Accountability
Plagiarism shown – and worse
Dr. Claudine Gay definitely has committed plagiarism repeatedly in her academic career. But her proposals for “woke” teaching are worse.
Yesterday CNAV shared the latest accusations against Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University. This included the sensational revelations by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet that Dr. Gay had gotten her Ph.D. dishonestly. To wit: she committed plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation. Another investigator found evidence of plagiarism by her in three other papers – out of 11 total. Yet the Harvard Corporation doesn’t care. Nor did they care about her disgraceful December 5 testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. And the reason they don’t care, is that they share her dark vision of creating a new society none of us would care to live in. This makes her guilty of fraud, not only against her fellow scholars, but also against students. And it shows why the “parallel society” needs its own institutions and methods of higher education.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism – as every higher and secondary educational institution must define in no uncertain terms for its students – is the passing-off as one’s own of another person’s work. As such it violates every concept of integrity and honor. It is also a common moral hazard for academic careerists. “Publish or perish” is a common proverb – and the victim in the case at hand, Dr. Carol M. Swain, explicitly said that academics receive rewards commensurate with the citations they generate. In that sense, plagiarism is a double theft – of the work itself and of the citation the original author earned.
Rarely does anyone brazenly substitute his own by-line for another’s. Instead, the typical intellectual thief:
- Quotes verbatim text without indicating a quotation (through quotation marks, indentation, or distinctive formatting), and/or:
- Changes a few words, without changing the basic expression of the idea, and calls the changes a paraphrase.
Every student must learn how to avoid even the appearance of both kinds of plagiarism when he first receives composition assignments of any kind. Good schools teach that in lower middle school, at least.
In the context of works offered for sale or otherwise subject to royalties, plagiarism is illegal and prosecutable. That’s what copyright – and patent – is all about.
The case of Claudine Gay
Yesterday, CNAV suggested that some person(s) unknown might have shared with Mr. Rufo (and also with Bill Ackman of the Pershing Square Fund) a large tranche of damaging information against Dr. Gay. That might or might not be the case. But investigative leads, from wherever they come, are as valuable as the other evidence an investigator finds after following them. So it is with Claudine Gay, and so it often is when investigating plagiarism. The reason: one who gets away with plagiarism once is likely to do it again.
Christopher Rufo and his colleagues shared extensive evidence that Dr. Gay had cobbled together quotes without citations, and paraphrases that were actually quotes, to produce a doctoral dissertation. Why the Dissertation Committee before whom she defended her dissertation did not detect this, is a further mystery. Yesterday Rufo shared a formal statement by the National Association of Scholars, calling on the Harvard Corporation to remove Gay.
The NAS cited more than plagiarism. They accused her of racism – and of “vindictive and arbitrary” application of administrative discipline, especially of faculty. Another user reminded the community of one such case:
Also beginning yesterday, another investigator shared evidence of plagiarism going far beyond the dissertation. Aaron Sibarium shared this evidence at The Washington Free Beacon and also as a thread on X:
Reaction
In fact, the Harvard Corporation definitely refused to fire Dr. Gay. Mr. Ackman took note of that last night:
So did Dr. Swain, who is furious. As Fox News reported, the Harvard Corporation issued a statement of support for Dr. Gay this morning. Dr. Swain reacted thus:
Swain had earlier called on Gay to resign. In the same post, she said the same to Ronna McDaniel, Chair of the Republican National Committee.
She also gave an interview to Rufo at City Journal. At that interview, for the first time, she laid the blame on “white progressives” promoting an agenda. She traced this to the lowering of academic standards and the promotion of what elite opinion then called “affirmative action.” Today they call it Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – that is, including everyone but white males. Like Bill Ackman before her, she said Dr. Gay benefited from DEI considerations. In addition, she hinted that the Dissertation Committee winked and nodded at Claudine Gay’s plagiarism in order to advance yet another person who “supported their ideas.”
This morning she shared similar insights with Neil McCabe at Redstate. More than that, she returned to the plagiarism theme and raised another concern:
If she was doing work on minority representation and publishing articles, if she didn’t cite my work at all, but she was clearly using my work, that’s more serious. Did she cite my work at all? Because my work won the highest prize political scientists can win, and my work was the one cited in the voting rights cases about majority-minority districts.
Then in this post she shared the consideration that frosted her more than anything else:
More than plagiarism
Which leads to one other issue in summing up. Claudine Gay is part of a larger movement having the goal of spreading ideological corruption throughout higher education. This long-form post quotes a lengthy memo by Dr. Gay, while she was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and under active consideration to become President.
That memo is a blueprint for the ideological destruction of a society. Plagiarism by Dr. Gay becomes a secondary consideration in this light – because even without it, that memo should disqualify:
- Dr. Gay from being president of anything, much less America’s oldest and most prestigious institution of higher education, and
- Harvard itself – and similar institutions – as places to get a good education.
CNAV has already asked whether anyone needs college anymore. More recently CNAV noted that college fails to prepare the student to go to work and do a job. The recent evidence suggests that college now exists to warp young minds and recruit them for Communist revolution. (Though whether college prepares students actually to take control of, and manage, a revolutionary conquest, is yet another riddle.)
In computer hardware parlance, a “white box” is a machine without a big brand name – or even a machine one designs and builds oneself. Conservatives might now need to invent “white box education.” The case of Claudine Gay is the worst case thus far – but not the only case.
Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
-
Education5 days agoCHAPTER 11: Critical Race Theory: A Species of the Ideological Thought Genus Marxism
Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024] -
Civilization4 days agoCHAPTER 12: Seeding Race Wars
Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024] -
Civilization4 days agoWill Trump flip New York?
-
Education3 days agoTitle IX revision sparks State revolts
-
Constitution2 days agoPrecinct Strategy scores again
-
Clergy5 days agoHistorical Points Have Their Place, But That Is Not Where Your Faith Is To Stand!
-
Education4 days agoDid the Freemasons, Illuminati, Spiritualists and Mystics establish this country?
-
Education2 days agoThe Road Back to Normalcy Starts Where the Problem Began: College Campuses