Harvard President Claudine Gay should be held to the same standard that she would be if she were another race or gender, said one of the scholars whose work she plagiarized.
“I’m not calling for her to resign or be fired but I’m calling on the board of Harvard to look very seriously at these issues, and hold her to the same standard that they would hold a white male or a white female to,” Carol Swain, the scholar in question, said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
Plagiarism is when a person takes another person’s work and uses it without proper citation or attribution.
In one instance, Ms. Gay wrote, “Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.” That was nearly the exact same sentence Ms. Swain wrote in her book, which came out in 1993.
In another part of her paper, Ms. Gay wrote, “Social scientists have concentrated their analytical efforts on the ambiguous link ... between descriptive representation (the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities).”
Ms. Swain had written, “Pitkin distinguishes between ‘descriptive representation,’ the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics … and more ’substantive representation,' the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
Those examples “constitute plagiarism,” Ms. Swain said. “Whether it was done accidentally or not, I don’t know.”
Peter Wood, a former associate provost of Boston University and current director of the National Association of Scholars, spoke to the Washington Free Beacon about the issue.
Harvard President Responds
Ms. Gay said in a statement: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”Harvard said it initiated an investigation in October and that the probe “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.” Ms. Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” the school said.
Harvard students are held to a policy that says people must not merely change a few words from other work but “completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words.” It says, “If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
Stephen Voss, who was affiliated with Harvard at the time his work was published, was another scholar whose work was plagiarized by Ms. Gay.
He told the school newspaper that what happened was “technically plagiarism“ but described it as ”minor-to-inconsequential,“ speculating that Ms. Gay ”just didn’t have a sense of what we normally tell students they’re supposed to do and not do.”
The plagiarism also took place in several peer-reviewed papers. Ms. Gay, who became Harvard’s president over the summer, has written about race and politics after earning a Bachelor’s in economics from Stanford University and a doctorate from Harvard in 1998.
Diversity Nexus?
Ms. Swain said that she believes Ms. Gay rose to her position under the diversity standards that many universities have implemented.“People that, like Claudine Gay, I would say that they did not have to meet the same standards that other people had to meet—that I had to meet, for example,” Ms. Swain said.
Ms. Swain has several connections with Ivy League schools. She was an assistant professor at Princeton University after graduating with a master of legal studies from Yale Law School. “Black Faces, Black Interests” was published by the Harvard University Press.
“I don’t care about her dissertation. But I do care that the academy, the progressives, the elites, that they advanced her,” she said. “And I think that it was dishonest for her not to have given more credit to where she got her ideas from, which would have been my book.”
Ms. Swain said she doesn’t desire to be president of Harvard but would be happy to meet with its board to help them come up with a better diversity plan “that complies with our civil rights laws and our Constitution.”
Ms. Swain, a conservative, said she’s been invited this year by major universities to speak and sees overall a thawing toward conservative scholars.
“I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that universities are not held in such high esteem, and college and university degrees are not valued as much,” she said, adding later: “I think most of us need to find our voices when it comes to free speech, when it comes to civil rights laws, and our Constitution; that we have to have the courage to speak up and we need integrity. And I’m hoping that good will come out of all of this.”
