Harvard University President Claudine Gay Facing Plagiarism Allegations
Scholar Carol Swain confirmed Gay plagiarized her language in Black Faces, Black Interests. She said: “A white male would probably already be gone.”
School choice advocate Christopher Rufo, American Conservative contributing editor Chris Brunet, and Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium dropped damning evidence against Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Did Gay plagiarize many of her publications, including her dissertation?
Gay became the first black woman to head Harvard when she started her tenure this summer.
Gay is already under fire due to the rampant antisemitism on the campus. She then couldn’t oppose or condemn calls for genocide of Jews in front of Congress. Her follow-up statement trying to reframe her testimony did nothing to help her case.
Now Gay faces allegations of plagiarism.
Let’s start with her Ph.D. dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.” She penned it in 1997 when she attended Harvard for a doctorate in political science.
The paper deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes. As evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.
First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language. Here is the original, from Bobo and Gilliam:
Using 1987 national sample survey data . . . the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
And here is the language from Gay’s work:
Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in “high black-empowerment” areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
Gay provided a note to Bobo and Gilliam, but it is still plagiarism when we use their language (I think the universal acceptance is more than three words in a row). If you use their language, then use quotation marks.
If you cannot correctly paraphrase, then just directly quote. Schools narrow the definition of paraphrasing for a good reason. Here is Harvard’s policy via Rufo and Brunet (emphasis mine):
“When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
Rufo and Brunet also found instances of Gay using scholar Carol Swain’s direct language from her book Black Faces, Black Interests:
In one passage, summarizing the distinction between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation,” she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book Black Faces, Black Interests, without providing a citation of any kind. Swain writes:
Pitkin distinguishes between “descriptive representation,” the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics … and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.
Gay’s version is virtually the same, with slight modifications to the diction and punctuation:
Social scientists have concentrated . . . between descriptive representation (the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities).
EXCLUSIVE: I spoke with scholar Carol Swain, who confirms that Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized Swain's work. In fact, Swain saw a "clear pattern of what one would consider plagiarism."
"A white male would probably already be gone."https://t.co/WT8wcv7nbG pic.twitter.com/LP2GZa3THu
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 12, 2023
Sibarium dissected Gay’s other publications.
Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University, told Sibarium that he considers Gay’s peer-reviewed papers in 2012 and 2017 “much more serious” than an essay she published in 2003:
In “Moving To Opportunity: the Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment,” Gay borrowed language from a 2003 report by eight researchers—three of them Harvard economists—prepared for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And in “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” Gay borrowed language from a 2010 book by Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, and from a 2011 paper by Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens, “Low-Income Housing Development and Urban Crime.”
Freedman and Owens are never cited, though Gay thanks them for letting her use their data. Gay does cite Schwartz and the eight researchers elsewhere in “Moving to Opportunity” but not in the paragraphs where their quotes appear. None of the passages have quotation marks, creating the impression that they are Gay’s own language and ideas.
And in "A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing," Gay borrowed language from a 2010 book by Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, and from a 2011 paper by Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens, "Low-Income Housing Development and Urban Crime." pic.twitter.com/lsYacHTchu
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) December 11, 2023
None of the passages have quotation marks, creating the impression that they are Gay’s own language and ideas. pic.twitter.com/5CtqpWKYJf
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) December 11, 2023
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has demanded Harvard remove Gay from her position.
NAS also cited Gay’s awful appearance in front of Congress as a reason why she shouldn’t be president of Harvard:
Her performance on December 5 should be—to borrow a word she used repeatedly on that occasion—put into context. The context in this case consists of:
- Her shoddy professional work, which would by normal standards disqualify her for any academic appointment at Harvard.
- Her record of plagiarism.
- Her promotion of racist policies.
- Her vindictive and arbitrary administrative punishment of Harvard college members.
BREAKING: The National Association of Scholars calls on Harvard to remove Claudine Gay as president of the university. The esteemed group notes Gay's "shoddy professional work," "record of plagiarism," and "promotion of racist policies." Momentum is building. pic.twitter.com/F3Nz6hUex6
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 11, 2023
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Comments
She’ll play the race card.
Looks like she’s been playing it all her life, it appears to be the only card she has.
She is another Affirmative incompetent, probably lied, cheated & given a free pass over race.
Looks like she wasn’t sure that the Race Card would be enough so she tossed in Lesbian just to be sure.
Looks like Urkel,
https://www.thelist.com/img/gallery/heres-what-steve-urkel-looks-like-today/intro-1627840483.jpg
Dealt from the bottom of a well-worn and greasy deck; as is the norm for the vile and stupid Dhimmi-crats.
The race card … Don’t leave home without it!
“Membership has its privileges!”
Vauvenargues “Old discoveries belong less to their original inventors than to those who put them to use.”
Lautreamont “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author’s sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.”
Or, to fail to give credit is to commit murder. This is more like my thought. Eventually an idea enters the common culture, and one can discuss special relativity without mentioning its inventors, but one typically cites something that in turn cites something else … going back to the original works. Even if one doesn’t do that in popular writing, one must do it in a dissertation (1) because it’s academic practice and (2) a newly born academic (PhD recipient) must show, as a professional qualification, that they know the background to what they’re writing. It is one of the explicit expectations in a dissertation, moreso than in subsequent journal articles and academic writing.
I should give credit for my first line. It’s from the Talmud.
Did you have to put those in quotes?
650 “faculty” support her in a letter.
Did anyone new sign that petition after the dissertation plagiarism information hit?
Looks like we have identified the problem…. Another 650 that should be shown the door in order to clean up the useless septic tank Harvard has become
To be fair, political science is a joke department and most of the so-called PhD dissertations written for it are unmitigated BS. The more literate theses are mostly plagiarized.
Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.
Just from that title you can tell that this paper operates at something like a 7th grade level. PhD? LOL.
From the “thesis” itself, this paragraph seems to say that the thesis is not really about what the title would even suggest:
So … nothing like the title. D+
She goes on …:
PhD level work?? To call this “infantile” would be to smear infants. But this is typical of political science. It’s a joke department for people with low IQs to pretend they are academics and intellectuals.
She made her “research” all her race anyway.
Reminds me of Lt. Worf’s Princeton thesis – which was also unreadable and infantile and all about black problems.
It takes stupendous and brazen gall, stupidity and hypocrisy to complain and whine about alleged racism in American society and how bad contemporary black Americans have it, while attending a university steeped in privilege and elitism, as an “affirmative action” admission.
But that was just a senior thesis and probably more academically honest, and furthermore Mike didn’t go onto a “groundbreaking” academic career, but got thru law school and never darkened the doors of a university again, except to drop off her alleged children at what else — Harvard!
Some ethnicities get praised for self-promotion, some get pilloried. What a clown society, and what a clown college Harvard really is.
Wait until you get to “Doctor” Jill Biden’s drivel.
Perhaps I’m dumb. I can’t find in that an assertion that expands the terrain where we know what’s going on, or, indeed, a testable assertion of any kind.
In the building things business, we call that kind of stuff “throat clearing” and stuff it into a preamble somewhere, never to be referenced again.
No one at Harvard read that drivel. It was irrelevant to the decision to hire her. She’s merely a fashion accessory, adorning the university like a true Christian wears a cross at the neck: to signal affiliation with a belief.
Whether the cross is made of tin or gold is unimportant. The message conveyed is what matters.
That last paragraph sounds above the infantile level. I wonder where she found that to steal as her own?
Too “smart” for her own good, but not qualified, morally or otherwise, to lead a university, other than one called Dogma U.
Only 15% of black Americans have an IQ of 100 or higher. Maybe someday we will be able to fix that. In the meantime we have to stop promoting meritless people.
This could give the trustees the political cover they need to fire black female. But if so, she would almost certainly be replaced with another DEI hire to demonstrate the trustees are “anti-racist”.
They don’t want political cover. They hate to let the normal people win. Yes of course they are trying to line up a DEI replacement. Maybe Michelle Obama! Black female will be the preferred choice. But they should have announced Gay’s firing already, or at least a fact-finding on the “allegations” of plagiarism.
They’ll try to bluff it out, but then the damage falls even more on Harvard itself. Let the enemy continue making this mistake and showing a total absence of integrity.
“Maybe Michelle Obama! Black female will be the preferred choice.”
Well, that’s a sure fire way of firing Claudine Gay without being accused of racism.
black female Dem.
has a job for life.
nothing will be done.
No, I think she will resign. She will then blame it on white supremacy, everyone on the left will treat her like a victim and she will get a cushy job at a think tank or guest appearances on CNN
Black, lesbian, female, and a serial plagiarist?
OMG, with those qualifications she might even run for US President and win!
Wow.
I read through most of that thesis. Holy SH*T!! That was unbelievable. Most of it was junk – “thank you”s to everyone, credits, announcements on what the paper is going to say. Over and over and over. I had to flip back a couple of times because she seems to have plagiarized herself in the paper, typing pretty much the same exact thing two or three times, explaining what she is going to show.
The paper, formally, finally starts on page 19 (page 7 in the original) and is finished on page 24 (page 12 in the original). ROFLMAO. 6 pages, double-spaced, half-filled. LOL. PhD … It could have been fit into a dinner’s worth of fortune cookies. What a joke.
I recommend everyone to go get this thesis and try to actually read through it. It is a laugh riot. Forget the plagiarism. That is the least of it. This is just childish, retarded scribblings about nothing interesting or important, written by a complete moron.
Oops.
I only had access to the preview. The real paper is much, much longer … but I can’t get it. My mistake on that part.
I hate it when I do that!
Writing like that, she could get a job writing Micro$oft tech manuals.
Seriously, have you ever tried to read one of those? All throat clearing, and telling you how great it’s going to be. A couple lines, sometimes a whole paragraph of what it does, or how to talk to it. Then back to the blather. “And that was the awesomest…”
The issue should not be her presidency, but her tenure and her faculty position. These should be removed, as they would for any other academic. That is obvious.
What is also becoming obvious is that it’s getting to be too late for Harvard. Harvard needs to move quickly to show it will wash its hands and disassociate itself completely with such wrongdoing. It should take 15 minutes. Give her her day in court and then, unless somehow she convinces the world that she didn’t plagiarize massively, fire her publicly.
The process has not been announced yet. This will be a permanent part of Harvard history and, by waiting this long already, Harvard shows some hesitation, some acquiescence. The stain is likely permanent and is certainly well deserved.
Needs a hostile takeover.
The hostility is there, but I don’t see how to make a takeover out of that.
Just another transparently undeserving, dim-witted and unqualified “affirmative action/”equity” hire. Academia is rife with such charlatans and hustlers.
So…maybe this is a weird take. Why does it matter? Are there serious people who pretend like university campuses are bastions of integrity? Or even serious academic thought? Of course it is nothing but woke nonsense. Nobody goes to an Ivy to get an education. They do it to get into the club that used to go to Epstein’s island.
Can you imagine if there was a painting of Trump and a blue dress on that island?
Taylor Not so Swirt
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/12/11/reports-taylor-swift-attended-comedian-ramy-youssefs-standup-show-benefitting-gaza-charity/
Disgusting, but, unsurprising. It’s deemed allegedly “cool” for Leftists and Dhimmi-crats to play up and pander to the fallacious and contrived narrative of alleged Muslim victimhood and grievance..
This is what you get when you hire affirmative action justice warriors.
Maybe all college debt should paid out of the endowment funds of all the colleges across the country.
From The Babylon Bee:
“Harvard President Claudine Gay In Hot Water For Plagiarizing Large Sections Of ‘Mein Kampf'”
“HARVARD, MA — It has been a tumultuous week for Ivy League university presidents as they have faced harsh criticism for acts as simple as allowing their students to call for the genocide of the Jews. Most recently, Harvard President Claudine Gay is in even more hot water after reports surfaced that she plagiarized large sections of her Ph.D. thesis, borrowing entire sections from Mein Kampf.
This news comes shortly after UPenn President Liz Magill was forced to resign for paragliding into a school assembly while firing an AK-47 in the air.
“I would like to apologize to the students and faculty for naively plagiarizing Hitler’s astounding and courageous work without thinking that it could lead to Antisemitism,” said President Gay, “I promise to retract any use of Mein Kampf and have made an appointment to have my newly-inked swastika forehead tattoo removed.”
At publishing time, the board of Harvard University had expressed concern at how long it would take to find another president who is black and has the last name of “Gay.””
source: https://babylonbee.com/news/harvard-president-claudine-gay-in-hot-water-for-plagiarizing-large-sections-of-mein-kampf
They sell MEIN KAMPF and PROTOCOLS…ZION at Hakiim’s Bookstore in the heart of the West Philadelphia ghetto.
The store has grown since the 1980s.
From the street it looks like a Feel-Good mostly-children’s bookstore.
There aren’t any other bookstores in West Philly.
I wish that this was satire but it is real.
What do you think the children learn growing up in West Philly, and who do you think teaches them …… since the 1980s
She now qualifies to have a federal holiday named after her.
Though “Gay Pride Month” has already been taken.
No, she won’t care.
Gay is the end result of a University bowing to the woke mob. It is only logical they would do an affirmative action hire for the President. I bet if anyone were inclined to look they would find quite a few Gay’s in positions like her.
Oh, look. Oberlin College has one. I’m stunned!
No sane American would want to have anything to do with this woman, nor with the folks who selected and support her.
Same goes for Penn Stanford Michigan (yikes!!) or Berkeley UCLA many others — really anywhere where DEI Gestapo lurks.
Especially if you are Jewish.
Ok fine. Take some time after high school. Get a iob. Get good at dealing with customers. Impress your boss. Meanwhile, get online and start learning another language. If you are reasonably diligent, then within a year or two you’ll be able to go overseas and build a life for yourself away from the DEI Gestapo — Try Spanish or Hungarian or Hebrew or Korean or Korean.
Use your imagination.
NO AMERICAN COLLEGE WANTS YOU TO THINK ABOUT THESE OPTIONS.
American colleges want you “fat, drunk, and stupid, son.” And in debt.
You don’t have to play along.
Interesting how this evaded notice her entire career until they could safely hang their hat on antisemitism. The anti-white rhetoric wasn’t good enough?
I think it’s hilarious that she used Carol Swain’s work…they couldn’t be more different lol
‘Scholar Carol Swain confirmed Gay plagiarized her language in Black Faces, Black Interests. She said: “A white male would probably already be gone.”’
A white male wouldn’t be there in the first place. Black women are always first choice for any public leadership position.
Regardless of ability or intellect.
We’re about to learn that plagiarism standards are historically and systematically western-centric and racist.
I find it interesting that these women university presidents are all struggling in this time when leadership ability is tested. Seems like DEI and its predecessor philosophies have not really helped these higher education institutions all that much.
when strong leadership is required where is it? Certainly not in the current University leaders.
If she is not fired for this every student previously or currently in the process of being expelled or punished should sue. AND Harvard has to admit it’s fine with plagiarism
Well what did people expect would happen when they appoint under qualified people to positions out of their league?
This right here is what is wrong with DEI, it promotes people in to positions where they will fail and they will fail hard! Worse is that it then reflects poorly back on their race and also makes it harder for appriately qualified black people to be promoted because people will look at them and wonder if they are qualified or just a diversity hire.
Colleges hiring by DEI: Don’t Expect Intelligence.
Utter nonsense. It is rare even in a hard science technical paper to avoid paraphrasing. And impossible in literature reviews or in the softer areas like political science. And you can’t put everything in quotes. “More than three of the same words in a row” is plagiarism? How many different ways can you write “turbulent or laminar boundary layer?” This is simply a method to attack people by combing through their written and spoken words to get ’em for something clumsy or inartful. GOTCHA’ !!
That’s fine if you can’t avoid it and cannot rephrase well….just put it in quotes and source it so people are aware.
No. At the very least, she deserves criticism for being too LAZY to rephrase using her own words.
Well yes your response IS utter nonsense completely missing just how serious and pervasive her plagiarism was. And you also seem to lack an understanding of how neglecting to cite works can impact a person’s career and earnings. Ms Swain had actual original ideas and theories. Gay neglected to cite taking as her own. Gay was then cited for these original ideas by others demonstrably reducing the number of times Swain was cited…. Which is how, grants, salaries, status, standing and positions are determined. So yah it’s a very serious, VERY big deal. And the fact that the President of frickin Harvard did it with no repercussions will probably impact academia going forward… as if it needed to be viewed any more negatively than it already is.