Macrobius
Megaphoron
From a liberal/Bayesian sort of blog:
tl;dr
This is Jessica. As many of you probably saw, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard this week. Her tenure as president is apparently the shortest on record, and accusations of plagiarism involving some of her published papers and her dissertation seem to be a major contributor that pushed this decision, after the initial backlash against Gay’s response alongside MIT and Penn presidents Kornbluth and Magill to questions from Republican congresswoman Stefanik about blatantly anti-semitic remarks on their campuses in the wake of Oct. 7.
The plagiarism counts are embarrassing for Gay and for Harvard, for sure, as were the very legalistic reactions of all three presidents when asked about anti-semitism on their campuses. In terms of plagiarism as a phenomena that crops up in academia, I agree with Andrew that it tells us something about the author’s lack of ability or effort to take the time to understand the material. I suspect it happens a lot under the radar, and I see it as a professor (more often with ChatGPT in the mix and no, it does not always lead to explicit punishment, to comment on what some are saying online about double standards for faculty and students). What I don’t understand is how in Gay’s case this is misconduct at the level that warrants a number of headline stories in major mainstream news media and the resignation of an administrator who has put aside her research career anyway.
On the one hand, I can see how it is temptingly easy to rationalize why the president of what is probably the most revered university on earth cannot be associated with any academic misconduct without somehow bringing shame on the institution. She’s the president of Harvard, how can it not be shocking?! is one narrative I suppose. But, this kind of response to this situation is exactly what bothers me in the wake of her resignation. I will try to explain.
Regarding the specifics, I saw a few of the plagarized passages early on, and I didn’t see much reason to invest my time in digging further, if this was the best that could be produced by those who were obviously upset about it (I agree with Phil here that they seem like a “weak” form of plagiarism). What makes me uncomfortable about this situation was how so many people, under the guise of being “objective,” did feel the need to invest their time in the name of establishing some kind of truth in the situation. This is the moment of decision that I wish to call attention to. It’s as though in the name of being “neutral” and “evidence based” we are absolved from having to consider why we feel so compelled in certain cases to get to the bottom of it, but not so much in other cases.
It’s the same thing that makes so much research bad: the inability to break frame, to turn on the premise rather than the minor details. To ask, how did we get here? Why are we all taking for granted that this is the thing to be concerned with?
Situations like what happened to Gay bring a strong sense of deja vu for me. I’m not sure how much my personal reaction is related to being female in a still largely male-dominated field myself, but I suspect it contributes. There’s a scenario that plays out from time to time where someone who is not in the majority in some academic enterprise is found to have messed up. At first glance, it seems fairly minor, somewhat relatable at least, no worse than what many others have done. But, somehow, it can’t be forgotten in some cases. Everyone suddenly exerts effort they would normally have trouble producing for a situation that doesn’t concern them that much personally to pore over the details with a fine-tooth comb to establish that there really was some fatal flaw here. The discussion goes on and becomes hard to shut out, because here is always someone else who is somehow personally offended by it. And the more it gets discussed, the more it seems like overwhelmingly a real thing to be dealt with, to be decided. It becomes an example for the sake of being principled. Once this palpable sense that ‘this is important’, ‘this is a message about our principles,’ sets in, then the details cannot be overlooked. How else can we be sure we are being rational and objective? We have to treat it like evidence and bring to bear everything we know about scrutinizing evidence.
What is hard for me to get over is that these stories that stick around and capture so much attention are far more often stories about some member of the racial or gender non-majority who ended up in a high place. It’s like the resentment that a person from the outside has gotten in sets in without the resenter even becoming aware of it, and suddenly a situation that seems like it should have been cooperative gets much more complicated. This is not to say that people who are in the majority in a field don’t get called out or targetted sometimes, they do. Just that there’s a certain dynamic that seems to set in more readily when someone perceived as not belonging to begin with messes up. As Jamelle Watson-Daniels writes on X/Twitter of the Gay situation: “the legacy and tradition of orchestrated attacks against the credibility of Black scholars all in the name of haunting down and exposing them as… the ultimate imposters.” This is the undertone I’m talking about here.
I’ve been a professor for about 10 years, and I’ve seen this sort of hyper-attention turned on women and/or others in the non-majority who violated some minor code repeatedly in that time. In many instances, it creates a situation that divides those who are confused by the apparent level of detail orientedness given the crime and those who can’t see how there is any other way than to make the incident into an example. Gay is just the most recent reminder.
What makes this challenging for me to write about personally is that I am a big believer in public critique, and admitting one’s mistakes. I have advocated for both on this blog. To take an example that comes up from time to time, I don’t think that because of uneven power dynamics, public critique of papers with lead student authors should be shut down, or that we owe authors extensive private communications before we openly criticize. That goes against the sort of open discussion of research flaws that we are already often incentivized to avoid. For the same reason, I don’t think that critiques made by people with ulterior motives should be dismissed. I think there were undoubtedly ulterior motives here, and I am not arguing that the information about accounts of plagiarism here should not have been shared at all.
I also think making decisions driven by social values (which often comes up under the guise of DEI) is very complex. At least in academic computer science, we seem to be experiencing a moment of heightened sensitivity to what is perceived “moral” and “ethical”, and that often these things are defined very simplistically and tolerance for disagreement low.
And I also think that there are situations where a transgression may seem minor but it is valuable to mind all the details and use it as an example! I was surprised for example at how little interest there seemed to be in the recent Nature Human Behavior paper which claimed to present all confirmatory analyses but couldn’t produce the evidence that the premise of the paper suggests should be readily available. This seemed to me like an important teachable moment given what the paper was advocating to begin with.
So anyway, lots of reasons why this is hard to write about, and lots of fodder for calling me a hypocrite if you want. But I’m writing this post because the plagiarism is clearly not be the complete story here. I don’t know the full details of the Gay investigation (and admit I haven’t spent too much time researching this). So it’s possible I’m wrong and she did some things that were truly more awful than the average Harvard president. But I haven’t heard about them yet. And either way my point still stands: there are situations with similar dynamics to this where my dedication to scientific integrity and public critique and getting to the bottom of technical details do not disappear, but are put on the backburner to question a bigger power dynamic that seems off.
And so, while I normally I think everyone caught doing academic misconduct should acknowledge it, for the reasons above, at least at the moment, it doesn’t bother me that Gay’s resignation letter doesn’t mention the plagiarism. I think not acknowledging it was the right thing to do.
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tl;dr
This is Jessica. As many of you probably saw, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard this week. Her tenure as president is apparently the shortest on record, and accusations of plagiarism involving some of her published papers and her dissertation seem to be a major contributor that pushed this decision, after the initial backlash against Gay’s response alongside MIT and Penn presidents Kornbluth and Magill to questions from Republican congresswoman Stefanik about blatantly anti-semitic remarks on their campuses in the wake of Oct. 7.
The plagiarism counts are embarrassing for Gay and for Harvard, for sure, as were the very legalistic reactions of all three presidents when asked about anti-semitism on their campuses. In terms of plagiarism as a phenomena that crops up in academia, I agree with Andrew that it tells us something about the author’s lack of ability or effort to take the time to understand the material. I suspect it happens a lot under the radar, and I see it as a professor (more often with ChatGPT in the mix and no, it does not always lead to explicit punishment, to comment on what some are saying online about double standards for faculty and students). What I don’t understand is how in Gay’s case this is misconduct at the level that warrants a number of headline stories in major mainstream news media and the resignation of an administrator who has put aside her research career anyway.
On the one hand, I can see how it is temptingly easy to rationalize why the president of what is probably the most revered university on earth cannot be associated with any academic misconduct without somehow bringing shame on the institution. She’s the president of Harvard, how can it not be shocking?! is one narrative I suppose. But, this kind of response to this situation is exactly what bothers me in the wake of her resignation. I will try to explain.
Regarding the specifics, I saw a few of the plagarized passages early on, and I didn’t see much reason to invest my time in digging further, if this was the best that could be produced by those who were obviously upset about it (I agree with Phil here that they seem like a “weak” form of plagiarism). What makes me uncomfortable about this situation was how so many people, under the guise of being “objective,” did feel the need to invest their time in the name of establishing some kind of truth in the situation. This is the moment of decision that I wish to call attention to. It’s as though in the name of being “neutral” and “evidence based” we are absolved from having to consider why we feel so compelled in certain cases to get to the bottom of it, but not so much in other cases.
It’s the same thing that makes so much research bad: the inability to break frame, to turn on the premise rather than the minor details. To ask, how did we get here? Why are we all taking for granted that this is the thing to be concerned with?
Situations like what happened to Gay bring a strong sense of deja vu for me. I’m not sure how much my personal reaction is related to being female in a still largely male-dominated field myself, but I suspect it contributes. There’s a scenario that plays out from time to time where someone who is not in the majority in some academic enterprise is found to have messed up. At first glance, it seems fairly minor, somewhat relatable at least, no worse than what many others have done. But, somehow, it can’t be forgotten in some cases. Everyone suddenly exerts effort they would normally have trouble producing for a situation that doesn’t concern them that much personally to pore over the details with a fine-tooth comb to establish that there really was some fatal flaw here. The discussion goes on and becomes hard to shut out, because here is always someone else who is somehow personally offended by it. And the more it gets discussed, the more it seems like overwhelmingly a real thing to be dealt with, to be decided. It becomes an example for the sake of being principled. Once this palpable sense that ‘this is important’, ‘this is a message about our principles,’ sets in, then the details cannot be overlooked. How else can we be sure we are being rational and objective? We have to treat it like evidence and bring to bear everything we know about scrutinizing evidence.
What is hard for me to get over is that these stories that stick around and capture so much attention are far more often stories about some member of the racial or gender non-majority who ended up in a high place. It’s like the resentment that a person from the outside has gotten in sets in without the resenter even becoming aware of it, and suddenly a situation that seems like it should have been cooperative gets much more complicated. This is not to say that people who are in the majority in a field don’t get called out or targetted sometimes, they do. Just that there’s a certain dynamic that seems to set in more readily when someone perceived as not belonging to begin with messes up. As Jamelle Watson-Daniels writes on X/Twitter of the Gay situation: “the legacy and tradition of orchestrated attacks against the credibility of Black scholars all in the name of haunting down and exposing them as… the ultimate imposters.” This is the undertone I’m talking about here.
I’ve been a professor for about 10 years, and I’ve seen this sort of hyper-attention turned on women and/or others in the non-majority who violated some minor code repeatedly in that time. In many instances, it creates a situation that divides those who are confused by the apparent level of detail orientedness given the crime and those who can’t see how there is any other way than to make the incident into an example. Gay is just the most recent reminder.
What makes this challenging for me to write about personally is that I am a big believer in public critique, and admitting one’s mistakes. I have advocated for both on this blog. To take an example that comes up from time to time, I don’t think that because of uneven power dynamics, public critique of papers with lead student authors should be shut down, or that we owe authors extensive private communications before we openly criticize. That goes against the sort of open discussion of research flaws that we are already often incentivized to avoid. For the same reason, I don’t think that critiques made by people with ulterior motives should be dismissed. I think there were undoubtedly ulterior motives here, and I am not arguing that the information about accounts of plagiarism here should not have been shared at all.
I also think making decisions driven by social values (which often comes up under the guise of DEI) is very complex. At least in academic computer science, we seem to be experiencing a moment of heightened sensitivity to what is perceived “moral” and “ethical”, and that often these things are defined very simplistically and tolerance for disagreement low.
And I also think that there are situations where a transgression may seem minor but it is valuable to mind all the details and use it as an example! I was surprised for example at how little interest there seemed to be in the recent Nature Human Behavior paper which claimed to present all confirmatory analyses but couldn’t produce the evidence that the premise of the paper suggests should be readily available. This seemed to me like an important teachable moment given what the paper was advocating to begin with.
So anyway, lots of reasons why this is hard to write about, and lots of fodder for calling me a hypocrite if you want. But I’m writing this post because the plagiarism is clearly not be the complete story here. I don’t know the full details of the Gay investigation (and admit I haven’t spent too much time researching this). So it’s possible I’m wrong and she did some things that were truly more awful than the average Harvard president. But I haven’t heard about them yet. And either way my point still stands: there are situations with similar dynamics to this where my dedication to scientific integrity and public critique and getting to the bottom of technical details do not disappear, but are put on the backburner to question a bigger power dynamic that seems off.
And so, while I normally I think everyone caught doing academic misconduct should acknowledge it, for the reasons above, at least at the moment, it doesn’t bother me that Gay’s resignation letter doesn’t mention the plagiarism. I think not acknowledging it was the right thing to do.
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