Good Plagiarism Bad Plagiarism

Claudine Gay resigned today as president of Harvard University. She had only been in the position since last July.

Gay first came under fire for what many described as a slow response to antisemitism on campus that was part of protests against Israel’s war against Hamas. She came under further fire for accusations of plagiarism in her academic work. Feeling the pressure, she resigned today.

Gay was Harvard’s first Black president and only the second woman which means her resignation is a double win for Republicans. Elise Stefanik tap danced on the grave of Gay’s presidency today.

The Harvard Crimson wrote three days ago in an editorial that Gay was a plagiarist but should stay for now. It was a Substack post that first exposed Gay’s plagiarism, pointing out “sloppy citations in four of Gay’s academic works, including her PhD dissertation.”

Admittedly, I have done “sloppy” citations for stuff in this blog but I do try to give credit where it’s due. I cut and paste a lot of facts and details but give credit to the writers. I’m not a great writer but I do try to do it with ethics and integrity. I will take information and rewrite it in my own style. My research is from other people’s research. I think this may be what Gay was guilty of.

After the Substack post, several media outlets uncovered more examples and leveled over a dozen plagiarism allegations against Gay, primarily concerning her PhD dissertation and two of her 11 published journal articles.

The Crimson wrote, “The allegations mostly occur in passages summarizing technical methods. They include missing quotation marks around others’ language, incomplete attribution of few-word phrases, and, in a handful of cases, copying multiple-sentence passages nearly verbatim from other authors.”

“The Harvard Corporation, the University’s top governing body, conceded Gay’s work contains “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” and Gay has now made seven corrections across the work in question.”

The Crimson editorial also said, “All plagiarism is wrong and antithetical to our University’s academic mission. But not all plagiarism is equal.”

“Plagiarism offenses lie on a spectrum. As defined by Harvard’s undergraduate “Guide to Using Sources,” it includes both misrepresentation of others’ ideas as one’s own and misattribution of borrowed material. Both matter, but the latter category, into which Gay’s allegations fall, is less serious by far.”

“Whereas passing off another’s academic ideas as one’s own constitutes gross misconduct and indicates malice, failing to insert quotation marks in a summary of a cited study or duplicating language to describe technical methods suggests only negligence.”

A few years ago when a colleague plagiarized an idea from me, his first claim was that he never saw my cartoon until after he had posted his on social media. He was lying. He was passing off another’s idea as his own and did it with, as the Crimson described, “gross misconduct” and “malice.” So we have to question if Trump’s plagiarism of Mein Kampf, stating that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” was only negligence to attribute quotes or if he was passing off another’s ideas as his own. The other in this situation is Adolph Hitler.

Like my plagiarizing colleague, Trump claimed he never read Mein Kampf, indicating his racist mean-spirited language, ideas, and intentions if he retakes the White House are all his own. I guess it would make Trump’s racist ideas sound worse if he said, “Sure, I got the idea from Hitler,” but whether he stole it or not, it’s still just as fucking terrible because it’s the exact same ideas as Hitler’s.

One problem here is that Republicans don’t see Hitler as evil as normal people see him. Yesterday, I mentioned how a newsletter for Moms for Liberty quoted Hitler and later, one of the founders said she stood with that Mom and her Hitler quote. Why do we have to explain to Republicans that a person who committed genocide of over six million Jews is a bad dude?

Trump, like my colleague, is incapable of having his own ideas. He stole “Make America Great Again” from Ronald Reagan. He probably got “build the wall” from the Daily Stormer or Breitbart. When Hillary Clinton called Trump “Putin’s puppet” during one of their debates, Trump was incapable of using his own words, so he stole Clinton’s and said, “You’re the puppet.”

I hate to see Claudine Gay resign over this. I don’t believe her actions regarding antisemitism and protests on Harvard’s campus warrant her resignation. And while I’m no fan of plagiarism, I truly believe the examples I’ve seen show that she was only negligent in attributing sources and she did not steal other people’s work and claim it as her own. I believe she’s a good person and the kind who can learn from her mistakes. Donald Trump is the kind of person who makes horrible choices that hurt people and then he repeats them because he truly enjoys being a bigoted asshole.

If we’re going to lose people like Claudine Gay and elevate goose-stepping assholes like Donald Trump this year, then 2024 is seriously going to suck.

Creative note: I started on two different topics today before switching to this, and then Gay resigned while I was drawing the cartoon. A few nights ago, I thought about the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and how I watched it live as it happened, and wondered if I’d catch something like that the same way again…and the next day another earthquake hit Japan. Weird, right?

Blog note: Yes, the blog has been redesigned. Why did I do that? It was probably due since I’ve had the same theme for a decade but it was really made to help out some readers. I’ve been receiving comments from readers that the star rating wasn’t working. I didn’t even know that was important to anyone. So, I went to WordPress to find out how to fix it and was told that my theme was outdated and no longer updating, so I’d have to switch to a new one if I wanted stuff to update and work properly. So this is it. I still need to go through a few things like widgets to make sure everything is working, and I’m not entirely in love with it. But I did get one compliment from a reader this morning. What do you think?

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