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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

It was only a matter of time. If credible plagiarism evidence or other serious ethical lapses come to light, it is really hard for high-level administrators to keep their jobs. We saw that at Stanford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847734) and with Joi Ito at the MIT Media Lab. The ridiculous contortions the universities will go through to avoid the inevitable (“a few instances of inadequate citation” in Gay's case) won't stop the train once it's started.

Although Harvard's board said it learned about Gay's plagiarism in October, there had been online accusations that predated her appointment, when she was still the dean of faculty. It amazes me the selection committee either A) failed to do due diligence or B) knew about it and went ahead anyway.

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I don't think it's a coincidence that this came a day after a pretty scathing op-ed from two students in The Crimson. They laid out the specific argument, one that I find hard to dismiss, that the president of Harvard needs to meet or exceed the standards students at Harvard are held to.

Her presidency was simply untenable.

It appears that ran as a dissent to a piece by the editorial board, which said she should stay (for now): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/editorial-gay-...

It appears the majority, or at least plurality, of the Crimson's editorial board was still backing her.

True, although for a minute there it looked like the Corporation was acknowledging the plagiarism ("duplicative language", I think they called it?) and standing by here. Apparently those allegations had been out in the open in her field for quite some time, even before she was selected for the position. Given how hard it is even to get tenure at a top university, it's surprising that they selected someone with these skeletons lurking.

The other due diligence issue besides the plagiarism rumors was the fact that her research output was negligible compared to other Harvard presidents such as Drew Gilpin Faust and Larry Summers.

Her H-Index was 10 or 11 before Google removed it. By comparison Summers is 138. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yX255OoAAAAJ&hl=en

But they had to know this when they chose her though, right? It's possible they didn't know about the plagiarism/accusations if they didn't look hard enough. There's no way they didn't know she wasn't a particularly prolific scholar, since she has literally never written a monograph, and has penned roughly a dozen articles.

They must have. However, I wonder how many experienced academics were on the search committee, or if it's mostly rich donors. That could explain a lot.

My take: I think Gay was one of several up and coming internal candidates which Harvard keeps in the wings for bigger things. She had capably proved herself as FAS Dean, much like Faust oversaw the Radcliffe Institute. The search committee thought Gay would be ready to lead the University as an experienced administrator, and ignored or overlooked the academic red flags.

It is possible that they assumed all due diligence had been done by the committees that gave her tenure and elevated her to her prior positions, and therefore didn't really do much looking at her academics at that juncture. Apparently she was tenured at Stanford just 5 years after arriving, which means she was put up for tenure after 4 years. That is amazingly fast, especially given her publication record. I guess the articles she published were incredibly impactful, since it is typically very difficult to get tenure at Stanford without at least one book.

> Her H-Index was 10 or 11 before Google removed it.

Worse than mine and I don't even have a college degree. :P

Are you still cosplaying a member of society?

Perhaps it seems more difficult to earn tenure because ambitious frauds who choke up the system know the worst thing that they can do to themselves is let any honest, rigorous, critically minded academic move up.

Stack committees with myopic pointyheads, strategize departmental budgeting and approvals to keep them in a state of vague paranoia and conflict with each other, and enjoy having a divided, distracted, powerless faculty body?

Look up who's on your state education boards and test the saying, "never let academics decide policy."

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