The president of Harvard University is stepping down

When Robert Caslen quit as president of the University of South Carolina in 2021 after plagiarizing about her work on the paper “The Case of Black Hole and Black Holes”

In the past, other head of academic institutions have been removed by allegations of plagiarism. An investigation found that a number of the academic reports he authored contained manipulated data. RobertCaslen resigned as president of the University of South Carolina in 2021, after plagiarizing part of a speech.

“It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries. But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

Gay’s departure follows heightened scrutiny of allegations that she plagiarized parts of some of her published works and in the wake of a controversial appearance before Congress last month.

In a statement Tuesday, Harvard’s governing board named Alan M. Garber, the university’s provost and chief academic officer, as interim president until a new leader is chosen.

Gay took office in July and was president for 16 years, a trajectory that the Harvard Crimson described as “meteoric.” But her downfall raises questions about how people in such high-profile positions can find themselves facing such charges in an age where advanced technology so easily enables detecting alleged cases of plagiarism.

She wrote that she was worried that her commitments to confronting hate and maintaining scholarly rigor were being undermined by personal attacks and threats of racial animus.

The Harvard Business Review Reports: “The Problem With Regulating Academic Writing” Claudine Gay Resigns “Plagiarism”

The irony, Tomar said, is that Gay’s alleged failings are likely only now coming to light because of the endless amounts of data that gets fed into artificial intelligence programs, such as Chat GPT.

He predicts a slew of academic leaders will likely be outed in similar fashion. He feels little sympathy for the people who are caught having violated policies, but he thinks that is the wrong thing to do.

“We may be able to retroactively discover what somebody did in the 1990s. But ought we not to be slightly more concerned about what the person who was going to graduate next year is doing?” he asked.

The corporation added: “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” The articles date back to 2001 and 2017.

On Monday, right-wing website the Washington Free Beacon reported that it found problems in four of Gay’s published papers, including her 1997 dissertation.

The quality of work that is produced by the students should be at the forefront of the supervisors’ minds.

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

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

Plagiarism in Higher Education: Tackling Tough Topics in Academic Integrity, by Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton

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

Tomar was a professional cheating during this pre- internet time. “It was very easy to get away with cutting and modifying before educators were really aware of it,” he said.

Without the plagiarism detection software programs that are now in use, professors were encouraged to use their intuition if something felt off with an assignment. They were urged to hold one-on-one meetings to help them 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. The physical libraries used card catalogs to conduct research. It wasn’t unusual for papers to be written out by hand, then typed into a computer or word processor. And the few software tools that eventually became available back then, were nowhere near as sophisticated as what exists today.

The alarm bells weren’t raised as much when the author was writing The Complete Guide to Contract Cheating in Higher Education. “It’s a no-brainer to me that she was just sort of right ahead of the curve of detection at the time.”

Dave Tomar, a self-proclaimed professional cheat who wrote academic papers for undergrads and post-doctoral students for about a decade, said it’s easy to understand how Gay’s writing went undiscovered for so long.