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.Rufo and Brunet wrote:
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).
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.
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.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY