The president of Harvard University resigned following claims that her doctoral thesis contained plagiarized work. Numerous additional academics could be falsely accused of plagiarism with relative ease by AI tools. The former president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, spoke before “The House Education and Workforce Committee” in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2023.
But in response to growing pressure over her remarks regarding “antisemitism” on campus and allegations of plagiarism, Gay submitted her resignation on Tuesday.
According to Davarian Baldwin, a historian affiliated with Trinity College, Dublin, artificial intelligence software could readily detect a comparable verbal overlap among scholarly articles.
He stated that scholars frequently use similar terminology in specialized disciplines to describe the same concepts. He further stated that plagiarism software could be hazardous if it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia, in general, is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.” he acknowledged that Gay had undoubtedly committed errors. Although Gay did not mention the allegations of plagiarism specifically in her letter of resignation, she acknowledged the skepticism regarding her capacity to maintain scholarly rigor. The AP reported that Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, stated that these plagiarism tools could potentially be “weaponized” to harm academicians.
“There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world,” Mulvey stated. Although she declined to comment on the allegations levied against Gay. The initial publication to draw attention to the parallels between Gay’s work and that of others was the conservative website “The Washington Free Beacon.” The website provided hyperlinks to four scholarly articles and Gay’s doctoral thesis. The utilization of software to identify the similarities remains to be discovered.
Following the publication of the report, Gay encountered criticism regarding her management of antisemitism issues on campus and her testimony at a congressional hearing, wherein she failed to firmly argue that demands for the elimination of Jews violated Harvard policy. It was previously reported that the Harvard Corporation, which oversees the institution, had freed Gay of allegations of plagiarism. The board declared that it had conducted an investigation into occurrences of similarity in which certain text was omitted between quotation marks.
MSNBC ran this glorious 4-minute segment recapping all of my wins from critical race theory to New College of Florida to the Claudine Gay scandal. Thank you, @AliVelshi! pic.twitter.com/EoziN7XOZS
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 3, 2024
Although some “instances of inadequate citation” were discovered in Gay’s work by Harvard Corporation, this did not qualify as research misconduct. The board declared that Gay would be requesting the addition of quotation marks and citations to the published works.
According to the Associated Press, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who suspected Gay of online plagiarism, hailed her resignation as a victory for his campaign on X.
Subsequently, Rufo declared on X that he would be making “an initial $10,000 to a ‘plagiarism hunting’ fund.”
“We will expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life,” he wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Gay was the first black president of Harvard. Six months after assuming the presidency, she submitted her resignation, thereby becoming the least-tenured president in the history of the institution. She has resumed her academic duties.
