The New York Post announced that Harvard covered for President Claudine Gay before even investigating plagiarism allegations against her.
Last week, the newspaper revealed that in October, anonymous sources told it about possible plagiarism committed by Gay. The Post reached out to the school.
Through powerful lawyers, Harvard bullied The Post, claiming that the accusations were “demonstrably false” and that Gay “cited and properly credited” sources in her works.
The Clare Locke law firm “previously represented the Sackler family [former owners of Purdue Pharma, linked to the opioid cases], Matt Lauer, and Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine” along with Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News:
Clare Locke said it was representing both Harvard and Gay.“These allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false,” the law firm wrote — suggesting that Harvard had cleared Gay already.“Harvard and President Gay stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published.“The Post must not move forward with the proposed article.”It claimed that any suggestion of plagiarism “rests on a fatally flawed understanding of what ‘plagiarism’ is (and is not) in scholarly work performed in academic journals and settings.”It also accused The Post of conducting “facile comparisons of similar phrases” to assess whether there was evidence which would support plagiarism allegations. Plagiarism means copying without attribution.The letter rounded up statements from academics using college letterheads — whose work The Post had found bore striking resemblance to Gay’s — to say that they did not believe they had been plagiarized.
Clare Locke also represented Sarah Palin in her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and Project Veritas against Stanford University
The Post learned that two days after Harvard sent the letters, Gay supposedly asked for an investigation a few days later, which led to the school putting together a subcommittee to review her works.
The subcommittee went against the formal policy of investigating faculty members. Harvard claimed it wanted “to avoid a ‘conflict of interest’ due to Gay’s status.”
The experts, none from Harvard, “found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.”
Then, that powerful law firm hired by Harvard threatened to sue The Post “for ‘immense’ damages.”
Except for…the initial investigation never happened:
Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.But more than a month later, on December 12 Harvard said Gay had been investigated by its top governing body and was correcting two academic journals, to acknowledge where her work had really come from — meaning the claim it was “properly credited” was false.
This story has become beyond…bizarre.
One letter from Harvard sticking up for Gay suggested the AIO program ChatGPT produced the alleged plagiarism:
“[T]here are strong indications that the excerpts cited by The Post were not in fact the ‘complaints’ of a human complainant — but rather were generated by artificial intelligence or some other technological or automated means,” it said.“If these indications are correct, and the ultimate source of these examples is an algorithm-generated list created by asking ChatGPT to (for example) ‘show me the 10 most similar passages in works by Claudine Gay to other scholarly works’ it is no ‘complaint’ at all. It is, instead, manufactured news.”
The letter also threatened to expose those who supplied The Post with the plagiarism allegations.
Harvard tells students that it holds faculty and academic members to the same standards. The policy states:
“Even if you write down your own ideas in your own words and place them around text that you’ve drawn directly from a source, you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.”
When in doubt, add a footnote and citation! It’s not hard to do.
Harvard hit a six-year high in 2020-2021 when 27 undergraduates had to withdraw because of honor code violations, “which includes plagiarism, exam cheating, and other infractions.”
“Plagiarism and exam cheating were the most cited concerns in Honor Council cases,” The Harvard Crimson reported in November 2022. “Inappropriate collaboration dropped from 27.6 percent of cases in the 2019-2020 academic year to 12 percent in the 2020-2021 academic year.”
The Honor Council found 47 types of plagiarism and 60 types of exam cheating during that time period.
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