People care if you steal their original ideas and/or forget to cite them entirely. They don't care about fragments of a sentence, or whether you cited them on every page. That stuff is more "sloppy and embarrassing" than offensive.

I have to ask at this point- are you a published academic? The reason I ask is that there is specific plagiarism training in most programs.

There are very specific guidelines laid down, it's not about whether the person you copy "cares" or not. All of my training around plagiarism made it quite clear: the research misconduct officer will look at all the examples and exclude the ones that appear to be legitimate mistakes and false positives.

I cannot see these examples as legitimate mistakes or false positives.

Yes. You can type my first and last name into Google to find my publication list and Google Scholar.

I am disappointed by all the people whose understanding of plagiarism is limited to some mechanical set of rules enforced by a University research officer. Academic rules on plagiarism exist for specific reasons, and anyone in this field should be able to articulate those reasons or work them out from first principles. Once you understand why the rules exist, you’ll also understand why we take certain types of misappropriation much more seriously than others, and why in some cases violations can be addressed with a correction.

(It goes without saying that we don’t tell students this. We tell students that if they forget to cite a six-word sentence fragment, they’ll be put in the electric chair and given 20,000 volts.)

Further, saying one thing to students (undergrads) and another thing to Phds and professors is academically dishonest. Not that I woudl do this, but how would you feel if somebody told your students that you applied different rules to university presidents that were more loose than the ones applied to the students?

Thanks; I'm surprised you have an academic track record and yet defend her plagiarism. To me it's cut and dried: this was direct copying, without attribution, likely done with intent, and it's not just a few words going uncited, it's paragraphs with one or two words changed.

Do you truly think she did not intend to plagiarize or thought that what she wrote was totally OK? I've informally polled my larger academic community and by and large, they think that once the full set of examples was shown, that it rose to the level of "a person analyzing this text with the 'first principles' and 'reasons for plagiarism rules' would conclude it was career-ending.

ALso I'd like to say that I really don't like you saying "understanding of plagiarism is limited to some mechanical set of rules enforced by a University research officer". I had several classes when I was a grad student and we discussed all this in detail, as well as going over these sorts of things with other students and my advisor. We really did put a lot of thought into this, it's clearly not just applying the rules of the integrity officer.

In the real world the bar for “ending the career” of a researcher is very high. And it should be. We as a society spend enormous (often taxpayer funded) resources training researchers. This is why we don’t casually throw careers in the trash over missing citations and correctable minor sentence fragments that can only be discovered by machines. What we do care about is misattribution of substantive ideas, because that undermines the incentives that science relies on. Clearly the former sort of thing is extremely sloppy and should result in corrections and major embarrassment, it’s just not necessarily worth ending careers over. I have been the victim of plagiarism of both kinds, and I can assure you that disciplinary resources in the real world work nothing like the theory you’re taught in grad school. And sometimes that’s a good thing.

I spent some time thinking about my answer here.

First, about 3/4 of the academics that have weighed in on this looked at the text and considered it to be plagiarism (because direct textual copying is misattribution of substantive ideas).

Also, I think you're being a bit condescending- why should we belief that your experience with plagiarism and discipline at your instutition provides a generalized view of how it's dealt with.

Next, her career is NOT ended. She returns to her faculty position with a nearly million dollar salary. my only hope would be that she is made to teach a class "Plagiarism: how not to do it and how not to get caught if you do". Or maybe the board could sue her, and revoke her tenure and remove her job.

As scientist who took pains to be excruciatingly correct in my publication record, only to see less qualified individuals write crap that made people happy go on to great success, I can say that I think I understand the incentives that science relies on (and concluded that I would be far happier as a computer engineer than a biophysical scientist).

> In the real world the bar for “ending the career” of a researcher is very high

FWIW, her career has not been ended, only her presidency at Harvard. She's still a tenured faculty member there, and there's a decent chance she'll end up as an administrator at a different institution someday.

I understand the desire to break down the differences between different types of plagiarism, but when we're talking about the president of a top institution, is it really too much to ask that the individual not have engaged in any of them, dozens of times?

I've concluded the person we are arguing with is either arguing in bad faith, intentionally ignoring the factual details, or has a definition of plagiarism which is not consistent with that of larger academia. As such, I don't think it really makes sense for us to continue to argue (in case he replies), as it's unlikely he will convince us of his definitions, or we will convince him to look at the text copying more closely. Most people I see denying plagiarism appear to be selecting a subset of examples that work best for their argument.

Amusingly, now it's come to light that Bill Ackman (who played a big role in getting Gay out) is married to an MIT researcher who also may have plagiarized text in her thesis. I am curious how that plays out.