It very clearly wasn’t negligence- she cited plenty of other sources in her work that she didn’t copy word for word. She only left out the ones that she quite directly copied language from and did so on multiple occasions.
The review board let her off easy, giving her the benefit of doubt towards her intentions because she was the esteemed president of the university.
But that’s very clearly not what happened here and it’s detrimental to the discussion at hand to falsely label it as such. She in fact was able to let it slide for multiple months longer than her white counterpart and Penn.
It doesn't matter one single bit what the people who she plagiarized think about her, if they're upset by it or not, or if they think she's a good person or not. That's not what plagiarism is.
She directly took language from the work of others without prior permission and claimed it to be her own. That's all the context that is taken for academic dishonesty- if I was accused of plagiarizing my friend's essay by my department and countered with "but my friend thinks I'm such a good person", I'd be laughed out of the room.
The same third party board that said she didn't commit plagiarism while also forcing her to add dozens of missing citations to her work where she directly copied sentences from other articles... Which makes absolutely no sense.
It's absolutely not flimsy- she's only written a dozen articles and there's been concrete examples of plagiarism in at least of a quarter of them. Here is one of 40+ examples of the plagiarism found:
Swain in her article:
“the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
Gay in her article:
"the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities.”
Swain in her article:
“Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent”
Gay in her article:
"Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%”
She never cited Swain in any way until she was forced to do so this year by the review board. If I pulled this in college in more then 25% of my essays I'd most certainly be in front of my department head in a very serious conversation, looking at suspension at least.
Edit: Lol, late breaking news! As of today plagiarism allegations now cover 50%! Half! of her papers as even more examples have come out literally a few hours ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html
Now I see that she’s black in an important locus of elite power and it suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy about race. The white Penn administrator that screwed up their testimony in the exact same way in the exact same hearing was forced out in the exact same way.
Creating a paid or ad-supported client app for a website isn’t profiting off of content, it’s profiting off of the user’s desire for a better mobile experience. There’s no ‘stealing’, the developer never has access to nor purports to own any of the content themselves- it’s simply a voluntary intermediary for a user to access their own account with their own content feed.
That said, any client apps that run ads are dumb and will fail miserably. It’s awful for UX. Just so long as client apps can be monetized in other ways I think it’s fine to adopt a license that prohibits specifically ads.
This same story was posted yesterday, so I’ll rewrite what I did back then:
Most of this report is patently ridiculous. HRW asked people who follow the HRW social media accounts to please send in perceived instances of censorship they’ve seen for the Palestinian conflict social media, they got about a thousand examples from a self-selecting population, then published a big exposé about it.
There’s no comparative analysis (either quantitative nor qualitative) to whether similar censorship happened for other topics discussed, other viewpoints discussed, or at other times in the past.They allege, for example, that pro-Palestinian posters didn’t have an option to request a review of the takedown. The obvious next step is to contextualize such a claim- is that standard policy? Does it happen when discussing other topics? Is it a bug? How often does it happen? But they don’t seem to want to look into it further, they just allude to some sense of nebulous wrongdoing then move on to the next assertion. Rinse and repeat.
The one part of the report actually grounded in reality (and a discussion that should be had) is how to handle content that runs afoul of standards against positive or neutral portrayal of terrorist organizations, especially concerning those with political wings like the Hamas. It’s an interesting challenge on where to draw the line on what to allow- but blindly presenting a thousand taken down posts like it’s concrete evidence of a global conspiracy isn’t at all productive to that discussion.
So if your definition of a quotation is something written word for word, whether it is cited or even at all distinguishable from her own work (read them yourself, they very clearly aren't distinguishable at all), what do you call something where she very clearly doesn't copy the original text word for word but instead rewrites it to better fit in with her own prose without ever citing it? Maybe something like changing:
“...the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
to
"...the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities...”
It's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that the review board might've treated her differently from any random undergraduate because of her status within academia. That's just human nature, it doesn't even require intent to do so.