Comparing Claudine Gay’s plagiarism to Neri Oxman’s plagiarism

Neri Oxman, a tenured MIT professor and wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, has apologized for multiple instances of plagiarism in her 2010 doctoral thesis.

Mr. Ackman, who waged a months-long campaign against former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, including a failed quote very similar to Mr. Oxman, said his wife’s mistake was an honest one. .

Following Business Insider’s reporting on Oxman’s plagiarism, he wrote in a post to That’s what I do,” he wrote.

This is a very different approach from the approach taken with him after his resignation earlier this week. At the time, Ackman said he should be completely fired from Harvard’s faculty because of what he called “serious plagiarism issues.”

“Students are being forced to leave for much less,” he wrote in a post on It sets a precedent,” he posted.

But experts and internal analysis say there are more similarities than differences between Mr. Oxman and Mr. Gay’s plagiarism cases.

“Gay has been accused, at least in some cases, of verbatim passages from outside sources, and in most cases the sources are cited but not marked as quotes. There was no such thing,” plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey told Business magazine. insider. “That seems to be pretty much what happened here at Oxman.”

Bailey said that while both authors made mistakes in their papers, a small number of inappropriate citations found in hundreds of pages of research papers and papers usually do not rise to the level of termination in academia. Ta.

This type of plagiarism “usually comes not from malicious intent to steal, but from very, very sloppy writing,” he added.

When you put the two together, it looks like this:

Neither Mr. Oxman nor Mr. Gay have been accused of stealing big ideas, but their work contains misquotes.

The main problem for both Gay and Oxman has to do with quotation marks. Both of his works contained direct passages taken from other scholars, cited the sources in a row, and included the sources in the bibliography, but the passages were enclosed in quotation marks. It wasn’t.

Below is a passage from a paper by Israeli scholars Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner, as well as a passage from Oxman’s dissertation.

A similar comparison, first identified by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and American Conservative contributing editor Christopher Brunette, finds that gay men are not the same as Lawrence Bobo and Franklin D. Gilliam’s “Race, Sociopolitical Participation. , and black empowerment,” he wrote in his 1997 doctoral dissertation at Harvard University.

“The results show that Black people in neighborhoods with high Black empowerment (as indicated by mayor’s office controls) are more active than Black people living in neighborhoods with lower empowerment or White people of comparable socio-economic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment increases black participation by contributing to a more reliable and effective orientation toward politics and significantly increasing black attention to political issues. ” — Lawrence Bobo and Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment.”

“Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African Americans in “high black empowerment” neighborhoods were more likely than African Americans in low empowerment neighborhoods, as indicated by mayor’s office controls. They found that empowerment contributes to a more reliable and effective orientation toward politics and significantly increases blacks’ attention to political issues, thereby increasing blacks’ attention to political issues. We conclude that it affects participation. ” — Claudine Gay, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and Redefining American Policy”

Omitting the quotation marks violates MIT’s Academic Integrity Code at the time of Oxman’s paper and is contrary to Harvard University’s current policy, but Gay and Oxman, including the academics whose paper they copied, Experts largely agree that the violations are not significant.

When a researcher makes this type of mistake, the typical course of action is to issue a correction and possibly undergo a remedial course on research writing, said Mr. Bailey, the plagiarism expert.

“In the case of Gay and Oxman, there’s no real pattern as to what kind of sentences are used,” Bailey said, adding that in both cases, the author took the text and forgot to put it in quotation marks. Or, he added, it could be a case of someone who intended to paraphrase but forgot to do so. I’ll do that.

Gay requested some revisions to the paper after the citation errors were noticed in December.

Harvard University’s Board of Trustees cleared Gay of “research misconduct.” In her op-ed published in the New York Times after her resignation, Gay supported her work.

“I have never misrepresented the results of my research, nor have I claimed credit for anyone else’s research,” she wrote. “Furthermore, misquotes should not obscure fundamental truths. I am a proud supporter of my work and its impact on the field.”

After BI’s report, Oxman apologized for his post about X and said he would “demand the necessary corrections from MIT.”

Ann R. Williamson, a University of Miami professor whose research was inappropriately cited by Gay in a 2017 article, told the Harvard Crimson that she was “completely satisfied” with Gay’s subsequent correction. said in an email.

Peder Anker, who had a passage of text that Oxman used without a quote, told Business Insider that he had “deep respect” for Oxman and was “honored” to be quoted by her. .

“That being said, that quote is incorrect from a pedantic point of view and she has publicly apologized for it in X,” he said. “Please rest assured that her apology is accepted.”

However, former Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain expressed regret for Gay’s mistake and admonished her and Harvard: wall street journal editorial.

“Ms. Gay’s damage to me is even more profound because her early work was in areas where my work is considered original: Black Congressional Representation, Constituency , her scholarship on descriptive representation builds on the terrain on which I plowed the ground,” Swain wrote.

Both Oxman and Gay copied the text almost word for word, without any quotation.

In his 330-page paper, Oxman excerpted almost word for word from a 1998 book by German physicist Klaus Mattek, without citing or attributing the source. In Oxman’s post about

Gays face similar problems.

The complaint, sent to Hubbard University, alleges that her 1993 article published in the magazine Origins, “Between Blacks and Whites: The Complexities of Brazilian Race Relations,” is a copy of the work of scholar David Cobbin. He claimed that the texts he reflected contained numerous texts that did not mention him at all.

For example, Gay writes:

“The basic organizational unit approved by the National Assembly, established in 1978, was to be the Center of Struggle (Centro de Ruta). , samba schools, churches and favelas.”

In response, Covin wrote in a 1990 article titled “Afrocentrism in the Black Movement” published in the Journal of Black Magazine:

“In the basic organizational structure they approved, the struggle center was the basic organizational unit. It was supposed to happen.”

Gay’s plagiarism problem is not limited to doctoral theses.

The gay citation problem goes beyond doctoral theses and academic papers. Eight of her published works have been reported to Harvard University for containing instances of plagiarism.

Business Insider analyzed Oxman’s paper as plagiarism, but not his entire scholarly work, and Gay’s work is subject to far more scrutiny than Oxman’s. So far, instances of plagiarism have only been reported as problems with Oxman’s papers.

Bailey told Business Insider that Oxman and Gay were examples of “poor writing habits” often seen among students who use citations as part of the editing process rather than the writing process. To avoid this type of mistake, be sure to cite while writing, he said.

“This shows that this draft process was bad, and I would say that applies to both Gay and Oxman,” he said. “But in either case, this doesn’t necessarily represent a malicious desire to steal someone else’s work and not take credit for it. It’s just bad writing.”