Opinion Harvard's Claudine Gay should resign - Ruth Marcus

[question everything]

She plagiarized her acknowledgments. I take no joy in saying this, but Harvard President Claudine Gay ought to resign. Her track record is unbefitting the president of the country’s premier university. Remaining on the job would send a bad signal to students about the gravity of her conduct.

This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard. 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.

(snip)

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.”

(snip)

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, who “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?

More..

https://wapo.st/47lQ3Tq

(free)

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. Thanks Ruth. Because, as we all know, the College President reflects the will of the students that

are just getting started in life, when there are no guardrails as to how/what they think.

But put a Law and Order Conservative in charge and see what happens.

[spooky3]

2. I don't find Marcus' arguments compelling. We just don't have all the facts.

For example, we don't know what factors Harvard considered before it appointed Dr. Gay, or her record as a top administrator. But from what has been reported:

The instances of "plagiarism" were not found by a Harvard panel to violate policy, and these instances appeared to me to be unfortunate and wrong, but minor--not like lifting key ideas without attribution, for example. IMHO - It really looks to me as if her critics are more motivated by race and gender bias and/or their perceiving her to be antisemitic. The fact that some rich donors are pressuring her to resign is probably more a function of these same factors and/or their their right wing leanings.

Also troubling was reading about Dr. John McWhorter's criticism of Harvard's not firing Dr. Gay as resulting from their reluctance to apply appropriate standards to a black woman, and various commenters alleging that Dr. Gay's publication record wasn't good enough, that no white male would have been appointed president with her record, etc. That simply is not true. She has some impressive publications with lots of citations per Google Scholar. Two examples of white males with "weak" publication records come to mind immediately -- Ben Sasse at U of Florida and Gordon Gee, who has been president of several public and private universities. There are probably dozens of other such men. Many went into administrative roles precisely because they weren't great at research but had some ability to raise donor money and/or do high level admin. work.