Liz Magill, president of the university of Pennsylvania, was also forced to resign. The third person is Sally Kornbluth, academic administrator of the m.i.t., the only one who wasn’t forced to resign, probably because she’s jewish herself.
(wiki article)
No point in saying that she doesn’t want jews to be exterminated, her enemies know better than her what she’s really thinking, and there’s no possibility to walk back on these specific words to specify what she meant, it’s so stupid 🙄. She obviously interpreted the question(, of whether calling for the genocide of jews is against Harvard’s code of conduct,) as something loaded since “from the river to the sea” manifestations would then have to be prohibited(, well, you can liberate the territory by killing 1% of the israeli population and forcing the rest to flee, we’ve learned recently that it wouldn’t be a genocide, if such word means something). In retrospect she could have said that the only acceptable speeches on the campus are those calling for a two-states solution or something else that accepts Israel’s possession of the holy lands, but as usual calling for the destruction of Palestine isn’t as horrible as calling for the destruction of Israel.
Reuters article
Even if she did not intentionally commit plagiarism, “several citation corrections” is still an enormous problem. It is beaten into you in academic courses that failing to properly cite your sources and work is still plagiarism. You can’t just say “oopsie daisies” let me correct that.
This is why a large part of the time taken with writing a paper is in the editing. Mistakes like that are dangerous.
In all, the investigation is not over, and multiple different sources have differing opinions. We have to wait and see what the verdict is, as everything is still alleged. I have found sources stating that they have found more errors, and others saying that it’s not plagiarism, so it’ll be best to wait and see. Plus she is still a professor at the college, she was just booted from the presidents seat.
I haven’t checked, but the accusations seems to have really started after the 5th of December, no ?
So? Being a public figure will bring about an increased level of scrutiny. Even if the initial digging was done in poor faith that doesn’t excuse the charge at all, that just means that they’ve gotten away with it till now.
If the evidence was fabricated or spun in order to try and smear them for being pro-Palestine, then that’s a different story. But if they committed plagiarism and this attention is what got them caught, then why did they commit the plagiarism multiple times to begin with?
For example, if you are a public figure that has committed tax fraud, and because you are in the public eye the IRS decides to do a deeper dive into you and they discover your fraud… you still committed a crime.
Manipulations aren’t always easy to prove, but it’s not the case here.
This article cites that tweet as the first accusation, we’ll both agree that there’s nothing serious here.
The other news articles are written by journalists who don’t have time for a proper investigation, as is usual in our modern times, instead of losing a day or a week on a piece they gather the different existing claims and begin the next article(, quicker&cheaper&‘easier to read’).
And even if the examples were a hundred times more numerous she’s only borrowing turns of phrases, not acting as if the ideas originated from her, researchers are synthetizing much more than creating anyway, her thesis very likely added something new if it was accepted, but she probably also gave the state of the art of the subject she would end up teaching, borrowing turns of phrases should never be considered as shocking, even if she recognised herself that she should have used quotation marks here as she did in all the other cases(, and would have obtained the exact same consideration for her thesis(/theses), who already contain hundreds of citations anyway).
In my opinion, accusations of plagiarism should start when the original creator end up losing money, but she didn’t gain anything by forgetting some quotation marks(, even if it amount to one quotation mark unused for every ten used, which is far from being the case here), it’s politically motivated and kinda sad that nobody is surprised anymore.
B.t.w., her thesis defended the oppressed, not the powerful, it counts.
(edit : i’m glad that she modified her thesis/theses afterwards to cite the authors she took her turns of phrases from though because that’s what should be done, especially if she never cited these papers once(, unlikely))