 Let's start by looking at some of the specific examples of Claudine Gay's apparent plagiarism. This is from that article, that January 1st article I mentioned, where you put side by side some of her writing next to a scholar named David Cannon. And we can see by the highlighted material here, I'll just, for our audio listeners, I'll just read that first highlighted paragraph. Claudine's Cannon version is, the VRA is often cited as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in our nation's history. Claudine Gay writes, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is often cited as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in our nation's history. Then it goes on to describe the central parts of this, of the Voting Rights Act, that's almost identical language. One other example I'll pull up here, Claudine Gay and Gary King side by side. Gary King writes, the posterior distribution of each of the precinct parameters within the bounds indicated by its tomography line is derived by the slice. It cuts out of the bivariate distribution. Claudine Gay writes, the posterior distribution of each of the precinct parameters for precinct is derived by the slice. It's tomography line cuts out of this bivariate distribution. So these are fairly technical descriptions of kind of political, political districting and so forth and legislation. And my understanding is that she did not even, you know, often people will put in parentheses, I'm citing this person or footnote or end note. She didn't put any of that, but she did cite these people in their bibliography. So what should we take away from these, these are just a few select examples, but of the many examples that you have compiled of plagiarism in her work? Well, it's a continuum of severity, right? And even your own examples I think show that. The more technical example that you mentioned with the bivariate distribution, that's not ideal, but I think she could plausibly say that that was at worst mildly sloppy and at best kosher because her argument and the argument some other social scientists have made is that when you're describing very technical methods or even describing the terms in an equation, which is not quite what she's doing there, but it's close, there's only so many ways to describe an equation or describe a very technical model in social science. So it's hard to avoid redundancy. It would be unrealistic to cite every single time there's some redundant technical verbiage, you know, that is a common argument people have made. It's not an argument that is incorporated into Harvard's plagiarism policies for students. Those policies don't make any kind of exception for technical language. But if you're looking at this relative to the norms of social science scholarship, I think you could defend some of those examples. The one that you put on the screen with David Cannon, I think is harder to defend because it's not technical language. It's also much more extensive, right? Several sentences, which if you actually look on the page of her book that that's from, comprise almost half a page of material. It's stuff that, yes, there maybe aren't that many ways to word the technical ins and outs of the Voting Rights Act, but still there's so so many of those sentences are just copy pasted. It's pretty hard to argue that she couldn't have changed at least a few more words or moved some things around. That I think is more, you know, again, taken in isolation is at the end of the world. No, but it's a more severe case relatively. And then the most severe case that I don't think you put on the board, but it's worth mentioning, it's from a previous article I wrote, is when she copied pretty much an entire paragraph verbatim from two of her colleagues in the Harvard government department, Bradley Palmquist and Steven Voss, without not only without a quotation marks or without citing them in parentheses, but without listing them in her bibliography anywhere. So that was a pretty clear cut case, that one of just straight up plagiarism that I don't think anyone could really defend or argue was anything other than plagiarism. And in fact, that is one of the passages that she corrected. She added quotation marks in the citation after being called on it. So there's really a spectrum here. But there's a lot of examples that fall on various parts of the spectrum. So even if you think that maybe 25, even 30, 40 of the examples are minor, there's still 40 of those examples, plus maybe six to 10 more severe ones. And you're looking at a pattern. How egregious do you think this would be in academia if Gay hadn't been in her role as president of Harvard? If she were just an academic and the scandal came out and it wasn't colored with all of these sort of political under and overtones, how do you think academics would treat her? Well, we have some clues based on how Harvard has treated former cases like this from just regular professors. And what they've typically done is either not punish them or has said, yes, they plagiarized, but it wasn't that big a deal. So we're not going to punish them at all. Right. Where to the extent there is a punishment, it's merely the sort of official determination that plagiarism took place. But there was no actual material sanction. But tend to be censured in Congress, right? Like that doesn't actually happen much. It's a symbolic slap on the wrist. Right. So that happened to Larry Tribe and I think a couple other professors over the past two decades. It's Alan Dershowitz, Larry Tribe. There's one other law professor. And then Jill Abramson, same thing happened. And in all of these cases, the professors basically apologized. And in a couple of cases, the university said, yeah, they did technically plagiarize. You know, that's unfortunate. They didn't really do anything about it. So if she were just a tenured faculty member, the normal response would be for her to forthrightly say, yep, maya culpa, screwed up, sorry. And then the university did not really do anything. Of course, A, as you say, she's not a normal tenured faculty member. She's the president of the entire university. And B, she did not do what those other professors did, which was to own up to their mistakes and for everyone to just acknowledge, yeah, it was plagiarism, but not the end of the world. Instead, she and the Harvard Corporation retained a really high-powered law firm, Clare Locke, to try to suppress the story with a defamation threat to the New York Post, employing these really cloak and dagger tactics to just prevent it from ever coming to light. And then after we published a story and it became hard for them to ignore, they say, well, it wasn't plagiarism. It was just inadequate citation or duplicative language, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, euphemisms galore. And in the course of investigating the allegations the university did launch its own probe, they did not go through the normal processes outlined by the research misconduct office. They just basically appointed these unnamed political scientists to do this very opaque, non-transparent investigation totally outside of the norms and processes Harvard has laid out to do this kind of probe. So when you look at the response, in some ways, the cover-up is worse than the crime, they really, there's never been another professor in Harvard's history where they've employed anything like these tactics to try to suppress the story or then to downplay it when it can no longer be suppressed. And I think that is a real difference. Right, and my understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, she is still employed at Harvard and drawing a significant salary even though she resigned. $900,000 a year or something and seen like that. And so that's not even counting the speaking fees that one can draw later on, right? Like that's not even the habit. Yeah, once the examples piled up, she resigned the presidency, but not exactly taking a huge hit financially there. There's one more example that was the most kind of amusing and alarming one to me, which was documented in the New York Times where she copied the acknowledgments from a, in her 1997 Harvard dissertation, she copied the acknowledgments from another, one of her Harvard colleagues of political science, Jennifer Hosschild wrote, Sally Jenks showed me the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor, adding later that Mr. Jenks drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven. Sorry, that was Sandy Jenks. And then Dr. Gay thanked her thesis advisor who reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor. And then thanked her family who drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven. I mean, what do you, do you have like a theory of mind for what is going on here? Is this just like she's producing so much content that it's just like she's grabbing from wherever she can to put these manuscripts together? Like, do you have any insight as to what's going on here? Yeah, I mean, maybe she just felt like she needed to have an acknowledgement section but was crunched for time before filing her dissertation and was cribbing in the way he suggests. I have to say, that example on one level is more minor because it doesn't involve plagiarizing any kind of substantive scholarly language, certainly doesn't involve plagiarizing an idea. But on the other hand, it does seem to be the example that has disturbed the largest number of people including I think members of the Harvard faculty, you know, I can't name names, but I've been told by multiple professors at Harvard that that particular example really bothered them because it just seemed so gratuitous, so hard to rationalize, right? You know, the acknowledgments are supposed to be these deep personalized heartfelt expressions of gratitude and here you are cribbing a stock phrase from somebody else. It just really rubbed people the wrong way. So even folks I think who were inclined to dismiss some of the allegations as either politically motivated or simply not that big a deal just seemed to think this one indicated something negative about her character. I think the best you can say is that she was rather lazy. And the worst you can say is that maybe there was a kind of almost pathological inability to come up with original language even to thank your own mentors. And yeah, you know, I don't think that that single example would have made all the difference, but I, it is interesting to run the counterfactuals, right? In which you subtract this or that given example and that does seem to be one of the examples that really moved the needle for quite a few people. So it's possible that without that simple copying that one instance of copying maybe she survives this. Probably not, but that one really seemed to upset people in my conversations in a way that a lot of the other ones did not. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify or any other podcatcher.