I think this happens more often than some would like to think. Someone wants to use a couple of sentences from a book, they then rewrite it in a slightly different way thinking they've changed it sufficiently to where a citation may not be necessary, only to get caught years later by a technology that didn't exist when they originally wrote the paper. Obviously being the President of Harvard and answering moral questions about the genocide of Jews with a cold and legal answer, will make Gay's past plagiarism charges more relevant for those seeking to get her canned.
Absolutely agree. I always considered plagiarism as making claims about something that is not original, rather than rewriting some sentences. So to me:
- claiming something that is your own work but has been done by someone else (e.g., someone discovers something, I rewrite and obfuscate it to not be easily recognizable and then publish it as original work) -> plagiarism, very harmful, disgrace.
- copying and slightly rewriting a few sentences from here and there that are stating facts but you are not making claimabout them e.g., ‘planet Earth is the third nearest planet to Sun and it takes light 8 minutes and 18 seconds to reach Earth from Sun’. Even if this is taken verbatim from someone else (who has been cited somewhere earlier in the text), I would not consider it as plagiarism. It is a well-known fact, I am not claiming that I did this observation, just giving some background. It is probably poor scholarship though but not plagiarism, it does not harm anyone.
I think that I have done cases of the later in my thesis. For example, if I am describing some method in related work, as background, then most likely I went to the original paper (or some book) copy-pasted a few sentences and kinda rewrote it. Thing is, I am not making any claim that is my work, just describing something. Feels like most of the plagiarism from Gay was like this, which in general is as harmless as it gets. While the other form of plagiarism where you take someone’s finding and rewrite them as your own is harmful especially if you are more famous (thus the other people cite your work instead of the original one).
A lot of things can be argued about her, such as her CV being quite unimpressive, or her thin academical work and poor metrics for someone at that level. And I think that her testimony at the Congress was quite disgraceful. But at the same time, I think she did not do real plagiarism and was a victim of Ackman and co. In some sense it is ironical that she both got and lost her position on political reasons rather than academical ones.
Ironically, as counter-attack, Ackman’s own wife is now accused for plagiarism too, and it is very similar to Gay’s case (copy pasted factual sentences but not meant as original/novel claims).
