Claudine Gay and My Scholarship – WSJ

Harvard s governing fellows last week decided to stand behind President Claudine Gay despite her disastrous congressional testimony and multiple allegations of plagiarism. In a statement, they dismissed the latter as a few instances of inadequate citation that constituted no violation of Harvard s standards for research misconduct.

I write as one of the scholars whose work Ms. Gay plagiarized. She failed to credit me for sections from my 1993 book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress and an article I published in 1997, Women and Blacks in Congress: 1870-1996. The damage to me extends beyond the two instances of plagiarism identified by researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet.

Black Faces, Black Interests received numerous accolades and recognitions. In 1994 it was selected one of Library Choice Journal s seven outstanding academic books and won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award and the V.O. Key Award for political science. It won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for its scholarship on Congress in 1995. My book has been cited in court opinions, including by U.S. Supreme Court justices in Johnson v. De Grandy (1994) and Georgia v. Ashcroft (2003).

Ms. Gay s damage to me is aggravated because her early work was in the area where my research is considered seminal. Her scholarship on black congressional representation, electoral districting and descriptive representation builds on terrain where I plowed the ground.

via www.wsj.com

Carol M. Swain.

I guess she doesn’t think imitation is the sincerest form of flattery in this case.