Serious, in the case of academic dishonesty, is narrower than the actual actions indicate. In that article, her advisor indicates that his book “encourages scholars that use the method to describe things in those ways”. He can say that, but by describing things in exactly those ways without quotes, it muddies the water on whose thoughts you’re reading (as it would if I hadn’t quoted the above, which would have read as my words). I recall an independent review indicating she improperly cited but it wasn’t misconduct— respectfully, students doing the same thing before this would probably not be allowed that much leeway. Imagine being back in school days, would you paste paragraphs worth of words without quotes and expect to survive a dishonesty board?

Therein lies the issue: allowing that behavior is genuinely very serious, though it can look less so if you’re not literally thinking back to your own university experience. Moreover research isn’t done for the sake of writing stuff down for a grade, it’s done to progress society. Properly noting which thoughts are yours, and which are being quoted as supporting evidence or if your theories were built on others’, is important if merely for clarity’s sake. It could get worse than that though. Allowing this would allow researchers to ape words without sufficiently crediting them, and that could be taken to more sinister degrees.

Dr. Gay is an excellent academic, this aside, and she understands the danger in allowing her own behavior to go unaddressed. She corrected several of her own works and will probably correct more of them as issues continue to be found.

I kept this comment limited to analysis of the situation, but I’m gonna inject a little bit of personal opinion. I do genuinely think this sucks because, while I believe it was plagiarism, I hate when the conservatives win. But I also don’t see this as a real loss for Harvard or academia as a whole— Harvard will find another President and academic standards only improve. I also don’t want to make the conservative mistake of standing by someone whose conduct is detrimental to their own cause, simply because they are the enemy or target of a group I consider to be abhorrent.

And I think that’s ultimately the thing here. We don’t want the conservatives to take this one, especially because they themselves would likely throw academic standards into the wind if it weren’t personally advantageous in this moment. But if we remove the view of “the enemy,” this is just a President resigning because her academic history is less than flawless, and a President should always have a record capable of withstanding even the sharpest scrutiny. Any less and they are actively at risk of eroding standards which exist for a reason.