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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • Eh, us professors care pretty deeply about the plagiarism she did. Intent or even knowledge of plagiarism isn’t necessary for disciplinary action in plagiarism cases at major research universities. Any one of these examples would be enough for my university’s academic integrity committee to rule that plagiarism occurred:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/claudine-gay-harvard-president-excerpts.html

    And in the case of a dissertation, plagiarism is an automatic expulsion and degree retraction from my university. At the PhD level, students certainly know that what Dr. Gay did is plagiarism (a good rule of thumb is that five sequential words, even with paraphrasing, without citing the source, is plagiarism), and that plagiarism is completely unacceptable.

    I already know of a student who made the argument that their plagiarism wasn’t as bad as Dr. Gay’s, so because Dr. Gay wasn’t penalized, they shouldn’t be penalized. Had she not stepped down, that line of argument likely would have snowballed out of control. The professors I know think her comments to Congress were out of touch, but all of us had been livid that she and Harvard were saying that she didn’t plagiarize–any professor who looks at those examples will tell you that she did.