You cannot have it both ways. Universities get billions in public funding and then turn around using that money to fund political activists masquerading as academics. Disciplines like sociology are now very open about the fact that academics need to be openly activist to advance. It's disingenuous to then complain about political pressure.
> nothing will change until the system that produced this changes
Students chanting “from the river to the sea” while cheering on a terrorist attack may be the shark jump that prompts a systemic change. (Note: there is a huge difference between advocating for Palestinians and supporting Hamas. There is a huger one between supporting Hamas and supporting the October 7th attacks.)
Plagiarists- which Claudine Gay is- should lose their tenure, because their tenure was predicated on them being legitimate scholars, and plagiarists are not legitimate scholars.
It was established that she has a skimpy record, and nearly every one of those contains near-duplication of text without attribution. How could you ever trust an academic after it was exposed that they did that (intentionally)?
It's hard to be an academic but not plagiarizing is rule #1 or #2.
Picking one allegation from the top of the list here [1] (number "6"), it appears that she used similar phrasing to another reference, in order to describe a chart in her own work. But as best I can tell, the charts being described are completely different and based off of different datasets. [2, 3] So what I see in this instance is what looks like similar text matching, not theft of ideas or original research. If I'm wrong about this, I'll happily eat my words. Most of this stuff looks like that, or issues where she cited a reference but didn't include proper citations every time she summarized some fact (which should be fixed, but isn't a catastrophe.)
I absolutely agree that in some situations, text that looks like an exact copy isn't plagiarism. Intent matters!
But don't pick one allegation- consider all of them. When considered in whole, it's seems fairly clear her modus operandi is to 'copy-paste' entire sections of text and then change small numbers of words. And I suspect she had the intent- to do less work to create text that would get published. But I'm not 100% certain and I don't know what mechanism the plagiarism occurred by.
I dojn't think arguing that identical/similar text describing a different analysis is a good line of argument, either- wouldn't text describing charts that were completely different be.... much more different?
Interestingly, she didn't just earn tenure, she did so on a super fast track. She arrived at Stanford in 2000 and was tenured by 2005. [1] That means they put her up for tenure during the 2004-05 academic year. Normally tenure takes about 7 years, and about 50% of Stanford professors who make it to 7 years get tenure. Getting tenure in 6 is a little fast. Getting it in 5 is very uncommon. Getting it in 5 without any monographs (solo authored books) is pretty much unheard of.
My guess is that she had an outside offer (probably Harvard or Yale) and that pressured Stanford to put her up for tenure. I can't imagine an assistant prof with zero books published going to her department after 4 years and asking to be put up for tenure.
> are they going to be more noteworthy for their scholarly work or for their strong political opinions
Swain researches the "representation of African Americans in Congress." Gay's work was "on black congressional representation, electoral districting and descriptive representation." Any work on those questions will require voicing politican opinions; the work is deeply political.
Most people interested enough in politics to do political research are likely to also be politically active. However, it would be possible to do political academic research detached from one's personal politics. Similarly, most biblical scholars are religious, but there are notable atheists among them.
You don't need to be politically active to do political research and you don't need to be religious to do religious research. Though, the correlation in both cases is likely high.
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.
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.
You can look at the charts themselves to determine whether they're different. And then if you determine they are, then talking about the slopes (or coefficients) of variables doesn't seem like plagiarism to me.
More generally, "the large numbers of incidents" here is exactly what I'd expect if someone ran a text detector, but didn't do any quality control to see if the result actually represented theft of original research.
I honestly think you are either intentionally or mistakenly ignoring the large swaths of direct copied text, as in entire sentences/paragraphs.
False positives in plagiarism detection is a problem but my inspection of the examples found roughly 3-4 examples of directly copied sentences, usually with just one word changed, from a paper that she explicitly cites elsewhere in the document. Under my understanding (I'm an ex-academic with published papers) this counts as real plagiarism, and since it's repeated throughout multiple works, I think it's safe to conclude she did this intentionally and just thought she wouldn't get caught. I could be wrong.
It's quite apparent from everything that has come to light that she got tenured for the same reason she got to be Harvard president. Merit was not one of the reasons.
She hasn't written a single book that wasn't field-changing, award-winning, and on the NYT bestseller list. (Of course, the same could be said for me.)
It took me a second to realize you were intentionally using a vacuous truth (any statement is true about all members of an empty set) rather than accidentally inverting "was" as "wasn't".
There is a certain type of ex-software founder who likes the pose of philosopher king. They like to describe themselves as 'first principles thinker' but have never engaged in serious thinking since nobody challenges them on anything.
They often end up funding non-profits on AI policy, criminal justice or education reform with absolutely disastrous consequences for everyone who is not able to economically insulate themselves from the fallout. Typically, the things they end up funding espouse principles that fly in the face of everything that made them or their parents rich in the first place.
Everything I have seen and heard in interviews from this guy gives me this impression.
Apple loves to bully competitors and suppliers with both patents and app store. I doubt being on the other end of this will make them change their behaviour.
Forget small companies. Apple is famously known for blocking import of 3rd party parts for repair, but refuses to sell such parts to independent repair shops before recently.
A cynic might say the Biden administration precisely achieved its goal. Appoint someone progressive with the right optics who has zero experience getting things done or governing in a larger organization. Gets nothing done. Corporate donors are happy.
Happy to bet on this (and indeed I have, by buying GM stock). Cruise is definitely dealing with a huge, self-inflected PR disaster here. But all signs I have seen is that their tech is very advanced (although, as previously noted, probably a bit behind Waymo). Cruise and Waymo are heads and shoulders above their competitors, and there won't be only one winner (if for no other reason than the threat of anti-trust), so Cruise is likely to succeed.
Again, if you have data that shows Cruise is behind Waymo by a lot, or is behind any other company, please link it.
Could be a good bet, very asymmetric. The question to me is if the execs are leaving because they know Cruise doesn't have it technically and the jig is up, or if it's really more temporary. Hard to know from the outside. It's also hard to translate Cruise's much worse human-intervention numbers (vs Waymo) into a quantative measure of 'behindness' in terms of how difficult it is to catch up.
The event precipitating executives leaving related to the single accident and the deceptive behavior by Cruise surrounding it. To my knowledge, the data shows the tech is good (at least as safe as human drivers) and rapidly improving. But I agree it's hard to know from the outside, and that the sensibleness of the bet definitely depends on the fact that the potential upside is so massive.
It is absolutely True that most larger tech companies could run much leaner. Almost all projects that are done by many cross functional teams with lots of coordination overhead could be done by a small team of effective senior engineers.
Middle management, project/product empires mostly increase overheads with sublinear increase in output.
