Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate in the California State University system, it was pounded into my admittedly mushy brain that one of the mortal sins in academia was not giving someone else credit for their work. If a student failed to cite or improperly cited someone else’s work, whether it be statistics, […]
Read MoreIn 2023, Claudine Gay, then President of Harvard University, was the focus of plagiarism accusations. The university’s board came to her defense, re-branding her plagiarism as “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Harvard’s board employed an investigative process that its faculty had neither seen nor approved. Many people wonder whether lower-tier universities will follow Harvard’s examples […]
Read MoreClaudine Gay’s recent spectacular flameout has sparked a smoldering brushfire over academic plagiarism. Suddenly, we are seeing plagiarism everywhere. Shortly after the exposure of Gay’s sins, Neri Oxman, who is a Harvard professor herself, and the wife of Bill Ackman—the hedge fund manager that led a donor’s backlash against Harvard’s tolerance of anti-Semitism—was accused of […]
Read MoreClaudine Gay is the present poster child for plagiarism. Although presidents of Harvard University are never too far from public attention at any time, heightened focus on her came about based on her views on anti-Semitism and free speech. A long-time advocate of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” she saw nothing contrary to Harvard principles in […]
Read MoreRecent revelations of suspicious, unattributed text borrowings at academe’s pinnacle of prestige—the president’s office at Harvard University—once again draws attention to the pestilence of plagiarism. Plagiarism scandals among elites are nothing new, of course, and pop up frequently in the news both here and abroad, often with serious negative consequences for the accused.[1] Of course, […]
Read MoreHarvard recently submitted an obfuscated and unsigned summary of its plagiarism “review process” to Representative Virginia Foxx’s congressional committee, Committee for Education and the Workforce. The document is a mishmash of the terms: “investigation,” “inquiry,” and “assessment.” Harvard had previously circulated a draft of an interim policy on research misconduct. There is no indication of […]
Read MoreColleges and K-12 schools penalize students for written work that copies from a source without quotation marks and citations. But many colleges provide wiggle room for faculty. Harvard allowed its former president, Claudine Gay, to correct the record by adding quotation marks and citations long after papers were published. Imagine a school being unwilling to […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on January 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the end Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker, 700-some members of the faculty, the mighty voice of the Harvard Crimson and the entire nomenclature of the DEI movement could not save her from herself. Claudine Gay resigned as […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on December 24, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Harvard president Claudine Gay’s troubling history of appropriating other people’s idea and words and passing them off as her own has a well-worn name: plagiarism. Every college and university in the United States prohibits plagiarism. Most present students with […]
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Spectator on December 14, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Academic dishonesty strikes many people as boring. After all, it is academic. It is not like Sam Bankman-Fried, the “crypto king,” making $8 billion disappear into thin air. It is not like Florida dentist Charlie Adelson […]
Read MoreAmerican higher education is failing. There are numerous reasons for this, such as the pervasive deconstructionism in the academy exampled by young rioters destroying monuments to the very heroes who in the past supported similar causes to those of our modern-day “revolutionaries.” Rarely discussed, however, are the negative externalitiesof careless accreditation. Accreditors are supposed to assess the […]
Read MoreA university that does nothing when faced with clear evidence of academic misconduct deserves some public scrutiny. Case in point: The University of Houston, Texas’s third largest university, is having some trouble with academic standards. Since early this year, the University has been stonewalling allegations that a school superintendent plagiarized the doctoral dissertation he submitted […]
Read MoreCarleen Basler, a professor at Amherst who said she struggled with her writing, resigned after she was caught plagiarizing and the Amherst Student did a good job covering the story. So far, so good. But Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notices a few odd paragraphs in the paper’s report: Since some believe that Basler did not […]
Read MoreMadonna Constantine, Columbia’s Plagiarist, has been fired. How have some reported on this? “Victim of Hate Incident Fired From Columbia University” – The Daily Voice “Victim of Noose Incident, Columbia U. Professor Is Fired Amid Plagiarism Charges” – Diverse Issues In Higher Education Remember, the plagiarism was proven, the noose charge wasn’t. In case you […]
Read MoreThis week, as expected, the University of Colorado regents dismissed Professor Ward Churchill from his tenured position in the Ethnic Studies Department. (A university committee had found that Churchill committed plagiarism and misused sources.) And, as expected, Churchill has filed suit, alleging First Amendment violations. The move against Churchill – who first attracted attention after […]
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