After Harvard’s President resigned amid dozens of instances of her having plagiarized scholarly works, the Associated Press (AP) has called her a victim of a targeted conservative attack.
Nevermind the fact that there are 50 instances in which the shortest tenured president seemed to have plagiarized — the AP calls the whole incident a political attack.
“The allegations against Gay initially came from conservative activists, some who stayed anonymous, who looked for the kinds of duplicated sentences undergraduate students are trained to avoid, even with citation,” the author Collin Binkley wrote.
“In dozens of instances first published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works. A review ordered by Harvard acknowledged she duplicated the language without using quotation marks.”
The AP’s article was immediately hit with community notes from X, which stated that, in fact, plagiarism is a breach of Harvard University’s rules.
Elon Musk is happy Community Notes corrected the post by Associated Press
X CEO Elon Musk lauded the community note, something he’s claimed keeps the social media platform more transparent than rival platforms like Facebook.
“And, once again, @CommunityNotes for the win. Gay repeatedly violated Harvard’s rules against plagiarism. Source: Harvard,” he posted on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Harvard President Claudine Gay has resigned after getting caught with a number of plagiarism accusations regarding about half of her scholarly papers.
Gay originally denied the claims, and in her resignation statement continued to abstain from taking responsibility, instead calling out those who exposed her as racists.
Included in the allegations of plagiarism were Gay’s near identical paragraphs as earlier works by other scholars. Several side-by-side comparisons with previous works by other academics showed Gay writing nearly identical paragraphs, often with only minor semantic tweaks without using quotations or even citations.
