Plagiarism at Harvard

[financeguy]

Marc Lamont Hill has tweeted that the next Harvard president "must be a black woman."

[Parasaurolophus]

Marc Lamont Hill has tweeted that the next Harvard president "must be a black woman."

Since that's what pissed people off about Gay, it seems only fair to stick it back to them that way.

Though it may not be fair to the candidates, who will find themselves at the wrong end of a pile of trolls.

[Ruralguy]

Maybe they should just look at a group of really strong candidates from a variety of backgrounds and see who is best among them? Or is that too old fashioned? I'm not a big fan of "musts" such as Marc Hill's, but I am also sympathetic to some of the feelings behind it, considering a lot of the bad faith exhibited around Gay's ouster---oh, sorry, I mean "resignation."

[financeguy]

.

[Wahoo Redux]

Given the sheer mass of stuff that is published even on even esoteric subjects, even with computer technology, who could one possible check a dissertation, which is potentially hundreds of pages, for plagiarism in a timely fashion during a semester with everything else going on?

So dissertations are still submitted hand-typed, on paper? Who knew?
I don't think turnitin has a page limit. You can set the minimum length of text strings to flag, among other things. All kinds of things could be done to automate this even more.

As long as the material is in TurnItIn's database.

[Sun_Worshiper]

It seems pretty ridiculous to run a senior hire's dissertation through Turnitin. Nor are many committees going to run the 20 or 30 articles they may have published as an assistant or associate through the software. This is really something that administrators at universities, journals, and presses should be doing before approving these pieces for publication.

[onthefringe]

Don't use turnitin — get your university to subscribe to iThenticate— it actually checks against published journal articles and web pages.

Many journals now run submitted papers through the Crossref Similarity Check (which uses iThenticate), and the NIH appears to do some screening of submitted proposals.

But of course this does nothing to detect historical cases like with Gay.

[Hibush]

A new twist. Bill Ackman, the Harvard donor who led the charge against President Gay got so insenced about plagiarism in dissertations. Now it turns out that another prominent scholar has been found with serious plagiarism. Ackman is married to this one. How has their dinner conversation been?

[Parasaurolophus]

A new twist. Bill Ackman, the Harvard donor who led the charge against President Gay got so insenced about plagiarism in dissertations. Now it turns out that another prominent scholar has been found with serious plagiarism. Ackman is married to this one. How has their dinner conversation been?

I like the irony. But...

Sounds like apart from one paragraph which is entirely uncited, it's all stuff that is not properly paraphrased (or quoted) but is cited, plus publishing parts of her dissertation more or less word for word.

I'd say the paragraph is straight-up plagiarism, the cited but unquoted stuff is very sloppy and bad and unacceptable but not quite what I ordinarily flag as plagiarism, and as for the third, Business Insider is clueless.

[Wahoo Redux]

From the article.

Additionally, she recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013.

Plenty of people chop up their dissertations into article-length publications.  I did.  Is that considered plagiarism?

I think the Parabeast hit it on the head: this is some sloppy work but hardly worth the teeth-gnashing and clothes-rending.  The charges against Gay were also Trumped up. 

[kaysixteen]

WRT her plagiarized diss, from '97, the main sources she stole from were two profs in her own dept, from a pub of theirs from the very year before this-- so the question might well be asked, why did these profs, and/or some of their colleagues, not notice this, and if they did, why did they not flag it?  Or perhaps they just did not want to do that.

Now obviously her silly, whiny, self-righteous NYT op-ed is demonstrative of clueless manifest unrepentance.   Get thee gone.   Those defenders of hers who rightly point out that she was a target of rightist pursuit just simply do not seem to want to deal with her plagiarism, which of course smashes headlong into their narrative.  But facts are stubborn things-- Harvard's own very publicly stated policies on plagiarism suggest that Gay was treated vastly differently than an 18yo first semester froshburger would have been, and this is unacceptable. 

One more thing-- many professional journalists seem also to be giving her a pass on this, even though, ahem, plagiarism is also supposed to be a professional death penalty offense there as well (even though journos are allowed to publish things using anonymous sources, etc., something scholars just cannot do).

[Hegemony]

Plenty of people chop up their dissertations into article-length publications.  I did.  Is that considered plagiarism?

No, it is not. You are not stealing from a published work by another author. You are reusing an unpublished work you wrote yourself. That is not plagiarism. And it is not a parallel with the plagiarizers discussed in this thread.

[marshwiggle]

Marc Lamont Hill has tweeted that the next Harvard president "must be a black woman."

Since that's what pissed people off about Gay, it seems only fair to stick it back to them that way.

It's good to know that we've now got to the point that there is such a vast supply of candidates for even these rare positions that we can decide in advance on what criteria unrelated to the job requirements can be used.

"We're going to hire a left-handed green-eyed person for this job."

 

[Langue_doc]

Plenty of people chop up their dissertations into article-length publications.  I did.  Is that considered plagiarism?

No, it is not. You are not stealing from a published work by another author. You are reusing an unpublished work you wrote yourself. That is not plagiarism. And it is not a parallel with the plagiarizers discussed in this thread.

It's the norm in some disciplines to publish chapters from one's dissertation.

It's good to know that we've now got to the point that there is such a vast supply of candidates for even these rare positions that we can decide in advance on what criteria unrelated to the job requirements can be used.

"We're going to hire a left-handed green-eyed person for this job."

This also seems to be the norm these days. Didn't the CA governor declare that only a Black woman could succeed Diane Feinstein?

The comments in the latest NYT articles are quite instructive. The first one, The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit, claims that merit cannot be defined.

That is because merit, itself, cannot be defined. That is why the concept is so useful for slippery slopes. It cannot be proved or disproved. It can only be argued.

Academicians and practitioners know that you cannot operationalize merit.

Here's the link to the second one: The Problems Only Start With Plagiarism

[marshwiggle]

It's good to know that we've now got to the point that there is such a vast supply of candidates for even these rare positions that we can decide in advance on what criteria unrelated to the job requirements can be used.

"We're going to hire a left-handed green-eyed person for this job."

This also seems to be the norm these days. Didn't the CA governor declare that only a Black woman could succeed Diane Feinstein?

The comments in the latest NYT articles are quite instructive. The first one, The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit, claims that merit cannot be defined.

That is because merit, itself, cannot be defined. That is why the concept is so useful for slippery slopes. It cannot be proved or disproved. It can only be argued.

Academicians and practitioners know that you cannot operationalize merit.

Non-paywalled version of the article.

There's not a lot of "there" there. The quotation above seems to be an assertion, supported only by examples of how, in the past, the word "merit" was used as cover for a lot of discriminatory stuff, rather than a refutation of the idea that objective, job-based criteria can be used to select the best candidate. (So basically the exact opposite of what those examples reflected.)

Has anyone taken a look at how the age of candidates selected for these sorts of positions has declined over time? In the past, it was assumed that people without a lot of experience wouldn't be up to it, but now with DEI hiring younger candidates, (who by definition have less experience), are almost preferred as though experience in the system is a liability, rather than an asset.