Claudine Gay’s resignation shows the difficulties with regulating academic writing

Source: “Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns Embarrassing the Trouble with Regulating Academic Writing”

Gay moved to Harvard after being lured away from a tenured position at Stanford University. In her 16-year journey from professor to president, Gay, who is Black and the daughter of Haitian immigrants, has been praised by colleagues, bosses, and students for her originality of thought, rigor, and devotion to data.

“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am,” she wrote, “and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

Tomar believes that Gay’s alleged failings are likely to be revealed now because of the endless amounts of data fed into artificial intelligence programs.

He predicts a slew of academic leaders will likely be outed in similar fashion. He feels sympathy for those who violate an institution’s policies but he doesn’t think it’s the right thing to focus on.

“We may be able to retroactively discover what somebody did in the 1990s. He wondered if we ought to be a bit more concerned about what the graduate will do next year.

Source: Claudine Gay’s resignation highlights the trouble with regulating academic writing

The Harvard Corporation: Detecting Plagiarism in Higher Education, Revealed by Its Co-Editor David D. Gay

It has been a tumultuous episode for Harvard, whose highest governing board, known as the Harvard Corporation, has since noted that Gay had acknowledged “missteps.” In a Dec. 12 statement in which officials addressed the plagiarism charges, the university said an initial review of Gay’s published writings “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.”

The Washington FreeBeacon reported on Monday that it had problems with several of Gay’s published papers.

The quality of work should be a priority for the supervisors to bear some responsibility for.

Additionally, Ph.D. dissertations go through several steps of verification, including being reviewed by a supervisor, an examination committee and peers.

Still, Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton, author of Plagiarism in Higher Education: Tackling Tough Topics in Academic Integrity, says allegations of plagiarism are still largely handled manually.

Tomar began his career as a professional cheater during this pre-internet time. “It was really, really easy to get away with Googling and cutting and pasting before educators were really hip to it,” he recalled.

Without the plagiarism detection software that is now in use professors were encouraged to use their intuition if something felt off with an assignment. They were told to hold one-on-one meetings to assess a student’s grasp of the material.

That was largely due to the absence of plagiarism detection technology, he said, noting that the 1990s and even early 2000s were the nascent days of the internet. Physical libraries still used card catalogs for research. It wasn’t unusual for papers to be written out by hand, then typed into a computer or word processor. Back then, few of the software tools that became available were as advanced as they are today.

” 20 years ago the alarm bells were not raised as much,” said Tomar, who is author of The Complete Guide to Contract Cheating in Higher Education. She was right ahead of the curve of detection at the time.

Dave Tomar, a professional cheat who wrote for undergrads and graduate students for about a decade, said thatGay’s writing went undetected because he was well-known in the area.

Gay is not the first head of an academic institution unseated by allegations of plagiarism: The president at Stanford resigned last year after an investigation found manipulated data in several academic reports he authored. And in 2021, Robert Caslen resigned as president of the University of South Carolina after plagiarizing part of a speech.

Testifying at a congressional hearing in early December with two other university presidents — only one of whom, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T., still has her job — she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (Republican of New York; Harvard ’06) whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated “Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment.” Dr. Gay said that it might be, depending on the context. Dr. Gay and her fellow witnesses became overnight meme fodder because of those remarks which were apologized for but had already entered the media bloodstream.