https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases... It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president... Omitting quotation marks, citing sources incompletely, or not citing sources at all constitutes plagiarism according to Harvard’s definitions.

In my experience, when students omit quotation marks and citations, as President Gay did, the sanction is usually one term of probation — a permanent mark on a student’s record. A student on probation is no longer considered in good standing, disqualifying them from opportunities like fellowships and study-abroad programs. Good standing is also required to receive a degree...

When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation “unanimously stand in support of” her.

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If the students are being trained for a world in which the powerful don't have to follow the rules, then it's fine for Harvard to hold mere students to a higher standard than Gay. If the students are being prepared for a democratic society, where the powerful must follow the same rules as the powerless, then unquestionably Gay had to go.

In my experience, when a student is found responsible for multiple separate Honor Code violations, they are generally required to withdraw — i.e., suspended — from the College for two semesters. Since the Council was established in 2015, roughly 16 percent of students who have appeared before us have been required to withdraw.

How could you explain to a student who did the same thing Gay did that they have to withdraw, but she gets to stay? There is no way except to say that powerful people get to cheat. That's how we get more Trumps.

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