Taking a principled approach means that sometimes you support a person in one respect while being severely critical in another. I supported Harvard president Claudine Gay when she said that calls for genocide don’t categorically qualify as harassment. But now there’s evidence that she’s a repeat plagiarist, and that demands strong criticism if she is.

Update: Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard University. See also the new paragraph at the end of this post.

Plagiarism consists of using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as original work. If you cite the source, it isn’t plagiarism (though it might be a copyright violation if you use too much). Sometimes it’s tricky to identify. Two people can have the same idea independently. Words can stick in your mind, leading you to use them without being aware that you’re lifting them from another author. Sometimes there’s just one good way to say something.

There are online plagiarism checkers that editors use when reviewing submissions for originality and authors use to see if anyone has stolen their work and posted it to the Web. They sometimes return false positives. No automated process can unerringly distinguish plagiarism from mere similarity.

In President Gay’s case, the concerns are about her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation and several articles published since then. The Harvard Corporation found that in these cases, there was “duplicative language without appropriate attribution” but not misconduct. She submitted corrections to her dissertation and other papers, fixing the citations. The question in many people’s minds is whether being president let her get off more easily than a student or untenured faculty member would have.

In Reason, Robby Soave published an article with the aggressively worded title “If You Ignore Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism, Shame on You.” He cites Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried who pulled a classic ad hominem: “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people.” The source of the information should make no difference. The only question is whether it’s correct and supported by the evidence. Soave grants that “people are free to conclude that Gay’s transgressions are not quite serious enough to merit termination.”

I don’t get the impression that she’s built an academic reputation on work lifted from others. Rather, the impression I get is that she is chronically impatient to finish what she is writing and reuses the words of others without paraphrasing them or granting credit. In an interview after the Congressional hearings, she arrogantly declared, “I failed to convey what is my truth.” It’s not surprising if someone who thinks she can own the truth is sloppy about giving credit to others.

I don’t know enough about academic procedures to say whether that should be a firing offense. However, giving the impression that you can get away with things because you’re a university president is a bad thing. Would it have been too much for the Harvard Corporation to have issued a sternly worded rebuke, if nothing more? Jennifer Schuessler, writing for the New York Times, said that the concerns “have also prompted some to wonder whether Harvard is treating its leader with greater latitude than it would its students.” A Harvard professor, while generally supporting Gay, acknowledged that “it makes us look like we have a double standard.”

The central question is whether she “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly” used the work of others without proper citation. That’s Harvard College’s standard for punishable misconduct. My experience, as a former Harvard employee, is that the university can be very strict; even taking an annoyed tone when discussing an issue can get an employee into trouble. It seems to me that the president is judged by a quite different standard. I don’t really think her persistent sloppiness merits firing, but it should get a reprimand. Letting it just slide further sinks Harvard’s already low reputation.

Additional commentary based on information I just found, after learning of Gay’s resignation: I’m sorry. I assumed from the reports I’d seen that the instances on which she was called were somewhere on the edge, perhaps a few sentences that were too similar to previous work. I just came across an the Free Beacon article which details the plagiarized passages. They go beyond any reasonable possibility of coincidence or subconscious recollection. She engaged in blatant copy-and-paste writing, changing a few words to minimally disguise it.

One more thing I have to add (Jan. 3): I just came across a vile headline on the AP News site: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” The implication is that a person who reports plagiarism is the one who’s guilty of it. Is it any wonder so many people don’t believe the news?