This is why you're going to see an explosion of fraud cases stemming from the 90s and early-to-mid 00s. That was the period where PCs were widespread so it was pretty easy to copy words and images, but actually looking at any individual set of words or images and asking "Were these copied from somewhere?" was much more difficult. A lot of people copied/manipulated then because they thought it would be too hard to catch them. Well, technology caught up.

Just look at the multiple plagiarism cases against the former Harvard president. It was clear, at least to me, she copied liberally more out of laziness/lack of confidence because she didn't think she would get caught for small phrases here and there. I mean, who goes through all of the trouble to write a dissertation and then plagiarizes the acknowledgements???

In the Claudine Gay case, she didn't actually steal anyone's work in any of the publicized examples I saw. She clearly attributed the ideas and statements she was using, but then sometimes proceeded to paraphrase them too closely, without using quotation marks. You could argue that it's technically plagiarism, but morally, it isn't. The reason she got nailed was because billionaire donors were upset that she wasn't cracking down on pro-Palestinian student protesters.

Ironically, the guy who led the charge against Gay, Bill Ackman, is married to a celebrity academic who committed real, bona fide plagiarism. Once that came out, Ackman suddenly had all sorts of excuses for his wife's actual misconduct, which makes it clear that he never actually cared about the issue of plagiarism. He just wants kids who protest against the war in Gaza to get expelled.

I agree with everything you've said about Ackman's rationale and actions.

I don't necessarily agree with your overall characterization of Gay's plagiarism. While some of it is clearly of the kind you site (e.g. she's clearly referencing other work in a lot of her analysis, so the fact that she doesn't just reword some phrases a little more seems like a very minor transgression to me), there are other cases that are more than just sloppiness and are outright weird, like the acknowledgements issue. This opinion article from Ruth Marcus (a generally left-leaning writer) of the Washington Post highlighted the issues very well IMO: https://archive.vn/h8lqM

I don't think anyone cares what is written in acknowledgment sections. That's where people thank their mom and dad. If they thank their mom and dad in exactly the same way as someone else, who cares?

Ruth Marcus may be liberal, but she's also extremely pro-Israeli. The entire motivation for going after Claudine Gay was that she didn't stop students from protesting against Israel's war in Gaza, so Marcus' political stance on that issue likely colors her view on the plagiarism accusations.

> If they thank their mom and dad in exactly the same way as someone else, who cares?

Because it's pathetic? Again, this wasn't just one instance of sloppy plagiarism, this was a common thread throughout her extremely thin academic career. And Gay wasn't just some random undergrad, she was the president of what was supposed to be one of the most prestigious universities in the world! The plagiarism scandal was just more proof that Gay was woefully unqualified for her job.

As I said at the top, the plagiarism accusations were extremely thin, and nobody cares about how you word your acknowledgment.

The bottom line is that if Claudine Gay had cracked down hard on students for protesting against Israel's war in Gaza, she would never have faced these accusations, and she would still be president of the university.

I don't particularly care if she was a great president or not. I find it extremely unsettling that a few billionaires were able to oust the president of Harvard, as a way of forcing their own politics on the institution. Since her ousting, Harvard has moved hard against student protesters. Harvard got the message loud and clear, and that message had nothing to do with plagiarism.

I disagree; I inspected Gay's writing closely and compared it to the original and from what I can tell, she had specific intent to spend the least amount of effort and skill to make something that barely passed the threshold for being publishable, or she lacked the skill entirely to write her own unique text.

I expect somebody who reaches her level of achievement to adhere to the rules of academic plagiarism to the letter.

Was it as easily detectable in 2006?

Sure. They're not using advanced ML to find these. Just visual inspection and the kind of transforms you could do in Photoshop in 1991.