WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
Harvard president quits: Claudine Gay resignation highlights new conservative weapon | AP News
In high school, I had a Literature teacher who made us do a book report which included the bio of the author, the historic time frame when the book was written, any background on why he/she wrote it and then analyzing the book itself plus our conclusions. It was to be 30% of our total grade and we had 6 months to write it. She gave us a long class on quotations including how to keep track of them and to religiously notate them. When she finished that particular class, she looked at us and said “Some of you will be tempted to plagiarize somebody, please don’t. I read a lot and I have better sources than you.”
My paper was about Orwell’s 1984 (What a surprise, huh?) and I sweated bullets trying to get any material in Spanish. The teacher was generous and shared some of her stuff, but dumped a bunch of other material in English which forced me to live with a frigging English/Spanish dictionary while working on the report. I also got and gave help to bookworm buddies when we did our research in libraries: If we bumped on a book or periodical about a book we knew somebody else was working on, we would write it down and pass it along. Dude date was about a month and a half before school year’s end, we turned it in, and we eventually forgot about it as kids do.
The last Lit class was dubbed Massacre Day. The teacher arrived with the stack of reports and a somber demeaning. She divided the works in three sub-stacks and proceeded to call the individuals one by one to come pick up their report while announcing the grade. The big stack was mostly C’s and some D’s caused by what she said was lousy/lazy work (She was a great teacher but a heartless scorer, we knew that already.) Then came the “medium” pile and she starts to call some of the “best and brightest” of the class and announcing their collective grades: Big fat F for plagiarizing material.
At this time, I realized I had not been called and neither most of my bookworm friends. Ther was about seven of us left and she call the whole lot to stand in front of the class. I was sick to my stomach wondering how bad I fucked up to be called up and what was lower than an F. All of the guys in front but one had scored A’s and one guy B because of misspellings (I did forget to mention, we had to turn in out paper typed, and typewriters did not come with spellcheckers.)
Her last words for us were about the dangers of plagiarism. It was intellectual theft, and you would be treated as an intellectual criminal and a dishonest human being. That day ws probably one of my best memories of high school and a teaching moment I never forgot.
Now I am sad to see her proud standard that she branded in our spirits is nothing more than a small impediment in today’s academia.
and the “press” just has to say its a “weapon” to use against liberals….. yea ok… just like hitlers exterminating the Jews was “used against him”… We the People call it poetic justice… another example of why I have extreme contempt for these “people”..
They’re afraid because they know a large percentage of their cohorts also blatantly cheated to get their current positions. What will happen next is the media will bury/downplay every other incident that comes to light so there’s not as much public outcry. They have to protect their own.
Harvard has reassigned her to a $900,000 annual salary position in the political science department. She’s an authentic victim of racism now and will be celebrated as such even though what happened to her also happened to two white university presidents who testified alongside her during congressional testimony. Harvard did previously claim they investigated the claims of plagiarism and cleared her of the charge. Then gave her the position of President last July 1.
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The Rules do not apply to Blacks and it’s racist to hold them accountable to anyone anywhere. For the powers-to-be at Harvard to influence her to resign, had to be a well-thought-out plan to enable her to have more influence and power to indoctrinate students and thus create greater anti-American anti-white mindsets within academia.
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No one owns their own work, because no one is an individual unto themselves, but is instead only a small part of the total sum of the populace, from which they were enabled to write what others took from those before them and so on back through time. Everyone got from someone before them what they put into print. Plagiarism is nothing more than the white man’s racist control mechanism to keep minorities under their boot.
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Why do you think Obama’s Columbia and Harvard work was sealed and legally kept from the public eye?? Because it was all originally from him or……………?
That brings to mind Obama’s “you didn’t build that” condemnations.
Exactly Boris, the leftist forcefully assert that “Individuality” is a lie and nothing more than a weapon for the racist to beat down blacks, other minorities and women. By their logic, the only ones not guilty of plagiarism, are content creators who never engaged in any way, with anything written. But, listening to someone else read something and remembering it verbatim, then using that in a writing from perfect memory, does not cross the line.
In the last three months the left has declared they’re OK with genocide and hold minorities to a lower standard. We really need to hang that around their necks.
New conservative weapon against college plagiarism?
WTF????
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Plagiarism is wrong. It is a fast track to getting a failing grade. No college professor at any level will accept it. These days, they have software that will check to ensure any sentences/phrases you use that are identical (or close enough) to published works is either properly cited, or flagged as plagiarism.
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But, when a college President does it, gets caught, and gets forced to resign, somehow that is conservatives weaponizing the system?
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Oh… wait. Different tactic is in play.
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Because she is a leftist, she should be forgiven for any and all crimes committed. Actually expecting her to live up to the same standard the students of her university have to is a political attack.
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However, if the left was trying to oust a conservative professor or administrator, it would be a different tune altogether.
When I went back to college to finish my degree, they had an online tool like what CBMTTek mentions: you upload your paper, it scans and compares yours to other published works (of which it has a MASSIVE database), and spits out an “originality” score along with a unique file or URL to be submitted with the paper to verify it. That score is a percentage, and because we’re expected to do some direct quotations (properly cited, of course), most teachers wanted to see a score meeting or exceeding 95%, and a full bibliography with all citations correctly attributed.
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My papers averaged 97% or so after accounting for appropriately-limited direct quotes. It’s not difficult to read someone else’s work, absorb it, and re-write it in your own words to show you understand the material. (OK, I guess it could be difficult if you don’t understand the material, but isn’t that why you’re taking that class in the first place?)
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What boggles me is that the Left is branding anti-plagiarism as a “new conservative weapon”. Plagiarism is theft; it’s wrong no matter who’s doing it. It’s not suddenly A-OK because the plagiarist is a woman, or Person of Color, or adheres to the “correct” politics — or in Claudine Gay’s case, all of the above.
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(Actually, given the Left’s tolerance of PoC flash mobs and systematic organized shoplifting, which is also theft, maybe to them it is OK?)
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Does anyone really believe that plagiarism is a recent phenomena? Or that if it were a conservative caught plagiarizing in college, the Left would be unwilling or unable to use it against them? No?
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How, then, is it a “new conservative weapon”?
Guess I’m way out of touch. In high school (grad 1963) we prayed the fairly new CliffsNotes had one for our assigned book. Most instructors caught copying between/among students and with time the instructors seemed to have memorized the Notes. A student caught copying got an automatic failing grade no matter how well the rest of the report was written. That was good training/warning for following college work.
Now, quite a few years later, if one is caught and called on it, it must be not because of the obvious LIE that it is original work, no, it is because the LIAR is a member of some self-proclaimed victim group.