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Wife of financier who called for Harvard head’s exit faces plagiarism allegations
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Here's the thing: Most of these people aren't plagiarizing in the traditional way we think of it. They're paying poor college students from less prestigious colleges to write the research papers for them, and then slap their name on it. It's actually not surprising the poor student might drop some plagiarized stuff in there, because they're not really getting paid what they are worth. Deep down they know they are helping build a world where they will never get ahead because they're literally being paid to do the research that will give someone else far better credentials than they will ever have.
This has been going on for fucking decades. You just find some poor smart schmuck who doesn't have the financial ability to get their education in order, and offer them the finances they need in exchange for essentially giving a rich kid a fake prestigious degree, based on the fact a lot of the rich kids "original research" was done by someone else entirely.
All these rich twats have been faking their credentials for decades, that's why the mask has so visibly come off in the last few years: they don't even realize the "rules" of the game they are playing, and now we're officially back to a world where the aristocracy thinks they're better than the rest of us by simply just existing. They have zero functional reason to believe this, especially when they pay others to do their work and jobs for them, because they're far too painfully incompetent. The thing is, they don't think they are incompetent, and they won't take no for an answer, so they've slowly gotten rid of all the competent people at the top, as well, because they can't have people questioning their vision. (Elon Musk has done a great job of showing how thin their skin is and how ready he is to eject anyone from his workplaces who question him.)
If you think any "elite" person whether at Harvard or post-Harvard in the business world hasn't partaken in this, you're kidding yourself. Yale and Harvard fucking exist to crank out these "elite" people who go on to become billionaires. Bill Ackman is a Harvard graduate himself and his wife was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There is no we here. That is a false construction projected to add authority to the entire following wall of text.
People aren't farming out their dissertations to other grad students (usually). Yeah, once a person is a PI, their grad students do most of the actual writing, but anything written in their dissertation or as a grad student or post-doc is almost certainly all them, especially if they are the first author.
And even once they are a PI or even a department chair or university president, anything they write where they are listed as the first author is 100% their responsibility.
Your post just reads like you don't really understand how academia works.
From the downvotes, I'm guessing most people aren't aware of the cottage industry existing around paid dissertations
I can't speak for everyone, but I am aware of it, and I'm also aware it's tiny minority of dissertations, especially in STEM fields. You can't get around the fact that in scientific fields, you need the right equipment for the research your group is working on.
Not only that, but getting a PhD is a whole process. You often still take some classes, and do a lot of research. All that time you're interacting with other people in the same program, with a thesis advisor, with various profs, grad students and TAs.
Only at the end do you go off to write up your thesis, and most students at that point have a thesis advisor who they consult regularly. (Many of them wish they could spend much more time with their thesis advisor.)
If someone just magically shows up with a thesis at the end of that process, and they haven't been consulting their thesis advisor (or what they've been talking about doesn't match what's written), or the thesis doesn't match all the research and discussions they've had with people over the previous many years, it's going to draw a lot of attention.
And then, after the whole thing is written up, there's typically a thesis defense, where people who have expertise in very similar matters grill the student on the contents of the thesis. If you don't know everything in the thesis (and more), you're going to be in trouble here.
I'm sure there are various degrees of cheating. At the low end, you'll just have someone who has writer's block, and needs help trying to get the ideas from their brain into paragraphs. At the other end, you'll have people who legitimately don't understand everything in their thesis, and truly had someone else doing the work for them. But, just based on how the process works, it's going to be very hard to get away with true all-out cheating.