Claudine Gay resigns as Harvard President

Quote:

Harvard University's president has resigned after facing allegations of plagiarism and criticism over her comments about antisemitism on campus. Claudine Gay had faced mounting pressure to step down in recent weeks. In a letter announcing her resignation, she said it was in the "best interests" of the university for her to step down. "It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigour," she said. "This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words," Dr Gay wrote, adding that her resignation would allow Harvard to "focus on the institution rather than any individual". She said she had been subjected to personal threats and "racial animus".

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I expect two things are true in this case.

Was she targeted for racial abuse? Yes, almost certainly.

Was she guilty of plagiarism? Yes. If you look at some of the passages that appear in her work, she blatantly used the exact same wording as papers that she cited but without using quotations. She clearly gave the impression that the words were hers and thus used other people's work without proper attribution.

It has been pointed out that students have been kicked out of Harvard for doing exactly what she has done, so it makes no sense to allow her to remain as president of the university.

As a person who grades student work, albeit students writing in a second language, I have had seen plenty of examples like this, usually in a first draft because my job is to teach students who to write gooder, and then I would tell them to change it. If they still decided to submit work which was blatantly using other people's words as their own, then they would receive a zero for the assignment.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/0XiBeCP