Revisiting the Claudine Gay plagiarism accusations for a bonus episode and I cannot express how many of these are just totally normal paraphrases of basic facts.
Gay's article doesn't have citations but she did include the source in her list of further readings. Wild how we were all supposed to marvel at how unethical Gay's alleged plagiarism was while overlooking the immorality of fabricating accusations against someone in a bald attempt to get them fired.
So many examples like this. Rufo et al are using highlights to make it seem like she's lifting entire sentences and paragraphs but the phrases in the highlights often don't match up. Some of them barely resemble each other.
Again they've highlighted large portions to make it look like she's copy-pasting but these are pretty substantially paraphrased. One of the highlighted sentences is in fucking quotes!
The "victim" of the plagiarism says this is normal for descriptions of legal texts.
Losing my mind, she's citing her source right there in the text! Even if you think this crosses a line where she should have used quotation marks, fewer than five instances of this kind of "plagiarism" across her entire career is not remotely a fireable offense.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2023...
Why the fuck would Gay cite Williamson when she's citing Williamson's source? The verbiage isn't similar enough to warrant quotation marks and the information is so basic that it doesn't require a citation at all.
Some of these paragraphs just have random phrases highlighted with no similarities. If you read both of these paragraphs in full with no highlights there is no way you'd think one had copied the other.
Wait until you compare this with what Oxman did in more detail. Literaly one of papers is about exploring the deep connections between architectural/art concepts & math/physics, and it's the math/physics bits that are the ones lifted verbatim from the instruction manual from her CAD software
Between this, the Hbomberguy video, and the proliferation of generative AI, 2023 really was the year where we all learned how poorly the average person understands what plagerism really is.
Tbf, you'd potentially get sanctioned for plagiarism for both of these in marked work in the department I work in (a UK history department).
You do cite and paraphrase, but this would be too verbatim for our rules.
I probably would have used quotation marks here, but she is changing the text enough that it would make it obnoxious to read with all the brackets. And it’s not like the wording is so unique or creative that you would change it substantially if you didn’t want to quote directly. Small potato stuff.
the fact that nearly all of the "victims" of the plagiarism have been contacted and don't mind should have played a far bigger role in the discourse on this. It seems like her field has some internal norms on this and it's standard practice.
Okay, but anyone who uses "Webster's defines..." is automatically guilty of plagiarism of me in the eighth grade. And not because of what comes after the ellipsis.
Okay, but you used the words "Okay, but", and I'm pretty sure I've used that wording before you did. So you'd better both cite me and include quotes whenever you use it.
To not use quotation marks when she’s obviously citing the work seems more like an editing error than plagiarism. Like you make a lot of editing errors in academic writing. There’s a mistake on the second page of my completed dissertation! It’s a lot of writing even your editor makes mistakes
David Canon is also really fucking chill about this kind of thing because his book is so foundational to this sub-sub-sub-field. Part of plagiarism outside the classroom is that there has to be an aggrieved party
I get so fucking excited when people are like "I heard this thing on Maintenance Phase" and then they summarize it, who gives a shit if some of their phrasing overlaps with ours
Im so sorry about the delay, we were all set up to record on Wednesday and then I spent like 9 hours editing the Pinker episode and hit a wall. Currently scheduled to record on Tuesday and release a week later. I feel really bad about being gone so long!
I was a journalist for a minute and now I’m a lawyer. Because so much legalese has very specific definitions, you can’t replace words with synonyms. That was a learning curve! For blackletter law, descriptions of statutes, etc., even if you write something fresh, someone else has written it.
I think a lot of folks' understanding of what plagiarism is begins and ends with their strictest high school teacher, who talks about plagiarism as if it's an actual crime
Seems to be leaning heavily on "if you agree with a perspective and it, you're plagiarizing"
No one can repeat anything said before, lest you obviously be cribbing those ideas.
It was leaning heavily on "I assume that my audience has very little understanding of plagiarism in this context, but they have been primed to hate this woman, so slapping some random 'GOTCHA-ized graphics on this will be enough. They won't read it anyway."
These are the same people who, during the pandemic, would info-bomb my emails and texts with links to studies that "proved masking/vaccines/lockdowns don't work!", but if you ever actually read those studies, they said the exact opposite.
I fear the day when these people discover scientific methods sections. Yeah, my protocol for a western blot is going to sound basically the same as some else’s western blot. It kind of has to.
Extremely normal for descriptions of laws and regulations. Between direct quotes from the legislation and terms of art that are necessary for clarity and concision there simply aren't many different ways of accurately describing a baseline legal background.
Indeed, all of her "victims" have been very publicly unimpressed by the allegations, with the one exception (totally coincidental, I'm sure) of the professor who has since left academia for a career of being a full-time MAGA loon.
