Plenty of misconduct in the world is brought to light by unsavory characters.

Mark Felt of Watergate fame became Woodward & Bernstein's source because he was pissed at Nixon for passing him over to be FBI director after Hoover died.

Does that cast doubt on Nixon's guilt or the information he gave to the Post? I don't think so.

(ETA in response to your addition: academics and politics have been mixing a lot lately - in both directions - academics doing politics and politicians getting involved in academics. But prominent university officials making seven-figure salaries cannot expect their published works will escape scrutiny by those who are inclined to publicize rather than bury potential misconduct)

• Click here for link at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/06/27/r

inquiries (or litmus tests) in high-education are helpful. Maybe they are elsewhere.

If academic dishonesty is so critical, then all University presidents (or faculty) should be subjected to said investigation. Not just when someone decides they don't like their politics.

There are plenty of examples of academics being fired for being dishonest. Now, you may not consider plagiarism to be comparable to falsifying data on the scale of which is worse. However when publishing, they are both material violations of professional standards.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/07/20/florida-state-fires-professor

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184289296/harvard-professor-dishonesty-francesca-gino

https://www.woodtv.com/news/michigan/university-of-michigan-researcher-quits-after-publishing-falsified-data/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-university-of-illinois-professor-fired-20181214-story.html

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resigns-over-manipulated-research-will-retract-at-least-3-papers/

I'm aware.

Were they all fired after appropriate institutional investigations? Or did any of them get canned because they had outside actors trying to get them fired because they didn't like their politics? Were Christopher Ruffo et al. going to stop taking shots if Harvard ran an investigation that determined she plagiarised, but that it didn't rise to the level of being removed as President?

Which is my point below on how this should be handled. It's possible that Gay committed plagiarism, but that the circumstances surrounding how it played out are problematic.

We don't want McCarthyism, but can still be concerned about Communist infiltration into our institutions. So one can consider the motivation of the whistleblower, and the severity of the matter being investigated.

It's similar to an argument many of us have had with Trumpsters, including within my own family. Yes, I have no doubt some of the investigatory vigor directed at Donald Trump is politically motivated. That should be addressed and called out. But that doesn't mean it's OK for him to do the things he does.

My wife has a PhD, so I was subjected to five years of discussions about publications and life in the lab.

Digging into someone's background to find dirt is fairly standard practice in politics. Like it or not, when you take overtly political positions, someone on the other side is going to come for you.

I do agree that the practice of digging up dirt is problematic, I just don't think that the practice is unique to what happened to Gay. It is SOP in politics (which is why most normal people don't want to run for office) and some form of vetting is usually done for executive level positions in corporate America. While the motivations of her accusers should be taken into consideration, the fact remains that the accusations are valid. Given this, the motivations don't really matter all that much.

It does seem strange that none of this was identified before. How many levels of review did her work go through prior to being finalized?

I'm sure if you fed a lot of old work through modern plagiarism finding software that you'd turn up a lot of dirt on a lot of people. There's software now that's good at catching human generated data in experiments that's led to some retractions.

I'm just surprised it's not SOP to do this before hiring a president or giving someone tenure.

It was before the AI boom, but not that long ago.

That seems to be in the early years of software.

hard time - I presume that you mean the early years of the type of software used to check references in papers and such.

I was talking about my wife. Sorry.

of the University of South Carolina for plagiarizing a piece of a commencement speech (not generally considered an academic work) in 2021.

• Click here for link at https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/12/us/usc-president-bob-caslen-r

members of their own club.

Wasn't the president of Stanford just ousted over research misconduct?

I guess my point is, if the misconduct is there, then I don't really care who brings it to light. Human nature suggests to me that critics or competitors are more likely to (a) go looking and (b) go public if they find wrongdoing.

(ETA: Should the Michigan cheating scandal be discounted because Ohio State was first to raise the alarm?)

I have no problem with that. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Perhaps Harvard should've done their homework during the hiring/search process - this could have been avoided.

Going back to the original point of the thread and dealing with "rot" at academic institutions, I don't think supporting politically-targeted investigations to get rid of people we don't agree with is going to solve the problem.

EDIT: And as to why they don't "investigate their own", it has little to do with the Ivy league specifically. I'm sure they all know that if people looked hard enough, they'd all be guilty of similar attribution errors.

EDIT2: And to be clear, I do think the examples are plagiarism. So then what to be done about it? Well, it should have been handled by the same processes which govern all other academic misconduct at Harvard, including students. The result of that investigation may have warranted termination, or maybe it would have warranted something less severe.

is to stop looking for it and/or to put primary importance on the personal politics of those who uncover the misconduct?

That would seem to make the problem worse, not better.

handle it by processes that apply to all other faculty and students. And not let decisions on how it should be handled be driven by activism from those with ulterior motives.

resignation (she wasn't fired) beyond their ability to comment in the public arena.

Again, I don't see how that's a bad thing. I assume she could have demanded a formal review process beyond the secret anonymous panel the Harvard Corporation initially propped up to look at the first round of accusations (which were pretty weak in my view, in contrast to the later stuff that came out). She didn't. I assume there was a reason for that as well (the reason being she gets to keep her $900K a year professor position in Cambridge).

But if academia is going to take the position that the only allegations of misconduct that may be considered are those that (a) come from academics, and only from academics who (b) friends or allies of the subject of the investigation, then I think that says much about the quality and ethics of the academy.

Sure, they don't make the decisions. But they can certainly continue to beat the drum and stir up negative publicity to the point where she gets asked to resign (but isn't fired).

I think academia should take the position that people can be investigated and punished, but that the corrective action should not be based on whether the public perception of said correction is "sufficient".

She and her ilk set a double standard up on campus regarding speech, favoring certain groups over others. Anyone who is objective sees the double standard regarding speech on campus (what speech is considered "violence", heckler's veto for conservative speakers without any punishments), and she embarrassed her university by allowing and enabling this rot. This was all exposed and she subsequently resigned. You're probably right in that she was nudged to that position by people both inside and outside the university, but she certainly could have demanded a more formal process that may or may not have let her keep a high six-figure position. You don't like the politics behind one of the people who helped expose her plagiarism, ok. But that kind of stuff happens all the time, in the numerous examples above, not to mention politics invading our legal system as people search out grievances to sue over in order to make a political point (gay wedding cakes etc.).

Harvard is the most prestigious and well-known university in the country, I have no doubt there are plenty of qualified candidates out there who haven't plagiarized to the level she did and who would likely be more proactive in cracking down on obvious double standards for speech on campus.

she was plagiarizing, or because of (your assessment) of behavior with regard to speech on campus? And is it because of her specific actions/policies, or because you're just lumping in with "her ilk".

Your post is demonstrating my problem with the whole situation. Disagreeing with her politics, and then searching for a pretense to fire her is problematic. If you think she should be removed because of her policies related to campus speech, then make a case for that. As in Gay's case with plagiarism, "But that kind of stuff happens all the time" is rationalization, not justification.