Gay & politics

Schaffer, M. (2024, Jan. 5). The Right Is Dancing on Claudine Gay’s Grave. But It Was the Center-Left That Did Her In. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/claudine-gay-resignation-battle-column-00133820.

This is an interesting article, but it's entirely from the political angle, as if the sinking of Gay had nothing to do with the plagiarism itself. It doesn't even touch the central plagiarism questions that I have always been more interested in. To me it's more a question of justice. Was she guilty? If so, should she have known she was guilty?

Personally I think left, right, ultra-left, & ultra-right all want, whether they know it or not, a disciplined scholar as President of Harvard. This person does not have to be famous or ground-breaking in his/her field. But he/she has to know what they go through on a day-to-day basis. And not to have cheated on that very same path.

Claudine Gay steps down

I am reflecting a bit about the Claudine Gay incident even though I haven't read extensively about it. Instead, I encounter her name constantly as I peddle my book Harvardinates. It reminds me of my life teaching how to avoid plagiarism and working in an institution marred by accusations against its preident (documented on this blog).

The problem is, you simply can't lead an institution of scholars when you have been proven to plagiarize. If she was guilty at all, and it appears she was, she can't just apologize, fix it, and move on, with strength and integrity behind her actions and a diverse crowd of scholars accepting her leadership. They won't. They need one of their own.

The things she plagiarized, apparently, were the hardest not to plagiarize. You've done a masssive search for material, and time has run out to wait for the library to bring you a few more things. You accept somebody's word for it that a scholar found such and such. The problem is not that scholars are wrong that some scholar found such and such. The problem is that there are only so many ways to say that. And, not having read what was written, putting it in other words puts you at risk of misrepresenting it. Trapped by circumstances, you put what you think it said on the paper. But it's remarkablyy close to what that scholar thought it said.

Looking at it from above, it's clear that the only way out is to give yourself an extra six months, and haul in every article that is even remotely connected to your topic, and painstakingly, one by one, peruse each article until the sentence you produce can be entirely your own. It's only one sentence, but it has to be entirely your own. There are ways you can use to personalize this section; the key will be that although some words or combinations of words will ding a plagiarism search, no entire sentences will, and the kind of pain that Ms. Gay has endured will be entirely avoided.

There is no question that what happened was politically motivated. Her enemies are politically motivated; so are her supporters. Everyone has other motives besides just digging through words for the pure fun of defining plagiarism in the modern day. The problem is that it is still extremely serious business, and for the scholars of Harvard, they themselves have already devoted themselves to the six-month rule outlined above in order to save their reputation and their future. Why would they not expect the same from their president? They know she has other, bigger things to worry about but so do they. They have that in common, in fact, while there is little else that they have in common.

In the 1600s a president had to be a minister. But that was very difficult, as ministers had made lifetime commitments to their congregations who then were very reluctant to let go of them. What I mean is that when Harvard needed a new President it had a hard time finding one. Finally, in about 1683, they found a guy named Nathaniel Rogers to agree to come down to Cambridge and be President of Harvard. He was a qualified minister but had been spending his time helping another one, William Hubbard, run the Ipswich Church. It took him almost a year to release himself from Ipswich and move his family down to Cambridge. But no sooner had he installed himself and his family, and took up the duties of the Presidency, in 1684, there was an eclipse of the sun, and he died right in the middle of it.

People were alarmed, but that's a different story. Life goes on. Eventually, they got Increase Mather to do it, but that had its pitfalls too. Talk about witch trials, you had to be careful in those days.