tequila4kapp said:
The thread has gone in down a classic OT path...
I created the post with broader plagiarism in academia type considerations. Maybe I am naive or just out of touch but 50 instances of plagiarism??? How does the university not care enough about its academic reputation to allow this? The Stanford president resigned with 4 allegations of manipulated research data. Furd reportedly knew of the allegations from peer review stuff and didn't do anything...until the student newspaper reported on it. There's another prominent example I can't quite remember - something like a famous academic study on honesty included falsified data??? I realize that is only 3 examples and we have a gazillion universities in this nation but it just seems like things are out of whack in academia.
I've talked to my brother (a former academic) about this. His view is that there is a lot of like "boilerplate" across academia and that it really depends on the nature of the plagiarism. There are a lot of customs around when and how to cite prior work. Here's an
article from the Harvard Crimson about this.
I'm not defending Gay, I have no doubt that she crossed some sort of line if Harvard was willing to can her over this, but I expect that we will see this charge leveled more and more and weaponized politically.
To wit.