In addition, the initial reports of plagiarism seemed small-bore. Gay’s missteps did not seem to involve sweeping appropriations of carefully crafted words or thoughtful ideas but a failure to put mostly boilerplate language inside quotation marks.
Moreover, plagiarism in the digital age is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God event; every writer should worry about the risk of the accidental cut-and-paste. I like to think I’d recognize and remove any language I hadn’t written, but who can be certain? It is always best to cite — and even over-credit — the work of others. Charitableness begins at home.
And yet. The instances of problematic citation in the work of Gay, a political scientist, have become too many to ignore. Some go well beyond routine use of the same language. The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported that “in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences — even entire paragraphs — with just a word or two tweaked.”
In her 1997 doctoral dissertation, for example, Gay quoted from a paper by Bradley Palmquist and D. Stephen Voss, then her colleagues in the Harvard political science department, about turnout rates among Black voters. “This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias,” they wrote. “If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph.)”
Gay’s dissertation — which nowhere cites Palmquist and Voss — contains nearly identical language. “This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias,” she wrote. “If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.”
That’s not sloppiness. That’s plagiarism. Harvard’s own material underscores this conclusion. “Plagiarism is defined as the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else,” its manual for students advises. “If you turn in a paper … in which you have included material from any source without citing that source, you have plagiarized.”
Perhaps the most disturbing example is the least academic — Gay’s borrowing of words from another scholar, Jennifer L. Hochschild. In her acknowledgments for a 1996 book, Hochschild described a mentor who “showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor” and “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”
Gay’s dissertation thanked her thesis adviser, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor,” and her family, “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”
Now, can I just say? Acknowledgments are the easiest, and most fun part, of writing a book, the place where you list your sources and allies and all the people who helped you get the manuscript over the finish line. Why not come up with your own thanks? What does it say about a person who chooses to appropriate another’s language for this most personal task.
Harvard said it launched an inquiry into Gay’s conduct after being contacted by the New York Post in October about plagiarism allegations. It said an independent panel of three respected political scientists with no ties to Harvard had examined Gay’s published works and found instances of “inadequate citations” that, “while regrettable, did not constitute research misconduct” because there was no evidence of intentional deception or recklessness.
It said Gay had submitted four corrections to two articles and, after questions were raised about her dissertation, promised to update that document as well to fix “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Most of the scholars involved told the Harvard Crimson that they were untroubled by the conduct.
Really? Here’s what Harvard tells its students. “Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.”
And: “It’s not enough to have good intentions and to cite some of the material you use.”
And this: “When you write papers in college, your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors.”
Which raises the question: Is the university president’s work being held to the same standards? It sure doesn’t look that way.
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