The Curious Case of Claudine Gay
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In another thread, I commented that Gay has a rather weak academic resume with only 11 publications. This (long) article looks at some of the scandals that Gay has been involved in during her tenure as President of Harvard.
But, specifically, with regard to her academic bona-fides.
Let’s travel back in time to the year 2005, when I was in grade 7, there were only 2 genders, and Claudine Gay was up for tenure at the Stanford department of political science. Her CV indicates that she had 4 peer-reviewed political science articles: 2001 APSR, 2002 AJPS, 2004 APSR, 2006 AJPS (assuming the 2006 one was forthcoming when they granted her tenure) and no book. When Claudine was approved tenure with this weak profile, it was so shocking that one Stanford faculty member reportedly said after the vote: “how can we ever turn someone down in the future after that vote?”
Here are what her other colleagues have to say:
I’m about Gay’s age. Her case was totally demotivating when I was younger. She is nice and she is smart, but my gosh this entire case is an embarassement. My record crushes her record in every way: citations, volume, and quality. But my pain is not considered as worthy of consideration as her pain. Now, she is deciding who gets to be a Harvard faculty member. Fun times in the twilight of American Empire.
— Anonymous
Mind-boggling. Does there exist a most egregious affirmative action case in political science? Extremely low productivity, combined with lack of methodological soundness, and replicability issues which may be due to incompetence, dishonesty, or both. Virtually her entire measly body of work is flawed. I couldn't find any other AA hire with such a dismal record at any top-50 place (and among non-AA hires no one would have survived with such a record). Most people in her situation would hide in a hole instead of seeking such high-visibility administrative appointments.
— Anonymous
(more examples at the link)
Not only did she have so few papers, none of them can be replicated.
Where are her replication datasets and code? They don’t exist!
When people ask her for her code/data, it results in footnotes like this:
We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).
Consider Gay’s (2001) EI–R analysis of the precinct-level socioeconomic covariates that affect black and white turnout. […] For Gay’s Michigan and Pennsylvania EI–R analyses to be logically consistent, it must be true that knowledge of a precinct’s percent black (Xi) tells us nothing about the precinct’s per capita income (an element of Gay’s Zi). This is untenable in light of contemporary American social realities: if a precinct has a large African-American population, then all things equal this precinct will have a relatively low per capita income. Nonetheless, without assuming that a precinct’s per capita income is not a function of its racial composition, and without making a host of similarly implausible assumptions for the other right hand side variables in her second stage regressions, Gay’s use of EI–R is logically inconsistent.
— the footnotes of a 2002 conference paper titled 'Logical Inconsistency in King-based Ecological Regressions.'
Let’s explore this footnote, shall we, because it is a scandal unto itself when put into proper context. Not only does this footnote totally debunk the faulty methodology of her 2001 APSR paper, which is now automatically trash, but it also provides further evidence of a coverup. You see, when this article Logical Inconsistency in King-based Ecological Regressions was published in the AJPS, the footnote was gone. Vanished.
Poof.
Instead of calling out Gay’s faulty paper, it now described "a hypothetical study.” The fact that CG's name was not explicitly mentioned and the study was called "hypothetical" in no way exonerates the fact that her research is fundamentally flawed. Gay’s footnote was removed because the Harvard mafia pressured the AJPS editors to remove it… or so the gossip goes.
More on her academic qualifications and other Harvard-related scandals at the link.
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Is anybody shocked to learn that mediocrities with the right skin color get promoted in institutions from academia to large corporations? No, the only difference is in whether we think it's a good thing, or a bad thing, that it happens.
The institution I work for has control of our lock screen backgrounds. Every time I log in there is the face of a woman of color in a lab coat looking smartly at a test tube. Which would be totally fine, if it wasn't for the fact that all I see, when I see it, is the cynical intent of the person who chose the picture. Sometimes I wonder if the subject thinks about that too, but I don't spend too much time wondering about that. I think humans are fine getting attention and being promoted regardless of the reasons. At least, it's not hard to find those who are, even if not everybody would be fine with it.
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@George-K said in The Curious Case of Claudine Gay:
Well....
Look at the actual paragraph. She directly cites the sources. She doesn’t follow every technical requirement they require in their code, and that’s worthy of discussion, but it’s not like she was trying to pass off their work and summaries as her own.
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Yes, she cites the sources. However, her language is almost the same as the source, without quoting it. She presents the language as her own.
What the source said:
the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
What she said:
Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
What she should have said:
Empowerment they conclude, "influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs."
What she said was, word-for-word, exactly the same as the source. It should be in quotation marks.
The second example was at least a bit squishy.
Another one:
Original.
Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent.
Hers:
Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.
Does the addition of the word "incumbent" make it different? Besides, that word is superfluous and redundant. Not only that it's repetitive and unnecessary.
Nitpicky?
Sure.
I'll let people who know more about adademic publishing than I
used to knowto chime in."Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Yes, she cites the sources. However, her language is almost the same as the source, without quoting it. She presents the language as her own.
What the source said:
the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
What she said:
Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
What she should have said:
Empowerment they conclude, "influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs."
What she said was, word-for-word, exactly the same as the source. It should be in quotation marks.
The second example was at least a bit squishy.
Another one:
Original.
Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent.
Hers:
Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.
Does the addition of the word "incumbent" make it different? Besides, that word is superfluous and redundant. Not only that it's repetitive and unnecessary.
Nitpicky?
Sure.
I'll let people who know more about adademic publishing than I
used to knowto chime in.@George-K said in The Curious Case of Claudine Gay:
Nitpicky?
Sure.
I noticed that.
If it was her original words and "incumbent " was in there I wouldn't like it, but I would shrug it off.
When she sticks "incumbent" in the middle of someone else's words I don't like it at all. Was she trying to make it her words by adding the redundant incumbent ? Even Horace could judge that.
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What is considered plagiarism at Harvard?
https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what-constitutes-plagiarism-0
If you copy language word for word from another source and use that language in your paper, you are plagiarizing verbatim. Even if you write down your own ideas in your own words and place them around text that you've drawn directly from a source, you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.
Example:
Source material
Why did urban Black populations in the North increase so dramatically between 1940 and 1970? After a period of reduced mobility during the Great Depression, Black out-migration from the South resumed at an accelerated pace after 1940. Wartime jobs in the defense industry and in naval shipyards led to substantial Black migration to California and other Pacific states for the first time since the Migration began. Migration continued apace to midwestern cities in the 1950s and1960s, as the booming automobile industry attracted millions more Black southerners to the North, particularly to cities like Detroit or Cleveland. Of the six million Black migrants who left the South during the Great Migration, four million of them migrated between 1940 and 1970 alone.
Plagiarized version
While this student has written her own sentence introducing the topic, she has copied the italicized sentences directly from the source material. She has left out two sentences from Derenoncourt’s paragraph, but has reproduced the rest verbatim:
But things changed mid-century. After a period of reduced mobility during the Great Depression, Black out-migration from the South resumed at an accelerated pace after 1940. Wartime jobs in the defense industry and in naval shipyards led to substantial Black migration to California and other Pacific states for the first time since the Migration began. Migration continued apace to midwestern cities in the 1950s and1960s, as the booming automobile industry attracted millions more Black southerners to the North, particularly to cities like Detroit or Cleveland.
Or this:
If you copy bits and pieces from a source (or several sources), changing a few words here and there without either adequately paraphrasing or quoting directly, the result is mosaic plagiarism. Even if you don't intend to copy the source, you may end up with this type of plagiarism as a result of careless note-taking and confusion over where your source's ideas end and your own ideas begin. You may think that you've paraphrased sufficiently or quoted relevant passages, but if you haven't taken careful notes along the way, or if you've cut and pasted from your sources, you can lose track of the boundaries between your own ideas and those of your sources.
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I don’t think it was nit-picky at all.
A stunt like that in poli-sci or history without a citation when I was in grad school would warrant a big red circle with the word “SOURCE!!!”. If a similar error occured again in the paper a big red circle with multiple exclamation marks and the words “We MUST discuss for revisions before I am to forced to refuse to assess the remainder of your paper and give you a failing grade”.
Not nit-picking at all.
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I don’t think it was nit-picky at all.
A stunt like that in poli-sci or history without a citation when I was in grad school would warrant a big red circle with the word “SOURCE!!!”. If a similar error occured again in the paper a big red circle with multiple exclamation marks and the words “We MUST discuss for revisions before I am to forced to refuse to assess the remainder of your paper and give you a failing grade”.
Not nit-picking at all.
@Renauda said in The Curious Case of Claudine Gay:
I don’t think it was nit-picky at all.
A stunt like that in poli-sci or history without a citation when I was in grad school would warrant a big red circle with the word “SOURCE!!!”. If it a similar error occured again in the paper a big red circle with multiple exclamation marks and the words “We MUST discuss for revisions before I am to forced to refuse to assess the remainder of your paper and give you a failing grade”.
Not nit-picking at all.
This.
It's a big fucking deal.
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I would certainly insist on correcting such things if one of my PhD students did this, but in the hierarchy of plagiarism sins, this is pretty low. I guess that you can find similar issues in 50% of all dissertations, especially in the arts and humanities.
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I’ve only gotta few years of skoolin’ in, so can’t speak with the authority that the rest of you do, but to me, this is a more serious indictment of her ability and her lack of knowledge about the process than it does about the content of her character or her intentions.
Still, that may be even more damning for somebody applying for tenure at one of the country’s most prestigious universities…
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I am sure the dissertation is useless garbage either way, but I doubt it would have been less impressive as a dissertation if the corrections were made and the ideas in it properly assigned.
@Horace said in The Curious Case of Claudine Gay:
I am sure the dissertation is useless garbage either way, but I doubt it would have been less impressive as a dissertation if the corrections were made and the ideas in it properly assigned.
One of my zoo profs inserted a Penthouse Forum letter halfway through his dissertation. Nobody saw it...
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@Horace said in The Curious Case of Claudine Gay:
I am sure the dissertation is useless garbage either way, but I doubt it would have been less impressive as a dissertation if the corrections were made and the ideas in it properly assigned.
One of my zoo profs inserted a Penthouse Forum letter halfway through his dissertation. Nobody saw it...
