Diversity hiring does it again!
The odious Claudine Gay, Harvard’s diversity hire president, is finding herself in hot water, yet again. This time, it’s not her sleazy pandering to anti-Semitism, blatantly racist admissions program, or even her alleged bullying.
Instead, it’s the allegation that Gay’s academic credentials are somewhere lower than a rapey ghetto thug who got a scholarship because he can throw a ball into a hoop.
Turns out that Gay is only slightly less rigorous an “academic” than scientific non-entity, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
We have obtained exclusive documentation demonstrating that President Gay may face yet another problem: plagiarism of sections of her Ph.D. dissertation, which would violate Harvard’s own stated policies on academic integrity. (Emailed requests for comment to the Harvard president’s office were not returned.)
Gay published her dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics,” in 1997, as part of her doctorate in political science from Harvard. The paper deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes.
Because of course she did. What? Did you expect a race-trougher to do something that actually contributes to the sum of useful human knowledge?
Still, anyone who’s completed a degree or post-graduate study knows that there is a clear line between citation and plagiarism. It’s perfectly fine — required, in fact — to quote from other academics.
But it’s absolutely beyond the pale to copy and paste other academics’ work without clearly identifying it as a quotation.
As evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.
First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.
To avoid lengthy quotations (go look ‘em up in the original article, if you don’t believe me), what Gay does — repeatedly — is cite other scholars’ work and then copy-and-paste slabs of their text, with “a few trivial synonym substitutions”, and no quotation marks. I mean, that’s a gambit that most of us get called out on in high school. Trying it on in, not just a university, but a PhD thesis is such a clumsy act of thievery, it’s astonishing that she got away with it.
Or perhaps not, in this age of diversity’n’inclusion, where not being able to even write legible English is volubly defended as “Ebonics”.
Oh, no, she di-n’t!
This constitutes a clear violation of Harvard’s policy, which states: “When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
Uh-uh, girlfren’!
Gay repeats this violation throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.
But Gay gets even more brazen than that. She didn’t just steal the bicycle, she stole the lock and the post it was chained to.
Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain in at least two instances. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation,” she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book Black Faces, Black Interests, without providing a citation of any kind […]
Gay’s use of Swain’s material is a straightforward violation of the university’s rule on “verbatim plagiarism,” which states that one “must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation”—neither of which Gay followed.
Later in the paper, Gay also uses identical language to Swain, without adding quotation marks, as required.
In fact, the whole Harvard establishment was apparently in on the scam.
Third, Gay composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem. While she cites King’s book—in fact, King was her dissertation advisor—Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts, instead passing it off as her own original work. Throughout the appendix, Gay takes entire phrases and sentences directly from King’s book, without any citations or quotation marks. In total, Gay borrows material from King in at least half a dozen paragraphs—all in violation of Harvard’s standard on academic integrity.
City-Journal
How could anyone not notice slabs of his own book being plagiarised? Did he take it as an homage, or something?
So, what should happen? If it was a current Harvard student, they’d be subject to “disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College.” The punishment for a College president ought to be concomitantly more severe. Indeed, another college president resigned due to plagiarism in his dissertation. Another resigned simply for plagiarising remarks in a commencement speech.
And just this week, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill resigned in shame over the same disgusting cowardice regarding anti-Semitism on campus as Gay.
