The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education. (Recent AP story by Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit) The authors make their own Culture War alignment clear when they write about Chris Rufo, one of the conservative activists involved:
Good post. - Claudine Gay's qualification for President probably was foremost one of being on the team that took down Roland Fryer, a true black scholar who belonged at Harvard for his academic chops. But his research led him to conclusions that were verboten. The pretense of assuming that Gay might not have been a DEI hire all the way is risible. We've had this unconstitutional practice for several decades already, it is business as usual, and one is told on a federal farming grant form that one is automatically considered a disadvantaged farmer unless one is a white male. A terrible thing to be. Like Larry Summers, who clearly had to be fired from Harvard just for mentioning a small and inconvenient truth.
You're the expert. You could argue that the equal protection clause doesn't prohibit racial discrimination. My understanding is that the general consensus is that it does, except that that consensus goes back to a time when it wasn't white men who were systematically disadvantaged by government and other regulations. Please expound.
One more thing. One reads in related articles that John Roberts, for instance, has stated that college admissions policies violate the equal protection clause. He's our top jurist and seems to think it applies to colleges. What gives?
Understood. The designation of disadvantaged farmers and resulting discriminatory benefits for any farmer who is not a white male by the federal government was my example, one could say off-topic for Harvard as a private actor and Claudine Gay. Justice Thomas has called affirmative action practices simply "illegal". That might be safer to stick to than invoking the Constitution.
Dr Michael E Mann, famed thin-skinned, litigious climatologist, has been banging on using his "X" account to take sides with Gay but I have not yet succeeded in soliciting his comments on statistician Edward Wegman.
Wegman, it may be remembered, destroyed Mann's statistical approach to paleo-temperature estimation., AND analyzed the networks of "peer review" (good ol' boy) processes that privilege certain branches of research while downgrading others. The analysis included a section defining concepts, which "includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works." Mann and every member of the good ol' climatology networks cried "plagiarism!" and claimed Wegman was, therefore, wrong, and Mann, vindicated.
I'm not sure plagiarism is exactly the ground the left wants to fight on.
Mann is a terrible person, and a lousy 'scientist'. From the moment I saw that hockey stick and learned that he used factor analysis I knew what he had done. There's really only one way to get a graph like that.
There's a bit in a CS Lewis novel where someone says My masters are the Oyeresu and a bit later someone says to him You must be one of us, you said the password My masters are the Oyeresu. He replies I didn't say it as a password, I said it because it is true. Same with US culture wars viewed from the UK: sometimes things just mean what they ostensibly mean.
Plagiarism isn't just "a cardinal sin in academia" it's theft from the original author and fraud on the publisher and readers of the plagiarized matter - cardinal sins and serious crimes everywhere. It should be possible and uncontroversial to say that, but I am sure a non zero percentage of US readers will be thinking "racist shill for the GOP".
Plagiarism that consists of stealing ideas is the things you say. Plagiarism that consists of copying chunks of text that say things you are not claiming to be original with you is not. I haven't seen examples of Gay committing the first, although since I have not looked over all of the cases of duplicated text there might be some.
My PhD is in Political Science, in the fields of Methodology, American Government, and Biopolitics. I was also qualified in Public Policy, Public Administration, and Political Theory. (I took a lot -- 30 -- of grad seminars.) I have in the past served as a peer reviewer for a few journals. I feel reasonably qualified to judge the quality of Gay's work.
I looked at one that was easily available and one that used King's method of disaggregating ecological data. The readily available one fell, for me, under the "eh -- not terrible, but not much there, there. The more methodological one was different. First, I never really believed that King's method really works, so I was biased on that point to begin with. Second, her data selection appeared to be a mess. Third, to the extent that I fully understand the methodology it appears to either be misapplied or misunderstood. Or both. I can't align her analysis with the data she shows.
Essentially, I found the two works to be of less-than-average grad paper quality even without paying any attention to possible plagiarism.
The part about scalping being used by some tribes against their enemies seems out of place because it is: It was a post-publication correction made after the AP originally described scalping only as being used by whites against aboriginal people.
My view of plagiarism is shaped by Stanislaw Lem's 'Summa Technologiae' chapter, Plagiarism and Creation. Also Mark Twain's defense of Helen Keller and the classical rhetorical handbooks on 'invention', by which they meant how to lift good stuff from good authors. So in the long run, plagiarism is a personal problem.
Gay's job is to train people too dumb for college to recite D party kitsch so they can get D party patronage jobs. She's probably good at her job.
Good post. - Claudine Gay's qualification for President probably was foremost one of being on the team that took down Roland Fryer, a true black scholar who belonged at Harvard for his academic chops. But his research led him to conclusions that were verboten. The pretense of assuming that Gay might not have been a DEI hire all the way is risible. We've had this unconstitutional practice for several decades already, it is business as usual, and one is told on a federal farming grant form that one is automatically considered a disadvantaged farmer unless one is a white male. A terrible thing to be. Like Larry Summers, who clearly had to be fired from Harvard just for mentioning a small and inconvenient truth.
What is unconstitutional about racial discrimination?
You're the expert. You could argue that the equal protection clause doesn't prohibit racial discrimination. My understanding is that the general consensus is that it does, except that that consensus goes back to a time when it wasn't white men who were systematically disadvantaged by government and other regulations. Please expound.
The equal protection clause doesn't bar racial discrimination by private actors — if it had the Civil Rights laws would not have been needed to do it.
In fact a case could be made that racial discrimination laws violate freedom of assembly.
One more thing. One reads in related articles that John Roberts, for instance, has stated that college admissions policies violate the equal protection clause. He's our top jurist and seems to think it applies to colleges. What gives?
I don't know. I haven't seen what he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/affirmative-action-equal-protection-clause.html?unlocked_article_code=1.L00.Xqd4.LOuNZw8WvUvy&smid=url-share
Understood. The designation of disadvantaged farmers and resulting discriminatory benefits for any farmer who is not a white male by the federal government was my example, one could say off-topic for Harvard as a private actor and Claudine Gay. Justice Thomas has called affirmative action practices simply "illegal". That might be safer to stick to than invoking the Constitution.
Dr Michael E Mann, famed thin-skinned, litigious climatologist, has been banging on using his "X" account to take sides with Gay but I have not yet succeeded in soliciting his comments on statistician Edward Wegman.
Wegman, it may be remembered, destroyed Mann's statistical approach to paleo-temperature estimation., AND analyzed the networks of "peer review" (good ol' boy) processes that privilege certain branches of research while downgrading others. The analysis included a section defining concepts, which "includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works." Mann and every member of the good ol' climatology networks cried "plagiarism!" and claimed Wegman was, therefore, wrong, and Mann, vindicated.
I'm not sure plagiarism is exactly the ground the left wants to fight on.
Mann is a terrible person, and a lousy 'scientist'. From the moment I saw that hockey stick and learned that he used factor analysis I knew what he had done. There's really only one way to get a graph like that.
There's a bit in a CS Lewis novel where someone says My masters are the Oyeresu and a bit later someone says to him You must be one of us, you said the password My masters are the Oyeresu. He replies I didn't say it as a password, I said it because it is true. Same with US culture wars viewed from the UK: sometimes things just mean what they ostensibly mean.
Plagiarism isn't just "a cardinal sin in academia" it's theft from the original author and fraud on the publisher and readers of the plagiarized matter - cardinal sins and serious crimes everywhere. It should be possible and uncontroversial to say that, but I am sure a non zero percentage of US readers will be thinking "racist shill for the GOP".
Plagiarism that consists of stealing ideas is the things you say. Plagiarism that consists of copying chunks of text that say things you are not claiming to be original with you is not. I haven't seen examples of Gay committing the first, although since I have not looked over all of the cases of duplicated text there might be some.
My PhD is in Political Science, in the fields of Methodology, American Government, and Biopolitics. I was also qualified in Public Policy, Public Administration, and Political Theory. (I took a lot -- 30 -- of grad seminars.) I have in the past served as a peer reviewer for a few journals. I feel reasonably qualified to judge the quality of Gay's work.
I looked at one that was easily available and one that used King's method of disaggregating ecological data. The readily available one fell, for me, under the "eh -- not terrible, but not much there, there. The more methodological one was different. First, I never really believed that King's method really works, so I was biased on that point to begin with. Second, her data selection appeared to be a mess. Third, to the extent that I fully understand the methodology it appears to either be misapplied or misunderstood. Or both. I can't align her analysis with the data she shows.
Essentially, I found the two works to be of less-than-average grad paper quality even without paying any attention to possible plagiarism.
Just one guy's opinion.
The part about scalping being used by some tribes against their enemies seems out of place because it is: It was a post-publication correction made after the AP originally described scalping only as being used by whites against aboriginal people.
Thanks. It had that feel, but I didn't know it had actually been changed. Presumably I could use the Wayback Machine to check that, perhaps will.
The Wayback machine doesn't seem to have earlier versions of the article.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240103100917/https://apnews.com/article/harvard-president-plagiarism-claudine-gay-3b048da1f2ee17b5edec3680b5828e8f
Thanks.
My view of plagiarism is shaped by Stanislaw Lem's 'Summa Technologiae' chapter, Plagiarism and Creation. Also Mark Twain's defense of Helen Keller and the classical rhetorical handbooks on 'invention', by which they meant how to lift good stuff from good authors. So in the long run, plagiarism is a personal problem.
Gay's job is to train people too dumb for college to recite D party kitsch so they can get D party patronage jobs. She's probably good at her job.
In covering Gay's CV you omitted to mention that
a) she has refused to produce the raw data for some papers
b) it looks like she modified some data points between her dissertation and one paper
c) in the process of doing that paper she also abused a questionable statistical tool developed by her mentor Gary King
Neither of b or c of this can be completely confirmed because of a
I covered some of this at my substack (https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/sympathy-for-claudine-gay ) and Chris Brunet goes into the statistics issue in far greater detail at his - https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-king-has-no-clothes-claudine