Plagiarism by the Harvard President

Be fair, she has to go

It doesn’t matter who found the plagiarism or why, but there are now at least a half dozen examples of the Harvard president lifting phrases, words or more without attribution. Since she only has 11 papers, this might be as much as 50% of her work.

This is not “duplicative language,” or any other euphemism; it is just plagiarism. I have no idea if it is malicious or just laziness, but no professor would accept it from their student. The fact that plagiarism is so prevalent in the writings of the Harvard professor is deeply problematic.

The Stanford president resigned because several of his papers contained image duplication. He could— and did— claim that he had no knowledge and someone else in his lab did it. But this same excuse cannot apply to the Harvard president. She clearly made the error, and she cannot blame a third party. If anything what she did is worse.

I personally don’t think she should be fired as a University professor— I think some restitution is in order, but I do think she cannot Harvard president in the same way Tessler Levine could not be Stanford president. How can you claim to be a scholar when your scholarship contains so much fraud.

To me, the worst part of this whole affair is to watch people minimize plagiarism simply because they wish to support the Harvard president, and dislike the push to get her fired. You can dislike the movement to remove her, but we have to be fair— any student who plagiarized as much as she has done would be expelled. At a minimum, she cannot be Harvard president.

It isn’t hard.