Interesting how the MSM IS making such a big deal out of the President of Harvard plagiarizing, when I dont think anyone actually cares overmuch, except apparently journalists. Maybe because they write for a living, it is personal for them.
I was in the hard sciences as opposed to social sciences, but much of writing academic papers is repeating a lot of the same basic information over and over and over, before you get to the actual new stuff, which often isn't much. And it is a pain in the ass to try to rewrite the same stuff over and over and over in different ways. Even direct quoting in the correct format is very tedious. I suspect social science academic publishing this might actually be worse, as it relies more on subjective analysis and less on hard data.
That being said, substantively I doubt the alleged plagiarizing affected Gay's scholarship much at all. If anything, it just showed a professional propensity towards taking shortcuts to get through the tedious parts of being an academic.
It seems because no one actually cares (outside of some Republican congressional political grandstanding) Harvard can just ignore the criticism and things will blow over. Still it is interesting how the media themselves seem to care so much.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/educatio...tions-ae494ca7
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/u...lagiarism.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67782799
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