The editorial board of the Boston Globe demanded in a Monday article that Harvard University clarify whether the president of the university committed plagiarism or not.
Multiple sources accused Harvard President Claudine Gay of plagiarism following a Dec. 5 House Education Committee hearing, and the Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing board, admitted in December they had known of the accusations since late October. Gay has since submitted corrections to two articles, and now the Boston Globe is demanding the university clarify if the corrected passages constitute plagiarism.
“The rest of American higher education looks to Harvard for guidance on academic norms. With that leadership role in mind, the university should clear away the uncertainty over how it has applied its plagiarism policies to president Claudine Gay’s past academic work and state clearly whether several of her papers ran afoul of the rules it expects students and professors to follow — or not,” the Boston Globe editorial board wrote Monday.
“If Gay didn’t violate any standards of research, why would she need to correct anything? Nor does the statement reflect what many Harvard affiliates thought the rules were. A webpage on Harvard’s own website titled ‘What Constitutes Plagiarism?’ says ‘it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.’ Doesn’t that mean that, almost by definition, ‘inadequate citation’ constitutes plagiarism?” the Globe’s editorial board continued.
Gay appears to have copied entire paragraphs and quoted almost 20 authors without proper citations during her academic career. Harvard’s student newspaper also reviewed her scholarly works and found that some may have violated Harvard’s plagiarism policies.
“If a Harvard student were to turn in a paper with the same missing citations and quotation marks, what would the university call it, and how would it respond? Right now, Harvard’s statements create the impression that the university thinks what Gay did was not a violation of standards — and unless that’s really the message Harvard meant to send to everyone else on its campus and in academia, it should clarify,” the Globe editorial board wrote.
Gay came under fire following her response to anti-Israel activities on Harvard’s campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth faced calls to resign after refusing to say if calling for the genocide of Jews violated the universities’ codes of conduct.
Harvard did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Brandon Poulter on December 18, 2023
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