After a disastrous hearing in front of Congress (despite what SNL might have told you), a bad week for Harvard's president Claudine Gay just got a lot worse, thanks to Chris Rufo.
Is Harvard's president fake and Gay?
According to investigations from Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet, Dr. Claudine Gay may actually not be a legitimate doctor at all because large portions of her Ph.D. thesis were plagiarized.
Yep. Rufo and company go into great detail exposing Dr. Gay's alleged misdeeds that include lifting entire paragraphs and stealing ideas from other authors to pass off as her own work.
Let's get into Rufo's charges.
First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam's, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.
This is a direct violation of Harvard's policy: "When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source's ideas in your own words. It's not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation."
Gay repeats this violation of Harvard's policy throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.
Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between "descriptive representation" and "substantive representation," she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain's book 'Black Faces, Black Interests,' without providing a citation of any kind.
Gay's use of Swain's material is a straightforward violation of the university's rules, which state that one "must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation" — neither of which Gay followed.
Okay, I HAVE to break in here and let you know just how AMAZING this last part is.
Not that Gay would allegedly plagiarize, but that she allegedly stole from CAROL SWAIN!
Carol Swain is an amazing conservative author and one of the Left's most hated academics because she's a black conservative.
Swain even took a shot at Gay when the news broke:
Took a shot AND plugged her book all at once.
What a G.
Alright, we're still in this deep dive, so let's get back to Rufo's thread.
Later in the paper, Gay also uses identical language to Swain, without adding quotation marks, as required. "Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent," reads Swain's book, which is the same, excepting an added comma, to the language in Gay's dissertation: "Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%."
According to Harvard's rules, this would be a violation of the policy on "inadequate paraphrase," which requires that verbatim language be placed in quotations.
Third, Gay composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King's book, 'A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.' While she cites King's book later in the appendix — in fact, King was her dissertation advisor — Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King's concepts and language, instead passing it off as her own original work.
I'd say Rufo has made a pretty strong case against Dr. Gay, and calls for her resignation are probably only now starting to heat up.
If Harvard allows sloppy work and plagiarism to stand, then they are bringing greater shame upon themselves than ever I imagined possible, but it's going to be fun to watch it all burn.
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