Apologies in advance for the length here, but I feel this topic warrants it.
I believe it is best to discuss this topic in four phases: (1) Are the instances of alleged plagiarism a serious violation? (2) Of what weight should Ackman/Rufo’s efforts matter? (3) Were the plagiarism allegations/instances necessary for the ouster of Gay? and (4) Was Gay’s congressional testimony unfairly received, and should it play no role in the movement to oust Gay?
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For the first topic “Are the instances of alleged plagiarism a serious violation?” I’d take this in three turns: (A) Is this conduct that students at Harvard would be reprimanded for? (B) Are the instances trivial/minor? And (C) is this conduct that should be acceptable for a university president (let alone Harvard University’s president)?
At the outset, it is worth noting that the verbatim usage of others’ work has been tallied to reach about 50 instances across Gay’s 17 published works. And eight of the 17 works include such verbatim instances. I know during your live streams you had the position “well the dissertation is 200+ pages, and a few instances of verbatim use of other words in here are not significant” (notwithstanding that I suspect the dissertation length dwarfs the length of the 16 other published works by Gay).
Regarding (A), I don’t think it is controversial that a single instance of the allegations – let alone such prevalent verbatim use of others language -- would be plagiarism under Harvard’s standards, as applied to students. In fact, even the soft paraphrasing (what I like to refer to as “seventh-grade paraphrasing”) of thesaurus-ing a verb or noun here or there is not sufficient to overcome an obligation to directly quote source material. Citing Harvard’s 1998 handbook “If your own sentences follow the source so closely in idea and sentence structure that the result is really closer to quotation than to paraphrase, you are plagiarizing, even if you have cited the source”. Students would be reprimanded for a single of the alleged 50 instances of plagiarism by Gay.
On (B), I cannot wrap my head around your characterization of these instances as minor – of course they are major violations. This is academic writing – not casual blogging or even journalism. If you present language as your own formulation, you are misleading the reader. There are two victims of plagiarism: (i) the plagiarized and (ii) the reader. While I don’t disagree that there is likely little harm to “the plagiarized” for verbatim repetition of another’s work where such language is highly technical and not novel information, “the reader” is misled about the significance of the writer’s work. Notwithstanding there is no “it’s okay to use verbatim/not cite the language of another to describe technical matters” carve-out to plagiarism rules – and it makes perfect sense that there would not be such a carve out, as otherwise a reader may interpret such technical statement as the novel rendering of the writer. Our rules for plagiarism exist to allow a reader to understand the novel ideas of a writer and, if followed correctly, allows a reader to evaluate the intellectual-add of the writer’s paper.
Also, specifically, your casual dismissal of the Palmquist and Voss plagiarism is baffling to me. Yes, her dataset allowed her to conclude an “increase” as opposed to a “decrease” (putting aside the 2002 concerns about Gay’s datasets and her willingness to share her underlying data). That is no saving grace. You cannot run a study, effectively ran by someone else to a different conclusion, and – once analyzing your data – take that prior paper and just change data (e.g. -.05 correlation to +0.3 correlation) and substantive conclusions (“decrease” to “increase”). That is so transparently wrong that I struggle to combat the countervailing argument. Additionally and specifically, Gay’s use of Palmquist’s and Voss’s statement “If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot”, to me, is not a highly technical restatement of clearly established existing rules. To use such sentence, effectively verbatim (changing “description of” to “one way to think about”), is so obviously plagiarism (even if she had actually cited their paper, per the 1998 Harvard rules).
Finally on (B), I revert to the prior statement that the allegation encompass over half of Gay’s (limited) 17 published works. If there was a single instance (or maybe low single digit instances) or even it encompassed an overwhelming minority of Gay’s works, maybe I’d understand the “it’s just minor” position. But it isn’t. Gay has a very limited publishing record, of which half are alleged to contain plagiarism. This strikes me as clearly significant, not minor, and not trivial. And I vehemently disagree with your position to that effect.
Moving to (C), it is helpful to level-set here: this is the president of Harvard, and arguably the publicly-presumed pinnacle of higher-education leadership. Plagiarism allegations, even in commencement speeches (see Bob Caslen) -- notwithstanding academic papers -- are more than enough to oust academic (and even political – see, e.g., Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) leaders. If you’re willing to wholly dismiss clear plagiarism in Gay’s acknowledgments(!!) section of academic, published, writing, you certainly must rank that as more wrong than copying three sentences given in a commencement speech. And I personally would hold the president of the University of South Carolina (US News nationally ranked #124) to a lower standard than Harvard (US News nationally ranked #3), particularly given Harvard’s global and political brand. I don’t think it is, generally, unreasonable to weigh the seriousness of various plagiarism instances, however it is clear that precedent has set the bar for university presidents significantly higher than Gay’s performance.
I believe at one point on stream you made a remark “Would I care if my doctor did this?” and that is absolutely the wrong way to think about this. This isn’t your doctor, this isn’t commercial industry, this isn’t even journalism/blogging (where you also made a comment that you essentially copied language from articles). Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of academia – where your academic and novel contributions are your barometer of significance. It’s okay if you don’t see why the system exists this way – but it would be helpful to at least acknowledge that it is an unforgivable sin in academia, where it is far less relevant to your doctor’s statements. And I think it is even fair if, given ultimate power, you would create a different system and/or rules for academics based on your viewpoints – but that is not the system we live in, and far less serious plagiarism has been taken far more seriously in other contexts for other university presidents.
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On to (2), “Of what weight should Ackman/Rufo’s efforts matter?”. I don’t think I need to spend serious time here, however your writing gave it more than lip-service. Factual wrongdoing does not need to be contextualized by the identities of the individuals presenting the facts. Facts should be evaluated on their merits alone. I find it difficult to distill bringing Ackman and Rufo into the discussion into anything other than ad hominem attacks (e.g. “billionaire” or “right-wing”).
Yes, Ackman seems highly motivated to shake up Harvard (perhaps driven, in-part, by his preexisting frustrations about Harvard’s handling of his donation of Coupang stock back in 2017 as detailed by the WSJ back in December). Rufo is a culture war warrior – who I can’t help but feel has a symbiotic relationship now with Gay, who gets to point to Rufo as the “racist” enemy, while Rufo gets to point to Gay as an elitist leftist fraud he has “scalped”.
If there was no “there-there”, perhaps the motivations of the accusers would matter to explain why this received so much attention. And maybe that’s why you give it lip service -- because you don’t think there is a “there-there” on plagiarism. I think academics disagree – and those who read the research of academics would overwhelmingly disagree.
With (3) “Were the plagiarism allegations/instances necessary for the ouster of Gay?” I will focus more on the congressional testimony (and related campus environment), because my opinion is that the plagiarism allegations were not necessary for Gay to deserve being removed as president of Harvard.
The congressional testimony was a nightmare for the universities. Anyone familiar with congressional testimony should be aware that (notwithstanding the threat of prosecution for lying under oath to congress), your appearances matter more than being legally/factually accurate. The presidents cannot be described as laypeople, as they were all prepared by a nationally-recognized law firm – WilmerHale – to help them navigate congressional testimony. The presidents of MIT, Penn, and Harvard should be held to similar expectations as CEOs testifying before congress (who would have also been prepared by a similar prestigious law firm). Their jobs are to be presentable leaders – not just give technical answers.
People remember Zuckerberg looking like a lizard-person before congress. Nobody remembers the technical answers Zuckerberg gave about antitrust or the topic-of-the-day. And the US DOJ is extremely unlikely to prosecute anyone who has testified before congress (I do not know specifics here, but it is my understanding that it is exceedingly rare outside of add-on counts to indictments to add pressure). It just optically is not how the US DOJ spends its time. Most importantly, it is the job of the effective CEO of the universities to be leaders to stand up for their universities and not equivocate – to make it clear that calling for the genocide of Jews is reprehensible – even if technically the Codes of Conduct allow such speech.
While I believe Magill performed marginally worse in Congress before Stefanik, Gay was no shining star. Magill was almost immediately ousted. Magill, in particular, got jammed up by saying calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the Penn codes “if the speech turns into conduct” followed by Stefanik’s “conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?”. The university presidents universally (hah) failed at being leaders of their universities on perhaps the most significant stage.
To be fair, Magill was already on her heels regarding the “Palestine Writes” event in September, which hosted openly antisemitic speakers, and October 7 immediately following such event couldn’t have been worse timing for Magill. But regardless – Magill was ousted because she had shown she was not ready to lead a university through a crisis.
Congressional testimony aside, Harvard’s campus has been in turmoil. A Jewish student assaulted for filming a public pro-Palestine “die-in” protest on Harvard’s campus. The library (during finals) being occupied by pro-Palestinian protestors. Pro-Palestinian protestors interrupting classes to use megaphones to promote their positions. And all this is on the heels of (i) Jewish student on other campuses (Cooper Union) being barricaded in classrooms for hours by angry protestors (ii) Hamas calling for their supporters to commit October 7th acts worldwide against Jews and (iii) on campuses like Columbia and Brown, pro-Palestine groups notably and openly defying university rules and judgements.
Gay failed at leading Harvard. She failed at rallying the university, students, alumni and the public. I think it is a mistake to call the plagiarism a “pretext”, because it was clear her abject failure at leading the university was not enough to push her out from her presidency. Since Magill was pushed from her role for leadership failures absent plagiarism, where Gay was defended by her board for lackluster performance, it is not surprising that it took additional “hits” to force Gay to be removed. That said, Gay’s plagiarism has been a topic of conversation since at least 2022. Additionally, Gay has shown sketchiness with her data, when she refused to share her data in 2002 with a Michael Herron at Dartmouth and Kenneth Shotts at Stanford. It’s not clear her academic ethics (coupled with a very thin academic record) were befitting of a university president alone. But it was not necessary to reach such conclusions for Magill. Rather, the plagiarism was just one factor in the column to remove Gay.
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Finally (4), “Was Gay’s congressional testimony unfairly received, and should it play no role in the movement to oust Gay?” And this is where I’ll discuss the Code of Conduct.
Of course a statement “we should genocide the jews” is context dependent if you have a free speech policy. It could be a joke! Or a leading-question in class to spark discussion!
And of course Harvard’s Code technically protects such speech. It isn't Rep. Stefanik's place to tell Harvard "This specific speech doesn't violate your Code of Conduct? Really? Yes it does" -- Harvard's policies are its own, and as a private institution it can set those policies however it so chooses! Rather, the issue is that Harvard uses its Code of Conduct as a sword (for preferred voices) and a shield (against disfavored criticism -- Jewish in this instance).
The core issue is that these universities have abused their Codes of Conduct in the past on a hair-trigger, with aggressive breadth in interpretation, to advance the universities' preferred groups -- but now the universities have a different, much higher, standard for Jewish students. This is fundamentally discriminatory. Since Harvard historically policed aggressively microaggressions and disfavored speech, it is clearly hypocritical and discriminatory to hold speech against Jews to a higher standard.
Harvard historically rescinded admissions to admitted high-school seniors over edgy memes in a private group chat. Harvard’s professor Carole Hooven was institutionally pushed out by Harvard for asserting that sex is binary. Harvard has not stood by its Code until now: when there is speech by presumably-oppressed groups against Jews. It is not persuasive for them to cling to the Code now, when other groups received a different treatment.
And so, no, the congressional testimony was not unfairly received. Even if literally the Code supports the highly-technical (and emotionless) answers given by Gay (and the other university presidents) to Congress, it is clear such testimony was two-faced. All presidents both (i) failed to clearly lead their universities in the face of reprehensible actions and speech (even if such speech is not punishable – an artful leader can stand by and support the targeted students) and (ii) could not credibly stand behind their codes of conduct against bullying and harassment because they had no recent track record of enforcing such codes fairly and consistently.
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Gay should have resigned (we agree on this). I believe the congressional-testimony-plus-leadership-failures-on-campus to maintain an academic environment for all students should have been more than sufficient for Gay to resign. The addition of clear plagiarism violations – which on their own would have, and have, toppled other university presidents in the past – were apparently necessary to push the Harvard board to remove Gay (or if you prefer to not say they removed her, allow her to resign and write a self-serving piece in the NYT blaming everyone but herself, and receive overwhelming adoration and defense by cable news anchors). I also think, absent the congressional testimony, the plagiarism instances would be enough to remove a university president as seen by the University of South Carolina president mentioned earlier (hell, Larry Summers – with a publication record that overwhelmingly dwarfs Gays, and extra-academic achievements that are incomparable -- was pushed out of being Harvard’s president in 2006 for a controversial statement in a speech that men and women may have biological differences in aptitude).
The standards university presidents are held to are high. Gay received extraordinary deference from the Harvard board, for reasons that can be debated (and such debate would likely be counterproductive and unnecessary for the overarching point). But her track record in the few months she was president were dismal, and her qualifications for the role were thin, even absent evidence of clear academic fraud. Gay’s plagiarism was extensive and overwhelming. There is no “minor” plagiarism in academia – and especially not for the president of Harvard.
Apologies in advance for the length here, but I feel this topic warrants it.
I believe it is best to discuss this topic in four phases: (1) Are the instances of alleged plagiarism a serious violation? (2) Of what weight should Ackman/Rufo’s efforts matter? (3) Were the plagiarism allegations/instances necessary for the ouster of Gay? and (4) Was Gay’s congressional testimony unfairly received, and should it play no role in the movement to oust Gay?
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For the first topic “Are the instances of alleged plagiarism a serious violation?” I’d take this in three turns: (A) Is this conduct that students at Harvard would be reprimanded for? (B) Are the instances trivial/minor? And (C) is this conduct that should be acceptable for a university president (let alone Harvard University’s president)?
At the outset, it is worth noting that the verbatim usage of others’ work has been tallied to reach about 50 instances across Gay’s 17 published works. And eight of the 17 works include such verbatim instances. I know during your live streams you had the position “well the dissertation is 200+ pages, and a few instances of verbatim use of other words in here are not significant” (notwithstanding that I suspect the dissertation length dwarfs the length of the 16 other published works by Gay).
Regarding (A), I don’t think it is controversial that a single instance of the allegations – let alone such prevalent verbatim use of others language -- would be plagiarism under Harvard’s standards, as applied to students. In fact, even the soft paraphrasing (what I like to refer to as “seventh-grade paraphrasing”) of thesaurus-ing a verb or noun here or there is not sufficient to overcome an obligation to directly quote source material. Citing Harvard’s 1998 handbook “If your own sentences follow the source so closely in idea and sentence structure that the result is really closer to quotation than to paraphrase, you are plagiarizing, even if you have cited the source”. Students would be reprimanded for a single of the alleged 50 instances of plagiarism by Gay.
On (B), I cannot wrap my head around your characterization of these instances as minor – of course they are major violations. This is academic writing – not casual blogging or even journalism. If you present language as your own formulation, you are misleading the reader. There are two victims of plagiarism: (i) the plagiarized and (ii) the reader. While I don’t disagree that there is likely little harm to “the plagiarized” for verbatim repetition of another’s work where such language is highly technical and not novel information, “the reader” is misled about the significance of the writer’s work. Notwithstanding there is no “it’s okay to use verbatim/not cite the language of another to describe technical matters” carve-out to plagiarism rules – and it makes perfect sense that there would not be such a carve out, as otherwise a reader may interpret such technical statement as the novel rendering of the writer. Our rules for plagiarism exist to allow a reader to understand the novel ideas of a writer and, if followed correctly, allows a reader to evaluate the intellectual-add of the writer’s paper.
Also, specifically, your casual dismissal of the Palmquist and Voss plagiarism is baffling to me. Yes, her dataset allowed her to conclude an “increase” as opposed to a “decrease” (putting aside the 2002 concerns about Gay’s datasets and her willingness to share her underlying data). That is no saving grace. You cannot run a study, effectively ran by someone else to a different conclusion, and – once analyzing your data – take that prior paper and just change data (e.g. -.05 correlation to +0.3 correlation) and substantive conclusions (“decrease” to “increase”). That is so transparently wrong that I struggle to combat the countervailing argument. Additionally and specifically, Gay’s use of Palmquist’s and Voss’s statement “If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot”, to me, is not a highly technical restatement of clearly established existing rules. To use such sentence, effectively verbatim (changing “description of” to “one way to think about”), is so obviously plagiarism (even if she had actually cited their paper, per the 1998 Harvard rules).
Finally on (B), I revert to the prior statement that the allegation encompass over half of Gay’s (limited) 17 published works. If there was a single instance (or maybe low single digit instances) or even it encompassed an overwhelming minority of Gay’s works, maybe I’d understand the “it’s just minor” position. But it isn’t. Gay has a very limited publishing record, of which half are alleged to contain plagiarism. This strikes me as clearly significant, not minor, and not trivial. And I vehemently disagree with your position to that effect.
Moving to (C), it is helpful to level-set here: this is the president of Harvard, and arguably the publicly-presumed pinnacle of higher-education leadership. Plagiarism allegations, even in commencement speeches (see Bob Caslen) -- notwithstanding academic papers -- are more than enough to oust academic (and even political – see, e.g., Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) leaders. If you’re willing to wholly dismiss clear plagiarism in Gay’s acknowledgments(!!) section of academic, published, writing, you certainly must rank that as more wrong than copying three sentences given in a commencement speech. And I personally would hold the president of the University of South Carolina (US News nationally ranked #124) to a lower standard than Harvard (US News nationally ranked #3), particularly given Harvard’s global and political brand. I don’t think it is, generally, unreasonable to weigh the seriousness of various plagiarism instances, however it is clear that precedent has set the bar for university presidents significantly higher than Gay’s performance.
I believe at one point on stream you made a remark “Would I care if my doctor did this?” and that is absolutely the wrong way to think about this. This isn’t your doctor, this isn’t commercial industry, this isn’t even journalism/blogging (where you also made a comment that you essentially copied language from articles). Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of academia – where your academic and novel contributions are your barometer of significance. It’s okay if you don’t see why the system exists this way – but it would be helpful to at least acknowledge that it is an unforgivable sin in academia, where it is far less relevant to your doctor’s statements. And I think it is even fair if, given ultimate power, you would create a different system and/or rules for academics based on your viewpoints – but that is not the system we live in, and far less serious plagiarism has been taken far more seriously in other contexts for other university presidents.
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On to (2), “Of what weight should Ackman/Rufo’s efforts matter?”. I don’t think I need to spend serious time here, however your writing gave it more than lip-service. Factual wrongdoing does not need to be contextualized by the identities of the individuals presenting the facts. Facts should be evaluated on their merits alone. I find it difficult to distill bringing Ackman and Rufo into the discussion into anything other than ad hominem attacks (e.g. “billionaire” or “right-wing”).
Yes, Ackman seems highly motivated to shake up Harvard (perhaps driven, in-part, by his preexisting frustrations about Harvard’s handling of his donation of Coupang stock back in 2017 as detailed by the WSJ back in December). Rufo is a culture war warrior – who I can’t help but feel has a symbiotic relationship now with Gay, who gets to point to Rufo as the “racist” enemy, while Rufo gets to point to Gay as an elitist leftist fraud he has “scalped”.
If there was no “there-there”, perhaps the motivations of the accusers would matter to explain why this received so much attention. And maybe that’s why you give it lip service -- because you don’t think there is a “there-there” on plagiarism. I think academics disagree – and those who read the research of academics would overwhelmingly disagree.
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With (3) “Were the plagiarism allegations/instances necessary for the ouster of Gay?” I will focus more on the congressional testimony (and related campus environment), because my opinion is that the plagiarism allegations were not necessary for Gay to deserve being removed as president of Harvard.
The congressional testimony was a nightmare for the universities. Anyone familiar with congressional testimony should be aware that (notwithstanding the threat of prosecution for lying under oath to congress), your appearances matter more than being legally/factually accurate. The presidents cannot be described as laypeople, as they were all prepared by a nationally-recognized law firm – WilmerHale – to help them navigate congressional testimony. The presidents of MIT, Penn, and Harvard should be held to similar expectations as CEOs testifying before congress (who would have also been prepared by a similar prestigious law firm). Their jobs are to be presentable leaders – not just give technical answers.
People remember Zuckerberg looking like a lizard-person before congress. Nobody remembers the technical answers Zuckerberg gave about antitrust or the topic-of-the-day. And the US DOJ is extremely unlikely to prosecute anyone who has testified before congress (I do not know specifics here, but it is my understanding that it is exceedingly rare outside of add-on counts to indictments to add pressure). It just optically is not how the US DOJ spends its time. Most importantly, it is the job of the effective CEO of the universities to be leaders to stand up for their universities and not equivocate – to make it clear that calling for the genocide of Jews is reprehensible – even if technically the Codes of Conduct allow such speech.
While I believe Magill performed marginally worse in Congress before Stefanik, Gay was no shining star. Magill was almost immediately ousted. Magill, in particular, got jammed up by saying calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the Penn codes “if the speech turns into conduct” followed by Stefanik’s “conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?”. The university presidents universally (hah) failed at being leaders of their universities on perhaps the most significant stage.
To be fair, Magill was already on her heels regarding the “Palestine Writes” event in September, which hosted openly antisemitic speakers, and October 7 immediately following such event couldn’t have been worse timing for Magill. But regardless – Magill was ousted because she had shown she was not ready to lead a university through a crisis.
Congressional testimony aside, Harvard’s campus has been in turmoil. A Jewish student assaulted for filming a public pro-Palestine “die-in” protest on Harvard’s campus. The library (during finals) being occupied by pro-Palestinian protestors. Pro-Palestinian protestors interrupting classes to use megaphones to promote their positions. And all this is on the heels of (i) Jewish student on other campuses (Cooper Union) being barricaded in classrooms for hours by angry protestors (ii) Hamas calling for their supporters to commit October 7th acts worldwide against Jews and (iii) on campuses like Columbia and Brown, pro-Palestine groups notably and openly defying university rules and judgements.
Gay failed at leading Harvard. She failed at rallying the university, students, alumni and the public. I think it is a mistake to call the plagiarism a “pretext”, because it was clear her abject failure at leading the university was not enough to push her out from her presidency. Since Magill was pushed from her role for leadership failures absent plagiarism, where Gay was defended by her board for lackluster performance, it is not surprising that it took additional “hits” to force Gay to be removed. That said, Gay’s plagiarism has been a topic of conversation since at least 2022. Additionally, Gay has shown sketchiness with her data, when she refused to share her data in 2002 with a Michael Herron at Dartmouth and Kenneth Shotts at Stanford. It’s not clear her academic ethics (coupled with a very thin academic record) were befitting of a university president alone. But it was not necessary to reach such conclusions for Magill. Rather, the plagiarism was just one factor in the column to remove Gay.
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Finally (4), “Was Gay’s congressional testimony unfairly received, and should it play no role in the movement to oust Gay?” And this is where I’ll discuss the Code of Conduct.
Of course a statement “we should genocide the jews” is context dependent if you have a free speech policy. It could be a joke! Or a leading-question in class to spark discussion!
And of course Harvard’s Code technically protects such speech. It isn't Rep. Stefanik's place to tell Harvard "This specific speech doesn't violate your Code of Conduct? Really? Yes it does" -- Harvard's policies are its own, and as a private institution it can set those policies however it so chooses! Rather, the issue is that Harvard uses its Code of Conduct as a sword (for preferred voices) and a shield (against disfavored criticism -- Jewish in this instance).
The core issue is that these universities have abused their Codes of Conduct in the past on a hair-trigger, with aggressive breadth in interpretation, to advance the universities' preferred groups -- but now the universities have a different, much higher, standard for Jewish students. This is fundamentally discriminatory. Since Harvard historically policed aggressively microaggressions and disfavored speech, it is clearly hypocritical and discriminatory to hold speech against Jews to a higher standard.
Harvard historically rescinded admissions to admitted high-school seniors over edgy memes in a private group chat. Harvard’s professor Carole Hooven was institutionally pushed out by Harvard for asserting that sex is binary. Harvard has not stood by its Code until now: when there is speech by presumably-oppressed groups against Jews. It is not persuasive for them to cling to the Code now, when other groups received a different treatment.
And so, no, the congressional testimony was not unfairly received. Even if literally the Code supports the highly-technical (and emotionless) answers given by Gay (and the other university presidents) to Congress, it is clear such testimony was two-faced. All presidents both (i) failed to clearly lead their universities in the face of reprehensible actions and speech (even if such speech is not punishable – an artful leader can stand by and support the targeted students) and (ii) could not credibly stand behind their codes of conduct against bullying and harassment because they had no recent track record of enforcing such codes fairly and consistently.
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Gay should have resigned (we agree on this). I believe the congressional-testimony-plus-leadership-failures-on-campus to maintain an academic environment for all students should have been more than sufficient for Gay to resign. The addition of clear plagiarism violations – which on their own would have, and have, toppled other university presidents in the past – were apparently necessary to push the Harvard board to remove Gay (or if you prefer to not say they removed her, allow her to resign and write a self-serving piece in the NYT blaming everyone but herself, and receive overwhelming adoration and defense by cable news anchors). I also think, absent the congressional testimony, the plagiarism instances would be enough to remove a university president as seen by the University of South Carolina president mentioned earlier (hell, Larry Summers – with a publication record that overwhelmingly dwarfs Gays, and extra-academic achievements that are incomparable -- was pushed out of being Harvard’s president in 2006 for a controversial statement in a speech that men and women may have biological differences in aptitude).
The standards university presidents are held to are high. Gay received extraordinary deference from the Harvard board, for reasons that can be debated (and such debate would likely be counterproductive and unnecessary for the overarching point). But her track record in the few months she was president were dismal, and her qualifications for the role were thin, even absent evidence of clear academic fraud. Gay’s plagiarism was extensive and overwhelming. There is no “minor” plagiarism in academia – and especially not for the president of Harvard.