Even though it’s mainly politics leading the charge on the discussion, these examples of plagiarism opens the door to a larger conversation about the state of our educational institutions. It's becoming clear that plagiarism, along with the replication crisis, the prohibitive cost and inaccessibility of education, the awful collective treatment of associate professors, and the hyper-politicization of academic environments, are not separate issues but rather interconnected signs of a systemic problem. The education system, as it stands, seems to be diverging from its intended purpose and ideals
Its a hard but necessary conversation for the future of the people and the governments that are supposed to represent and promote the welfare of those people. The sticking point is that it would require massive subsidy and regulatory capture to bring the education system back in line with the ideals of creating a more enlightened, worldly connected, wiser people. That money does have to come from somewhere, and higher taxes are basically the only meaningful option as long as the funding sink that is the American Military continues to be the single largest employer in history, making less funding a very unwelcome idea even among many on the left, because of the job loss that would result. That can be done, but requires more progressive politicians and allies that will vote with them in office, both locally and at large.
Depends. Did you copy the text word for word? Something as simple as rephrasing text in your own words is enough. But if you're copying 'commonly held knowledge' word for word, that's still plagiarism.
It's disgusting how you downplay academic plagiarism as some esoteric and unimpactful topic that nobody cares about. Anyone associated with academia or anyone who has gone through an undergraduate degree knows how important plagiarism rules are.
Preech. I'm currently on the job market while finishing up my dissertation. I'm looking for a mostly teaching position because while I can do research I don't enjoy it (due to the incrementalism) but I do enjoy teaching college students. However, the treatment of teaching-first and teaching-only positions is awful even though it is fundamentally what the whole institution of academia is about.
my big issue with education is that more and more it's perceived less as a means of learning and educating yourself, as it is a means of upward mobility, a place you go to get qualifications, and also learn a bunch of stuff you don't care about
(It’s hard to say that “plagiarism doesn’t matter within the ivory tower walls of academia” all while those in undergrad and grad school have to sign multiple documents promising not to plagiarize and being threatened that if they do, they shall be kicked out of school forever.)
Well to be fair they never said “plagiarism doesn’t matter” they said it has less significance at high levels, especially with respect to what would be considered common knowledge of the field. I know exactly the section youre referencing but im too lazy to clip the exact statement. Apparently you were too bc you made this comment in the first place lol
There were two issues at play. One was an academic failure to uphold standards and the second was an intentional campaign to oust her. Both matter but her job should not have been the cost of said academic failure given her overall achievements post graduation.
@myhandlewastakenandIgaveup I don't agree. If plagiarism is the death blow to an undergrad students career then why would we hold the president of the school to a lower standard? Like OP said, in every class they make a huge deal and have countless threats if you get caught plagiarizing. They make it clear that it's unacceptable. So just hold her to that same standard.
@@Aaron-kj8dv thats a super fair point which I don't have a direct counter for. I would only say that (as an extreme) if we found out that Einstein had failed to properly cite his sources would it tarnish his legacy but that is clearly a hyperbolic example and in reality we probably need to tone down the plagiarism punishments which can easily be excused as mistakes.
Wisecrack feels like a PBS after-school program for adulthood, and I mean that in a good way. I always feel like every video has enough substance and knowledge in it that I can understand a new/unfamiliar philosophical concept, a little bit of history/politics, and some general humanities enough to be interested to look more into it. Great video as always.
Let’s be honest, the rules around Academic plagiarism are insane. So, many times I’ve had to ask myself if something was common knowledge or if I should cite where I most recently read it. Citations rules in general are also confusing. But the real point of all of it is that no one has ever followed protocol to 100%. We’ve all cut corners or screwed up something in our lives. Especially sleep deprived, poverty stricken grad students writing their thesis at 3 a.m. this is just a blatant attack on someone for political reasons. And this from the party willing to ignore the graveyard of skeletons in Trumps closet.
Plagiarism is like assault, oftentimes the main defining factor is whether the 'victim' is willing to assert they are harmed. Of course egregious examples can be argued in absence of a victim, but for the most part the offended party should need to speak out as being offended.
No it isn't. She lied & stole. She's not Mozart building on the work of previous artists. She's a grifter who got herself something she didn't earn or deserve through deceit.
One would hope the president of America's flagship educational institution would be held to higher standards than the mediocre baseline of uninspired undergrads. Having said that, manufactured outrage and hypocrisy is a huge problem. Tho not the sole domain of the political right.
It's not so much as manufactured outrage as it is the continuation of a saga. It's all about lowering standards for the sake of diversity. Nobody with this number of plagiarism violations should ever be hired for the position of president of Harvard. It's that simple.
@@matthewatwood8641 Claudine caused her own downfall. She made it very clear that her political views are more important than the safety of all the students. Not only did she lose the confidence of donors, she ridiculed the academic integrity of the university.
@@ElizabethD33 The only reason she got as far as she did was identity politics. What's happening to her, Harvard, & everyone else affected by this exposes how destructive that kind of thinking & behavior are.
Eh, I think it's actually extremely important on the left that we hold our politicians and civil servants to a much higher standard, especially in matters of honesty and integrity.
You can hold people to a higher standard and still be realistic about how bad something actually is. Her plagiarism boiled down to a handful of extremely minor, easily understandable errors. That's not how people have treated them, though.
You are missing a point. If a student di EXACTLY what she did and gets caught, would be expelled. So, for the head of an organization, the "do as I say, not as I do" is not admissible.
@@nathaniel1670 Even in highschool. plagiarism was something that could get you suspended. Complete utter BS that the head of Harvard does what would have gotten me kicked out of both HighSchool and College; And walks around with a gaggle of supporters saying that what she did was "minor".
@@multiwinia1 In high school, you aren't working on hundreds of pages of work that relies on a massive body research. In high school, you aren't writing terribly rigorous papers, so citation shouldn't be terribly difficult. When it comes to the reality of academia, academics are under a lot of pressure to pump out large volumes of work and mistakes can be made. They're human and citation rules are nebulous at times. Everyone keeps mentioning the hypothetical college student who gets expelled for forgetting to cite something, but I'm pretty sure this rarely, if ever, actually happens. Expulsion comes after some gross violation, not something minor like forgetting to cite a sentence or two in a much much larger piece of work. It comes down to how the infractions affect the overall essence of the scholarship and whether or not there was some obvious intent to pass others' work off as your own. In Gay's case, I've read the allegedly plagiarized portions, and I would agree, as the comments in the video state, that her mistakes were minor and do not affect the overall quality and contribution of her scholarship. That isn't to say that it should be completely excused, but it did not justify her public excoriation and should not be the basis for her dismissal as an academic. People, like yourself I presume, are trying to cover up their disdain for academia and higher education by cloaking their attacks in what seems like a reasonable position of being against plagiarism. But we all know that they, and you, don't really care about plagiarism or the integrity of academia. It's almost as if you didn't actually watch the video.
Post PhD here, I left to go to the non-profit research industry because I was over the academy, but just wanted to say there are so many other careers for PhDs. Academia is a tough industry, and I hope it works out if you want it, but even if it doesnt, hopefully you find other avenues that bring you joy (like how the folks behind this channel have).
@@RustCorp buddy as a STEM PGR whose friends with other PhD and Postdocs, it's just as hard and cutthroat getting and staying employed as the 'soft sciences'. Especially in academia. Get off your high horse when you clearly aren't even in the field yourself.
Plagiarism can absolutely be a real issue with serious negative consequences. But if we specifically look at the moral panic surrounding the concept of plagiarism and the obsession people have with originality, that's a different matter entirely. That I think stems largely from the emergence of the modern, first past the post model of copyright law under capitalism. People have become more sensitive to the idea of copyright infringement in general partly because the systems we live under dictate that the first one to claim copyright functionally has a monopoly on financially benefiting from something, especially in creative fields. And in practice, wealth can be used as a bludgeon to "cut in line" when it comes to monopolizing the right to profit from an idea. When you put all that together with the "work or die" impetus of life under capitalism, it becomes much clearer where people get the impulse to be so protective of the concept of "original" ideas.
it sucks to do work and have someone else take credit for that. it sucks to do work and have someone else get by with stealing another person's work instead. If you are just going to copy work from others then you have plenty of time to create a proper citation. Plagiarism kills creativity and stifles effort.
I find plagiarism it be an interesting topic particularly in how it relates to music, as that's an area I'm personally invested in rather than literature and academia. I'm a fan of hbomberguy and was a little taken aback by how vitriolic his community reacted to the accused plagiarists in his video. I mean, people like James Somerton were 100% stealing, but nuance seems to have gone out the window on what's ok and what's not. Tons of people on his discord server began scouring the internet on a witch hunt looking for anyone who's copied a line verbatim from an article or approximated someone else's outline for a video or essay. Frankly, it became super toxic, and much in the same way that hbomberguy was making a character assessment of Internet Historian based on his community for not disparaging his right wing audience, hbomberguy has been a little bit of a hypocrite by remaining quiet on all of his fans running around and harassing people. In the music community, while no one is saying to outright steal someones composition, it's pretty common to copy some portion of something that someone else did (particularly to explore that idea) and repurpose it for your own song. I think at this point it's expected unless you're some kind of avant-garde auteur who punches pig carcasses as a percussive element. Like, transposing a melody and changing its key and time signature while also changing the underlying rhythm section beneath, not to mention the overall timbre of the music and your choice of instrumentation; you'd have NO idea something was "stolen". A lot of those copyright lawsuits relating to pop songs that have gone around are completely ridiculous and Adam Neely has talked about it quite a bit, that no one involve in the law really knows what they're talking about. Much like some of the points covered in this video (16:02), a lot of musical knowledge is people incrementally copying ideas from one another over centuries and its how we've continued to grow artistically. Personally, a lot of this plagiarism news just seems like drama by moral elitists who probably haven't created anything themselves. Thinking that they're activists for something. Like, stay in your own lane. Hbomberguy is allowed to criticize people because he himself is an essayist, Wisecrack is allowed to talk about this stuff because they're academics. "Allowed" is strong language, I'm just saying not everyone needs an opinion on this shit or has the qualifications to talk about it meaningfully.
Thanks for this! Super interesting and I think you're right that the music thing really complicates this. The fact that so much great music is built upon other compositions, riffs, rhythms, etc., and that's to say nothing of sampled music and electronic music. I wonder if there is something different amongst musicians and artists themselves where there is more of a collective understanding that "great artists steal", whereas academics, writers, and RUclipsrs are more precious about "owning" their own ideas?
@@WisecrackEDU as a multi-instrumentalist who has worked with artists across the genre spectrum it depends on the culture around the genre. Jazz artists especially care very little about that bc of the long tradition of jazz standards and improvisation, but metal artists tend to be REALLY tetchy about biting rhythms & riffs. Generally though the fans are a lot more precious about it than artists are. We understand a little more internally that genres and artists are in constant sonic conversation with each other, reacting against or building off what came before... But I'd also say that's hardly exclusive to music. It's just that it's more abstracted with music than, say, philosophy. It's a lot easier to say "this is just paraphrasing Fanon" definitively than it is to say "they stole that from led zeppelin" bc of all the moving parts besides semantics, like texture, key, tone, rhythm, tempo, instrumentation, interplay etc.
1:50 I find it troubling that Wisecrack tries to downplay the severity of plagiarism in academia. Why is there one standard for High-level administrators but a much more rigorous standard for Poor Low-income Students who are throwing themselves into debt just to be there? Having double ethics standards for elites vs. young & working class people isn’t exactly Liberal just saying. You would think a Philosophy channel ran by Philosophy PhDs would have the integrity to recognize the value of honesty & consistency when it comes to LEADERSHIP in Academia. Philosophy majors more than anyone should recognize the value of their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and recognize that it is THEFT when that intellectual property is stolen, no? Or is it fine if people copy paste the content from your channel and claim it as their own because of excuses like “the ivory tower does not care” & it’s “not that big of a deal” “some of the people who were stolen from were chill with it” to use your own phrasing and “reasoning”…🙄 Also, art is NOT about imitation. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Imitation is suicide.” as a society and through the lens of history we don’t collectively remember the art that looks like everything else we’ve already seen. Original works have always been seen as far more valuable & passing your work off as original when it isn’t is Fraud! Finally I ask you this: Would you be consistent and make the same defense for a Right-wing President of a University if they got caught plagiarizing? If it was a conservative prof, would you still be as sympathetic towards Intellectual Property Theft in that case? If not, you’re just as cynically partisan as the people Wisecrack tries to point fingers at. In these divided times, I don’t think the core message of this video is productive for anyone except lazy academic elites at Harvard or Yale who know they cheated & stole content to finish their Dissertations. A better topic would be why Administrators are held to one plagiarism standard while students are held to another. I love Wisecrack content & I won’t stop watching because of 1 miss. But as someone who values INTEGRITY & ACADEMIC RIGOR, Wisecrack really lost a lot of respect from me on this one. 🤷♂️
Let me answer: NO, they would NOT be consistent and argue the same points had the Harvard President been another conservative that was cancelled for wrongthink.
1:50 I find it troubling that Wisecrack tries to downplay the severity of plagiarism in academia. Why is there one standard for High-level administrators but a much more rigorous standard for Poor Low-income Students who are throwing themselves into debt just to be there? Having double ethics standards for elites vs. young & working class people isn’t exactly Liberal just saying. You would think a Philosophy channel ran by Philosophy PhDs would have the integrity to recognize the value of honesty & consistency when it comes to LEADERSHIP in Academia. Philosophy majors more than anyone should recognize the value of their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and recognize that it is THEFT when that intellectual property is stolen, no? Or is it fine if people copy paste the content from your channel and claim it as their own because of excuses like “the ivory tower does not care” & it’s “not that big of a deal” “some of the people who were stolen from were chill with it” to use your own phrasing and “reasoning”…🙄 Also, art is NOT about imitation. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Imitation is suicide.” as a society and through the lens of history we don’t collectively remember the art that looks like everything else we’ve already seen. Original works have always been seen as far more valuable & passing your work off as original when it isn’t is Fraud! Finally I ask you this: Would you be consistent and make the same defense for a Right-wing President of a University if they got caught plagiarizing? If it was a conservative prof, would you still be as sympathetic towards Intellectual Property Theft in that case? If not, you’re just as cynically partisan as the people Wisecrack tries to point fingers at. In these divided times, I don’t think the core message of this video is productive for anyone except lazy academic elites at Harvard or Yale who know they cheated & stole content to finish their Dissertations. A better topic would be why Administrators are held to one plagiarism standard while students are held to another. I love Wisecrack content & I won’t stop watching because of 1 miss. But as someone who values INTEGRITY & ACADEMIC RIGOR, Wisecrack really lost a lot of respect from me on this one. 🤷♂
If I had turned in multiple assignments without proper citations, then I would have been thrown out of university, the same rules should apply for the academics that work there. If it was 1 isolated time then it can be overlooked, but it was many times, and was a pattern of low integrity from her, and she had such a high position in Harvard so should have to pay the same price that a regular student would pay. No special privileges for being black and female.
Saying "No special privileges for being black and female" is so disingenuous when her being a black woman is what put the target on her back in the 1st place...
@@TheCrogunyour comment is disingenuous. The point is EVERYONE should be held to the same standard. That's it. If you don't want that, then check yourself.
@@Aaron-kj8dvbut is everyone truly being held to the same standard or is the standard only being applied because it's a black woman? Like the point is obvious but you can't ignore context...
@1:50 That is a misnomer. According to the Washington Post article published January 4th written by Sophia Nguyen "In a few cases, she did not make any mention of her source."
While I like a video around plagiarism is alright using it to essentially cover for a university president undermines the entire video. Countless of students go through every aspect of plagiarism rules and are punished ruthlessly for violating plagiarism rules. Either the rules are applied equally or the rules lose all meaning.
Gay was the President of Harvard. She is, and should be, held to the highest example of rigour. Yes, there were political motivations for making this story as internationally big as it was. But it doesn't change the fact that she was rightly punished for her academic dishonesty
I'm surprised that no mention is made of convergent creativity/invention. There are so many creatives online these days that truly original thought is becoming increasingly rare as there is a limited amount of potential creative paths to take under any cultural context.
I'm reminded of the Danish inventor who was denied a patent for a device that would dredge up shipwrecks because the same concept had already appeared in a Carl Barks Donald Duck comic.
The concept of intellectual property as we know it is living on borrowed time. It won't be gone within our lifetime, but as soon as it was possible for me to create a perfect copy of something with a simple mouse click, the moral and ethical implications got muddied to the point that once you get down that rabbit hole, you end up at a fork of either "Artists should be paid for their work" or "we shouldn't have systems in place that stop us from living if we don't have money" - I don't have a creative output partly because I have to work a job that keeps me both relatively busy and exhausted most of the time, but also because I don't want to have to deal with all of the legal fictions that come with the intellectual property domain of things. People copy things they like to have more of them, and the fact that sometimes the means of copying imparts the ability to make new things should have always been celebrated in my opinion. Pandora's box has been opened on the AI front. It's here to stay like the internet was, some of us just don't know it yet. Even with the limitations it has now, as a proof of concept what we have is encouraging more research into deeper and more complex algorithms for machine learning, and sooner or later we will be able to make something that operates in such a way as to be indistinguishable from independent thought. It's just a matter of time. I don't know what that means for the future. Like all tools, I figure AI can be used for many different purposes all across the morality scale. But ultimately, it's something that we're going to adapt to working and living with.
The part about “ai is here to stay” simply isn’t as true as most people (including the tech bros pushing its use) think it is. The ammount of energy (and physical equipment) AI uses is absolutely insane, and the more it’s used the higher this will go, the more it will slow down, and the more its used, the more the very thing it needs to function (genuine human content, and genuine human verification and data scrubbing) will not be able to keep up with it, at all. This ai crazy is a result of people putting all those crypto mining facilities to work doing… something else, trying to justify their existence and need. Trying to monetize them, even if it’s completely unsustainable or poor quality, all by taking advantage of the fact that people don’t understand how it all works.
Honestly, this is one of those big things about how when we are didactically given morals. like of course plagiarism is a bad thing to do, everyone tells me so. Also, the only time I've encounter plagiarism in my life it is about properly citing things. Therefore improperly citing things must be a moral failing.
Kleptomnesia (though I didn’t have a word for it before) has always been a fear of mine when I think about possibly writing music… once something is in my head, I can’t discern whether I actually created it or it’s from something else and I just retrieved it from the back of my mind, so I’ve always just kept it in my head out of fear that I could be copying someone… Also fun fact: the kleptomnesia of a song is the impetus for the plot of the hit Disney classic show “Austin and Ally”
2:13 What do you mean the ivy tower does not care about plagiarism? They would kick a normal student out in a heartbeat. Holding people in power to account is always fair, especially when they are a DEI hire (or rich). They need to be removed from their position and it is fair to go after them by any means necessary. When the working class starts getting access to these opportunities we can be more forgiving. You don't get to gate keep opportunity... and then botch it
I studied Hispanic Literature in one of the most prestigious universities of Mexico, la UNAM. I remember a teacher from the first semester whose class was about reaserch, how to find a book in the library, how to make a reference, and how to quote. When he talked about plagiarism, he begged us, crying, not to plagiarize, to do our quotations the right way, to do proper reaserch about our thesis, to read and to write thinking in the writers and academics helping us in our writing. That really shocked me, and I remember him every time I try to write something that is not my crazy thoughts and feelings. But here in Mexico, I think that the plagiarism cases that have involved politicians, even our former president, just show that our goverment is a corrupt one. Because a president can get away with it, a thesis advisor can give to the students the same thesis so they can graduate and then become a politician. Even if you are studying your PhD and the Academy discovers that you wrote an article that plagiarize an idea from another one, they kick you out. But you can have a happy ending with the right connections. It's all about the connections and money here.
The fact that they referred to drawing mass hate to this woman over a relatively minor infraction to the point of getting her to step down from her position as “conservative activism” honestly says a lot about the current state of modern conservative politics…
The smug dissent of your political enemies while going to bat for Cluadine Gay as a victim of "The Right" for some victimless thought crime is disingenuous and avoidant of her surrounding activities. The argument that plagiarism isn't actually that bad does nothing for me when she is supposed to be the paragon of academic integrity as the President of the most prestigious university on Earth. I would support her being removed from the Presidency for her comments on the conduct against her Jewish students, her lack of meaningful academic literature, or her plagiarism. This is substandard work for Wisecrack. I subscribed for insightful historical and philosophical context to modern media, and not partisan political talking points.
Remember in old Facebook days people would build these pages with sports talk or memes and then one day they'd be sold to someone trying to sell timeshares or something weird? I know it didn't happen, but this video makes it look like Wisecrack got sold to some political opportunists where they immediately for no reason pivot to political talking points.
Saying that Claudine Gay failed to properly cite resources is like saying "No officer, I was not in possession of narcotics. Narcotics just happened to fiscally exist in my close proximity in the space-time continuum of my person. They were not inside of my pocket, because topologically speaking, my pocket is not a hole." but the plagiarism is a scape goat for her real faillings.
@@KingPhilipsRideshare Simple. Use big words in relation to science concepts to make people think you know what you're talking about. In other words, he's speaking nonsense but he sure sounds smart.
I feel that our aversion is plagiarism is rooted in the fact that it is the first adult sin that we are instructed that we should avoid because we ourselves as children could willingly and probabilistically could commit it. It’s very unlikely that a grade schooler could or would commit murder. Certainly something we are taught is bad, but which adults didn’t seriously care about. We are quickly taught not to look at anyone’s paper. As a precocious lad, I wasn’t about the write a sub-standard one page essay on the state of Maine. Is the fact that I interchanged active and passive voice and antecedents and pronouns evidence of plagiarism? How else would my 10 year old self have understood that he was supposed to “interpret” the facts of the World Book encyclopedia? This was the WORLD BOOK. These were incontrovertible truths! What was I supposed 6:58 to do but report them? Frankly, beyond the pablum of advice I received as a grad schooler, how was I instructed to evolve this view? Any college+-aged morality I had evolved over the next 8-17 years was nothing against the great monolith of knowledge that was Sterling Memorial Library. Lex et Veritas. Truth. Who taught anything about the system of self-policing of its interpretation??
You trying the justify plagiarism for 20 minutes doesn’t affect the reality that she broke the rules. Plain and simple. At the very least, as president, she should be held accountable of breaking the same restrictions of those placed on her students.
The video is based on the absurd statements at the beginning that academics don't consider plagiarism a big deal. Professors are fired all the time for this. You can't be a university president, let alone Harvard's, if you plagiarize. THAT'S A FACT. The video goes on to compare academic papers to RUclips. WHAT? I don't care if content creators lift their material and don't cite their sources. RUclips is entertainment. I also don't care if pop magazines do this (though they often DO cite sources in a colloquial way). I certainly hope medical researchers aren't lifting data and coming to false conclusions before they permit new drugs and procedures.
As a fiction writer, I recently had an instant of kleptomnesia. A few months ago, I came up with a scene I thought was fun and interesting, but recently I watched a scene from a movie I like (but haven't watched in maybe ten years) and I realized 'What the heck? These are basically the same, beat for beat!' Luckily, I'm able to alter or cut the scene at this point, but it's very jarring when something like this happens.
Formerly the Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) since 2018, Dr. Gay holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford. She served as a government professor at Stanford before joining Harvard in 2006. Graduating from Stanford in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Dr. Gay received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for her outstanding undergraduate thesis. In 1998, she earned her Ph.D. in government from Harvard, winning the Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. A quantitative social scientist specializing in political behavior, she held positions at Stanford before joining Harvard in 2006. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay has been a fellow at institutions such as the Public Policy Institute of California, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Currently, she serves on the boards of the Pew Research Center, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Dr. Gay is also part of the oversight committee for the new Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Ralph Waldo Emerson said something like the following. "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
This highlights one of the key issues of our society: People need rewards to live and to get these rewards they need to be acknowledged - the point isn't necessarily to accomplish or create, but to make sure others think that you have. If we better distributed our resources, people wouldn't have to spend so much effort showing off (who cares who did/owns what) and could simply focus on doing stuff. Imagine how far ahead we could be.
The academics that Gray plagiarized only defend her because she's on the "right" political team. If any of their own students had done the same, they would've immediately turned them into the academic disciplinary board.
Claudine Gay deserved to be sacked for her atrocious and smug lack of leadership and general incompetence. If plagiarism had to be cited to get that result, I'm totally okay with that.
If she committed plagiarism as defined by the university she works for, she's guilty, case closed, end of argument. Let alone being unable to say that calling for the genocide of any group should not be tolerated.
Video misses the importance of hypocrisy in getting us all worked up. In these cases, it's someone who is taking a moral grand stand shown to be selective in their purity. It makes us angry and gleeful, because now we can attack our opponents character or otherwise found the kink in the armor of someone who's made us feel guilty. It is worth remembering that we started this, long ago we started the trend of of pouring through output looking for 'problematic' content, it's just the RW have turned it into an industrial process .
YUP. The social norms for civilized discourse have been eroded for years by the same kind of malicious character assassination and cancelation campaigns by the other side of the aisle, and are now watching in horror as the monster they created turns against them. Hopefully this is a wake up call for both sides that this kind of mob mentality comes back around to hurt everyone eventually, and incentivizes deescalating the witch hunt rhetoric that has become a staple of modern life.
11:22 i mentioned before one of the people she stole from A retired Vanderbilt University professor called for the immediate firing of the embattled higher education leader to "steer the university back towards sanity." "Fire Claudine Gay posthaste," Dr. Carol Swain posted Thursday on X
Maybe this is just a cultural difference, but I do not think anyone shed a tear when zu Guttenberg was kicked out as Defense Minister for academic dishonesty for his dissertation. If you would not have gotten the job without the degree, the person should not have the position.
A lot of the controversy around plagiarism stems from how it reveals that so many societal systems are B.S. Is a student who plagiarizes Wikipedia for a report really going to be less prepared for the workforce? Coming from a former student that didn't... no. It's been a decade since I graduated, and outside of "generalized principles", my degree has been nothing more than a checkbox into an unrelated career. In fact, capitalism is built around getting the most from the least effort; or ideally, from the effort of others and no effort of your own.
I think this is part of a larger question that is facing us down as a society. Namely, what should our views on ownership be going forward. Do we want to be a society where a media company can arbitrarily scrap a completed tv show for tax purposes? Do we want to be a society where a vaccine developed with public funding should be restricted in production to the company holding the patent? Do we want to be a society where farmers are criminalized for replanting seeds from crops they grew because the company that modified the seeds they planted says they can't? Do we want to be a society where hundreds of games that are no longer sold or supported in any form by their owners are allowed to disappear entirely rather than allow people to preserve them and provide access to them for free? Do we want to be a society where people are not allowed to repair their own property because the manufacturers built in systems that brick the machine if it's tinkered with? Do we want to be a society where the sole manufacturer of a medically essential drug is allowed to engage in rampant price hiking? Do we want to be a society where built-in functions of things you purchased are restricted by subscriptions and turned off if you don't pay? These are questions of ownership, about where the boundaries of personal ownership, copyright, trademark, patent, and contract should be. I have my own views on these subjects, but ultimately, these are subjects we are all involved in to some degree, and we will have to find an answer for together.
Kleptomnesia was called "plagiarinspiration" by the band The Clash - they accidentally copied the album art style for London Calling from an Elvis Presley album. In my failed attempt to be a musician, we used this word whenever we accidentally pulled a George Harrison.
A couple of points: when Dr Gay was writing her dissertation standards were different. If you consider the standards of the time the paper was written there’s even less of a problem. 2. This was racially motivated and it’s a bit depressing that the vid never touches on it. This happened because of the inherent belief of a large group of Americans that any successful black person does not deserve their station. This prejudice has been weaponized at black people since the foundation of the United States.
As a teaching assistant, yeah it matters in academia. But there’s a lot more grace for undergraduates especially first and second years then you might think.
I think calling plagiarism an “obscure academic issue most folks know nothing about” is a bit disingenuous. Most people learn about it from a very young age at school and it continues to be something wildly talked about and punished very harshly in university’s even at the undergraduate level. A decent amount of your audience is college educated. Why do you think you can trivialize it so easily?
Someone repeating our joke louder getting all the laughs happened to way too many of us. It's that core childhood memory that gets us so pissed off at people plagiarizing. It's the feeling of injustice at someone who did less of the work being more rewarded for it than the one who did more of it that keeps turning up in our lives and pissing us off again and again as we grow up, usually in small ways but sometimes in larger ones. Citation is just our way of trying to share some of the benefit we'll (potentially) draw from someone else's work with the person who did the work. It's a conscious effort on the part of our society to impose justice on an inherently unjust part of our world. That's what makes it an increasingly precious cultural artifact to uphold as full originality becomes more and more impossible to achieve.
In college you could get kicked of college or receive and F for plagiarism or wrong citations. That was 15 years ago. Even 15 years ago I had teachers and professors say that plagiarism was not a big problem to them as long as you rewrote it and didn’t quote stats as your own. But they said their job wouldn’t allow it if found. In plagiarism of stories, it’s been going on forever on the Internet you’ll see 5 to 10 to 15 articles that all say the thing. From left and right. So it’s a do as I say and not as I do. I didn’t mind what she said on the hill. But she is held to a higher standard as she does her students
While I respect and even laugh at your analysis of South Park and Rick and Morty; I cannot excuse this hall pass for Claudine Gay. This isn't just about a simple plagiarism hall pass; this is about holding adjunct professors to the same standard they should be holding their students. Giving Dr. Gay a pass for this destroys the good name of top IVY league schools, because even though I did not go to an IVY league school; my professors still kept my classmates and me to a zero plagiarism standard that is (or should be) the same across all universities; especially the top ones in the nation. Allowing this hall pass sets a precedent that diminishes the collegiate system's little creditability that they have left; after the implementation of DEI standards.
It’s a pattern for this channel. Straw man, ignore, obfuscate, misdirection. Forget about the plagiarism for a second. How about a look at Ms. Gay’s wafer thin resume and work experience. Especially following up a video about DEI where the same sleigh of hand was employed.
Plagiarism is a natural part of sentient existence. If your feelings are hurt by someone copying your work then you deserve it, because you narcisstically don't acknowledge that you have already done the same. If you have integrity then your feelings won't be hurt because you know that your plagiarism comes from appreciation, not desire to profit.
When you put a price tag on art, priceless creativity becomes worthless and worthless creativity becomes priceless. Kleptonesia? Does it even make sense? I dunno Let see if someone plagiarizes it.
It also feels relevant that, before the invention of the printing press, it was really difficult or basically impossible to attribute sources because most storytelling was oral, not written. Who are tou going crdit when you don't know who originally came up with the story you listened to, that is itself probably a ripoff of a story the teller listened to?
The Congressperson gave her own definition/interpretation of the words/phrases when she asked the question that doesn’t match up with the actual definitions. If Gay corrected it, some would call her a genocide sympathizer or say she’s trying to obscure the truth. If she disavowed it, she would have been criticized by her students and likely some faculty members for lying and not standing up for the students. Lose-lose situation either way.
Modern academic thought is a victim of its own rigorous emphasis on empiric evidence. Modern scientist: I have summarized the last 80 years of research in this field and we have demonstrated in our experiment with this slightly altered compound that it performs in a manner which is predictable through chemical principles and quantum theory. Plato: It came to me in a dream.
Plagiarism is only a problem because we value the person saying it more than the message and that’s the root cause of the problem. Attribution and credit is a vain pursuit.
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You guys always make My day 😊😊😊😊❤❤❤❤
She's not salty about being unpopular at all is she lol
Sellout
@@dsgdsg9764 wut?
How would you prefer we keep the channel afloat? @@Sieur_du_Helles
Michael gets a kid and all of a sudden he thinks he can be a socialist by taking a sick day… Sad
He's become a monster.
Absolutely inexcusable laziness
Effing commie tankie
Hahah
Totally right.
Even though it’s mainly politics leading the charge on the discussion, these examples of plagiarism opens the door to a larger conversation about the state of our educational institutions. It's becoming clear that plagiarism, along with the replication crisis, the prohibitive cost and inaccessibility of education, the awful collective treatment of associate professors, and the hyper-politicization of academic environments, are not separate issues but rather interconnected signs of a systemic problem. The education system, as it stands, seems to be diverging from its intended purpose and ideals
Its a hard but necessary conversation for the future of the people and the governments that are supposed to represent and promote the welfare of those people. The sticking point is that it would require massive subsidy and regulatory capture to bring the education system back in line with the ideals of creating a more enlightened, worldly connected, wiser people. That money does have to come from somewhere, and higher taxes are basically the only meaningful option as long as the funding sink that is the American Military continues to be the single largest employer in history, making less funding a very unwelcome idea even among many on the left, because of the job loss that would result. That can be done, but requires more progressive politicians and allies that will vote with them in office, both locally and at large.
Depends. Did you copy the text word for word? Something as simple as rephrasing text in your own words is enough. But if you're copying 'commonly held knowledge' word for word, that's still plagiarism.
It's disgusting how you downplay academic plagiarism as some esoteric and unimpactful topic that nobody cares about. Anyone associated with academia or anyone who has gone through an undergraduate degree knows how important plagiarism rules are.
Preech. I'm currently on the job market while finishing up my dissertation. I'm looking for a mostly teaching position because while I can do research I don't enjoy it (due to the incrementalism) but I do enjoy teaching college students. However, the treatment of teaching-first and teaching-only positions is awful even though it is fundamentally what the whole institution of academia is about.
my big issue with education is that more and more it's perceived less as a means of learning and educating yourself, as it is a means of upward mobility, a place you go to get qualifications, and also learn a bunch of stuff you don't care about
(It’s hard to say that “plagiarism doesn’t matter within the ivory tower walls of academia” all while those in undergrad and grad school have to sign multiple documents promising not to plagiarize and being threatened that if they do, they shall be kicked out of school forever.)
Well to be fair they never said “plagiarism doesn’t matter” they said it has less significance at high levels, especially with respect to what would be considered common knowledge of the field. I know exactly the section youre referencing but im too lazy to clip the exact statement. Apparently you were too bc you made this comment in the first place lol
The dreded black mark on your transcript
There were two issues at play. One was an academic failure to uphold standards and the second was an intentional campaign to oust her.
Both matter but her job should not have been the cost of said academic failure given her overall achievements post graduation.
@myhandlewastakenandIgaveup I don't agree. If plagiarism is the death blow to an undergrad students career then why would we hold the president of the school to a lower standard? Like OP said, in every class they make a huge deal and have countless threats if you get caught plagiarizing. They make it clear that it's unacceptable. So just hold her to that same standard.
@@Aaron-kj8dv thats a super fair point which I don't have a direct counter for. I would only say that (as an extreme) if we found out that Einstein had failed to properly cite his sources would it tarnish his legacy but that is clearly a hyperbolic example and in reality we probably need to tone down the plagiarism punishments which can easily be excused as mistakes.
Helen is AMAZING! So happy to See her again
We need more Helen! #wewanthelen
Can't agree enough! Michael is great, dont get me wrong! But one of wisecrack's strength used to be it's diverse cast of hosts. We missed you Helen!
Wisecrack feels like a PBS after-school program for adulthood, and I mean that in a good way. I always feel like every video has enough substance and knowledge in it that I can understand a new/unfamiliar philosophical concept, a little bit of history/politics, and some general humanities enough to be interested to look more into it. Great video as always.
the citing of Michael at the beginning wasn't Chicago style. were gonna send you to the academic council.
Michael demands to only be cited in Chicago style (mustard, no ketchup.)
Harvard Style Gang
Let’s be honest, the rules around Academic plagiarism are insane. So, many times I’ve had to ask myself if something was common knowledge or if I should cite where I most recently read it. Citations rules in general are also confusing. But the real point of all of it is that no one has ever followed protocol to 100%. We’ve all cut corners or screwed up something in our lives. Especially sleep deprived, poverty stricken grad students writing their thesis at 3 a.m. this is just a blatant attack on someone for political reasons. And this from the party willing to ignore the graveyard of skeletons in Trumps closet.
My writing strategy.
Opinion. Reword citation and elaborate as much as possible. Conclusion.
I still don’t know how to write papers
Plagiarism is like assault, oftentimes the main defining factor is whether the 'victim' is willing to assert they are harmed. Of course egregious examples can be argued in absence of a victim, but for the most part the offended party should need to speak out as being offended.
It’s 3 am here and I’m writing my thesis, and my deadline is next Friday🥲
And yes the self questioning struggle is real
@@nihilisticgachaall the best. I know how it feels.
No it isn't. She lied & stole. She's not Mozart building on the work of previous artists. She's a grifter who got herself something she didn't earn or deserve through deceit.
One would hope the president of America's flagship educational institution would be held to higher standards than the mediocre baseline of uninspired undergrads.
Having said that, manufactured outrage and hypocrisy is a huge problem. Tho not the sole domain of the political right.
It's not so much as manufactured outrage as it is the continuation of a saga. It's all about lowering standards for the sake of diversity. Nobody with this number of plagiarism violations should ever be hired for the position of president of Harvard. It's that simple.
It's not necessary to manufacture outrage for this issue. Claudine Gay created the problem.
@@matthewatwood8641 Claudine caused her own downfall. She made it very clear that her political views are more important than the safety of all the students. Not only did she lose the confidence of donors, she ridiculed the academic integrity of the university.
@@ElizabethD33 The only reason she got as far as she did was identity politics. What's happening to her, Harvard, & everyone else affected by this exposes how destructive that kind of thinking & behavior are.
Can you name a "manufactured outrage" issue from the left? Like, a single real one.
I like Burns and I also like everyone else. Including you, dear reader
Great video as always! Thanks Helen for stepping in while Michael is sick!!
Eh, I think it's actually extremely important on the left that we hold our politicians and civil servants to a much higher standard, especially in matters of honesty and integrity.
Yeah this framing is super annoying. It's literally the meme of "it's okay when we do it"
You're literally just describing cancel culture
reducto ad adsurdum.
You can hold people to a higher standard and still be realistic about how bad something actually is. Her plagiarism boiled down to a handful of extremely minor, easily understandable errors. That's not how people have treated them, though.
@@ArcticWolfe84false
You are missing a point. If a student di EXACTLY what she did and gets caught, would be expelled. So, for the head of an organization, the "do as I say, not as I do" is not admissible.
If students can have their future thrown away for plagiarism. Then profeasional academics should have their degrees revoked.
Are you in academia at all?
@@nathaniel1670 Even in highschool. plagiarism was something that could get you suspended.
Complete utter BS that the head of Harvard does what would have gotten me kicked out of both HighSchool and College; And walks around with a gaggle of supporters saying that what she did was "minor".
@@multiwinia1 In high school, you aren't working on hundreds of pages of work that relies on a massive body research. In high school, you aren't writing terribly rigorous papers, so citation shouldn't be terribly difficult.
When it comes to the reality of academia, academics are under a lot of pressure to pump out large volumes of work and mistakes can be made. They're human and citation rules are nebulous at times.
Everyone keeps mentioning the hypothetical college student who gets expelled for forgetting to cite something, but I'm pretty sure this rarely, if ever, actually happens. Expulsion comes after some gross violation, not something minor like forgetting to cite a sentence or two in a much much larger piece of work. It comes down to how the infractions affect the overall essence of the scholarship and whether or not there was some obvious intent to pass others' work off as your own.
In Gay's case, I've read the allegedly plagiarized portions, and I would agree, as the comments in the video state, that her mistakes were minor and do not affect the overall quality and contribution of her scholarship. That isn't to say that it should be completely excused, but it did not justify her public excoriation and should not be the basis for her dismissal as an academic.
People, like yourself I presume, are trying to cover up their disdain for academia and higher education by cloaking their attacks in what seems like a reasonable position of being against plagiarism. But we all know that they, and you, don't really care about plagiarism or the integrity of academia.
It's almost as if you didn't actually watch the video.
@@nathaniel1670 This sounds like a lot of excuses. If you get caught plagiarizing, you deserve the punishments coming your way.
@@yankeeluver100 You seem like the type to have absolutely no sense of nuance.
The more I go through with my PhD, the more I begin to understand I don't really have a chance in getting an academic career. 😭
It's tough. It might work out! It doesn't for some! But it's a tough industry right now.
I feel ya mate
Post PhD here, I left to go to the non-profit research industry because I was over the academy, but just wanted to say there are so many other careers for PhDs. Academia is a tough industry, and I hope it works out if you want it, but even if it doesnt, hopefully you find other avenues that bring you joy (like how the folks behind this channel have).
@@RustCorp buddy as a STEM PGR whose friends with other PhD and Postdocs, it's just as hard and cutthroat getting and staying employed as the 'soft sciences'. Especially in academia. Get off your high horse when you clearly aren't even in the field yourself.
@@WisecrackEDU it's been a tough industry for the last 20+ years, and it doesn't look like it is going to improve any time soon.
Plagiarism can absolutely be a real issue with serious negative consequences. But if we specifically look at the moral panic surrounding the concept of plagiarism and the obsession people have with originality, that's a different matter entirely. That I think stems largely from the emergence of the modern, first past the post model of copyright law under capitalism. People have become more sensitive to the idea of copyright infringement in general partly because the systems we live under dictate that the first one to claim copyright functionally has a monopoly on financially benefiting from something, especially in creative fields. And in practice, wealth can be used as a bludgeon to "cut in line" when it comes to monopolizing the right to profit from an idea. When you put all that together with the "work or die" impetus of life under capitalism, it becomes much clearer where people get the impulse to be so protective of the concept of "original" ideas.
it sucks to do work and have someone else take credit for that.
it sucks to do work and have someone else get by with stealing another person's work instead.
If you are just going to copy work from others then you have plenty of time to create a proper citation.
Plagiarism kills creativity and stifles effort.
and you're referring to what specifically?
Certainly not to what Dr Gay did.
I find plagiarism it be an interesting topic particularly in how it relates to music, as that's an area I'm personally invested in rather than literature and academia. I'm a fan of hbomberguy and was a little taken aback by how vitriolic his community reacted to the accused plagiarists in his video. I mean, people like James Somerton were 100% stealing, but nuance seems to have gone out the window on what's ok and what's not. Tons of people on his discord server began scouring the internet on a witch hunt looking for anyone who's copied a line verbatim from an article or approximated someone else's outline for a video or essay. Frankly, it became super toxic, and much in the same way that hbomberguy was making a character assessment of Internet Historian based on his community for not disparaging his right wing audience, hbomberguy has been a little bit of a hypocrite by remaining quiet on all of his fans running around and harassing people.
In the music community, while no one is saying to outright steal someones composition, it's pretty common to copy some portion of something that someone else did (particularly to explore that idea) and repurpose it for your own song. I think at this point it's expected unless you're some kind of avant-garde auteur who punches pig carcasses as a percussive element. Like, transposing a melody and changing its key and time signature while also changing the underlying rhythm section beneath, not to mention the overall timbre of the music and your choice of instrumentation; you'd have NO idea something was "stolen". A lot of those copyright lawsuits relating to pop songs that have gone around are completely ridiculous and Adam Neely has talked about it quite a bit, that no one involve in the law really knows what they're talking about. Much like some of the points covered in this video (16:02), a lot of musical knowledge is people incrementally copying ideas from one another over centuries and its how we've continued to grow artistically.
Personally, a lot of this plagiarism news just seems like drama by moral elitists who probably haven't created anything themselves. Thinking that they're activists for something. Like, stay in your own lane. Hbomberguy is allowed to criticize people because he himself is an essayist, Wisecrack is allowed to talk about this stuff because they're academics. "Allowed" is strong language, I'm just saying not everyone needs an opinion on this shit or has the qualifications to talk about it meaningfully.
Thanks for this! Super interesting and I think you're right that the music thing really complicates this. The fact that so much great music is built upon other compositions, riffs, rhythms, etc., and that's to say nothing of sampled music and electronic music. I wonder if there is something different amongst musicians and artists themselves where there is more of a collective understanding that "great artists steal", whereas academics, writers, and RUclipsrs are more precious about "owning" their own ideas?
Holy shit dude u seriously wrote this on a comment, that should be the header of an email
@@WisecrackEDU as a multi-instrumentalist who has worked with artists across the genre spectrum it depends on the culture around the genre. Jazz artists especially care very little about that bc of the long tradition of jazz standards and improvisation, but metal artists tend to be REALLY tetchy about biting rhythms & riffs. Generally though the fans are a lot more precious about it than artists are. We understand a little more internally that genres and artists are in constant sonic conversation with each other, reacting against or building off what came before... But I'd also say that's hardly exclusive to music. It's just that it's more abstracted with music than, say, philosophy. It's a lot easier to say "this is just paraphrasing Fanon" definitively than it is to say "they stole that from led zeppelin" bc of all the moving parts besides semantics, like texture, key, tone, rhythm, tempo, instrumentation, interplay etc.
well said!
I appreciate your thoughtful comment so much-well said!
1:50 I find it troubling that Wisecrack tries to downplay the severity of plagiarism in academia. Why is there one standard for High-level administrators but a much more rigorous standard for Poor Low-income Students who are throwing themselves into debt just to be there?
Having double ethics standards for elites vs. young & working class people isn’t exactly Liberal just saying.
You would think a Philosophy channel ran by Philosophy PhDs would have the integrity to recognize the value of honesty & consistency when it comes to LEADERSHIP in Academia.
Philosophy majors more than anyone should recognize the value of their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and recognize that it is THEFT when that intellectual property is stolen, no?
Or is it fine if people copy paste the content from your channel and claim it as their own because of excuses like “the ivory tower does not care” & it’s “not that big of a deal” “some of the people who were stolen from were chill with it” to use your own phrasing and “reasoning”…🙄
Also, art is NOT about imitation. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Imitation is suicide.” as a society and through the lens of history we don’t collectively remember the art that looks like everything else we’ve already seen. Original works have always been seen as far more valuable & passing your work off as original when it isn’t is Fraud!
Finally I ask you this: Would you be consistent and make the same defense for a Right-wing President of a University if they got caught plagiarizing? If it was a conservative prof, would you still be as sympathetic towards Intellectual Property Theft in that case? If not, you’re just as cynically partisan as the people Wisecrack tries to point fingers at.
In these divided times, I don’t think the core message of this video is productive for anyone except lazy academic elites at Harvard or Yale who know they cheated & stole content to finish their Dissertations. A better topic would be why Administrators are held to one plagiarism standard while students are held to another.
I love Wisecrack content & I won’t stop watching because of 1 miss. But as someone who values INTEGRITY & ACADEMIC RIGOR, Wisecrack really lost a lot of respect from me on this one. 🤷♂️
So right. Am a classical liberal so totally agree with you, good point there!
It is a lot more than a single miss tho, shows a broader pattern of which this is the most obvious.
And I am a rich kid, so I can self reflect
Let me answer: NO, they would NOT be consistent and argue the same points had the Harvard President been another conservative that was cancelled for wrongthink.
1:50 I find it troubling that Wisecrack tries to downplay the severity of plagiarism in academia. Why is there one standard for High-level administrators but a much more rigorous standard for Poor Low-income Students who are throwing themselves into debt just to be there?
Having double ethics standards for elites vs. young & working class people isn’t exactly Liberal just saying.
You would think a Philosophy channel ran by Philosophy PhDs would have the integrity to recognize the value of honesty & consistency when it comes to LEADERSHIP in Academia.
Philosophy majors more than anyone should recognize the value of their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and recognize that it is THEFT when that intellectual property is stolen, no?
Or is it fine if people copy paste the content from your channel and claim it as their own because of excuses like “the ivory tower does not care” & it’s “not that big of a deal” “some of the people who were stolen from were chill with it” to use your own phrasing and “reasoning”…🙄
Also, art is NOT about imitation. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Imitation is suicide.” as a society and through the lens of history we don’t collectively remember the art that looks like everything else we’ve already seen. Original works have always been seen as far more valuable & passing your work off as original when it isn’t is Fraud!
Finally I ask you this: Would you be consistent and make the same defense for a Right-wing President of a University if they got caught plagiarizing? If it was a conservative prof, would you still be as sympathetic towards Intellectual Property Theft in that case? If not, you’re just as cynically partisan as the people Wisecrack tries to point fingers at.
In these divided times, I don’t think the core message of this video is productive for anyone except lazy academic elites at Harvard or Yale who know they cheated & stole content to finish their Dissertations. A better topic would be why Administrators are held to one plagiarism standard while students are held to another.
I love Wisecrack content & I won’t stop watching because of 1 miss. But as someone who values INTEGRITY & ACADEMIC RIGOR, Wisecrack really lost a lot of respect from me on this one. 🤷♂
If I had turned in multiple assignments without proper citations, then I would have been thrown out of university, the same rules should apply for the academics that work there. If it was 1 isolated time then it can be overlooked, but it was many times, and was a pattern of low integrity from her, and she had such a high position in Harvard so should have to pay the same price that a regular student would pay. No special privileges for being black and female.
Finally someone with a brain in the comments !
Saying "No special privileges for being black and female" is so disingenuous when her being a black woman is what put the target on her back in the 1st place...
@@TheCrogunyour comment is disingenuous. The point is EVERYONE should be held to the same standard. That's it.
If you don't want that, then check yourself.
@@Aaron-kj8dvbut is everyone truly being held to the same standard or is the standard only being applied because it's a black woman? Like the point is obvious but you can't ignore context...
Yeah, imagine a president of an university doing plagiarism like RUclipsrs. You know, university and RUclips are regarded to the same low standards.
@1:50 That is a misnomer. According to the Washington Post article published January 4th written by Sophia Nguyen
"In a few cases, she did not make any mention of her source."
While I like a video around plagiarism is alright using it to essentially cover for a university president undermines the entire video. Countless of students go through every aspect of plagiarism rules and are punished ruthlessly for violating plagiarism rules. Either the rules are applied equally or the rules lose all meaning.
Gay was the President of Harvard. She is, and should be, held to the highest example of rigour. Yes, there were political motivations for making this story as internationally big as it was. But it doesn't change the fact that she was rightly punished for her academic dishonesty
你说的是对的，保持良好的工作！
Micheal is great, but it's wonderful to see the Wisecrack Queen again!
Agreed.
I'm surprised that no mention is made of convergent creativity/invention. There are so many creatives online these days that truly original thought is becoming increasingly rare as there is a limited amount of potential creative paths to take under any cultural context.
I'm reminded of the Danish inventor who was denied a patent for a device that would dredge up shipwrecks because the same concept had already appeared in a Carl Barks Donald Duck comic.
Context is everything when evaluating people by standards. Ask why are these standards are implemented, or is the prosecuting side abiding by them.
**Hollywood shuffles it feet and looks around nervously**
😂😂😂😂
The concept of intellectual property as we know it is living on borrowed time. It won't be gone within our lifetime, but as soon as it was possible for me to create a perfect copy of something with a simple mouse click, the moral and ethical implications got muddied to the point that once you get down that rabbit hole, you end up at a fork of either "Artists should be paid for their work" or "we shouldn't have systems in place that stop us from living if we don't have money" - I don't have a creative output partly because I have to work a job that keeps me both relatively busy and exhausted most of the time, but also because I don't want to have to deal with all of the legal fictions that come with the intellectual property domain of things. People copy things they like to have more of them, and the fact that sometimes the means of copying imparts the ability to make new things should have always been celebrated in my opinion.
Pandora's box has been opened on the AI front. It's here to stay like the internet was, some of us just don't know it yet. Even with the limitations it has now, as a proof of concept what we have is encouraging more research into deeper and more complex algorithms for machine learning, and sooner or later we will be able to make something that operates in such a way as to be indistinguishable from independent thought. It's just a matter of time. I don't know what that means for the future. Like all tools, I figure AI can be used for many different purposes all across the morality scale. But ultimately, it's something that we're going to adapt to working and living with.
The part about “ai is here to stay” simply isn’t as true as most people (including the tech bros pushing its use) think it is. The ammount of energy (and physical equipment) AI uses is absolutely insane, and the more it’s used the higher this will go, the more it will slow down, and the more its used, the more the very thing it needs to function (genuine human content, and genuine human verification and data scrubbing) will not be able to keep up with it, at all.
This ai crazy is a result of people putting all those crypto mining facilities to work doing… something else, trying to justify their existence and need. Trying to monetize them, even if it’s completely unsustainable or poor quality, all by taking advantage of the fact that people don’t understand how it all works.
Honestly, this is one of those big things about how when we are didactically given morals. like of course plagiarism is a bad thing to do, everyone tells me so. Also, the only time I've encounter plagiarism in my life it is about properly citing things. Therefore improperly citing things must be a moral failing.
Kleptomnesia (though I didn’t have a word for it before) has always been a fear of mine when I think about possibly writing music… once something is in my head, I can’t discern whether I actually created it or it’s from something else and I just retrieved it from the back of my mind, so I’ve always just kept it in my head out of fear that I could be copying someone…
Also fun fact: the kleptomnesia of a song is the impetus for the plot of the hit Disney classic show “Austin and Ally”
2:13 What do you mean the ivy tower does not care about plagiarism? They would kick a normal student out in a heartbeat.
Holding people in power to account is always fair, especially when they are a DEI hire (or rich). They need to be removed from their position and it is fair to go after them by any means necessary.
When the working class starts getting access to these opportunities we can be more forgiving. You don't get to gate keep opportunity... and then botch it
you actually got me with the title change damn
I studied Hispanic Literature in one of the most prestigious universities of Mexico, la UNAM. I remember a teacher from the first semester whose class was about reaserch, how to find a book in the library, how to make a reference, and how to quote. When he talked about plagiarism, he begged us, crying, not to plagiarize, to do our quotations the right way, to do proper reaserch about our thesis, to read and to write thinking in the writers and academics helping us in our writing. That really shocked me, and I remember him every time I try to write something that is not my crazy thoughts and feelings. But here in Mexico, I think that the plagiarism cases that have involved politicians, even our former president, just show that our goverment is a corrupt one. Because a president can get away with it, a thesis advisor can give to the students the same thesis so they can graduate and then become a politician. Even if you are studying your PhD and the Academy discovers that you wrote an article that plagiarize an idea from another one, they kick you out. But you can have a happy ending with the right connections. It's all about the connections and money here.
The fact that they referred to drawing mass hate to this woman over a relatively minor infraction to the point of getting her to step down from her position as “conservative activism” honestly says a lot about the current state of modern conservative politics…
Great job Helen, you really channeled your inner Michael!
According to the Washington Post "In a few cases, she did not make any mention of her source." What you said at 1:50 wasn't accurate and a misnomer.
The smug dissent of your political enemies while going to bat for Cluadine Gay as a victim of "The Right" for some victimless thought crime is disingenuous and avoidant of her surrounding activities. The argument that plagiarism isn't actually that bad does nothing for me when she is supposed to be the paragon of academic integrity as the President of the most prestigious university on Earth. I would support her being removed from the Presidency for her comments on the conduct against her Jewish students, her lack of meaningful academic literature, or her plagiarism. This is substandard work for Wisecrack. I subscribed for insightful historical and philosophical context to modern media, and not partisan political talking points.
Remember in old Facebook days people would build these pages with sports talk or memes and then one day they'd be sold to someone trying to sell timeshares or something weird? I know it didn't happen, but this video makes it look like Wisecrack got sold to some political opportunists where they immediately for no reason pivot to political talking points.
Saying that Claudine Gay failed to properly cite resources is like saying "No officer, I was not in possession of narcotics. Narcotics just happened to fiscally exist in my close proximity in the space-time continuum of my person. They were not inside of my pocket, because topologically speaking, my pocket is not a hole." but the plagiarism is a scape goat for her real faillings.
What the fuck dude
@@KingPhilipsRideshare Simple. Use big words in relation to science concepts to make people think you know what you're talking about.
In other words, he's speaking nonsense but he sure sounds smart.
You're probably one of the people who listens to Christopher Rufo.
I hate Chris Rufo, but ya make a good point.
Saying Claudine Gay committed plagiarism is like saying I am a racist.
I feel that our aversion is plagiarism is rooted in the fact that it is the first adult sin that we are instructed that we should avoid because we ourselves as children could willingly and probabilistically could commit it.
It’s very unlikely that a grade schooler could or would commit murder. Certainly something we are taught is bad, but which adults didn’t seriously care about.
We are quickly taught not to look at anyone’s paper.
As a precocious lad, I wasn’t about the write a sub-standard one page essay on the state of Maine. Is the fact that I interchanged active and passive voice and antecedents and pronouns evidence of plagiarism? How else would my 10 year old self have understood that he was supposed to “interpret” the facts of the World Book encyclopedia? This was the WORLD BOOK. These were incontrovertible truths! What was I supposed 6:58 to do but report them?
Frankly, beyond the pablum of advice I received as a grad schooler, how was I instructed to evolve this view?
Any college+-aged morality I had evolved over the next 8-17 years was nothing against the great monolith of knowledge that was Sterling Memorial Library.
Lex et Veritas.
Truth.
Who taught anything about the system of self-policing of its interpretation??
You trying the justify plagiarism for 20 minutes doesn’t affect the reality that she broke the rules. Plain and simple. At the very least, as president, she should be held accountable of breaking the same restrictions of those placed on her students.
Helen presenting Michaels work for this exact video is Art
The video is based on the absurd statements at the beginning that academics don't consider plagiarism a big deal. Professors are fired all the time for this. You can't be a university president, let alone Harvard's, if you plagiarize. THAT'S A FACT. The video goes on to compare academic papers to RUclips. WHAT? I don't care if content creators lift their material and don't cite their sources. RUclips is entertainment. I also don't care if pop magazines do this (though they often DO cite sources in a colloquial way). I certainly hope medical researchers aren't lifting data and coming to false conclusions before they permit new drugs and procedures.
As a fiction writer, I recently had an instant of kleptomnesia. A few months ago, I came up with a scene I thought was fun and interesting, but recently I watched a scene from a movie I like (but haven't watched in maybe ten years) and I realized 'What the heck? These are basically the same, beat for beat!' Luckily, I'm able to alter or cut the scene at this point, but it's very jarring when something like this happens.
Formerly the Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) since 2018, Dr. Gay holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford. She served as a government professor at Stanford before joining Harvard in 2006.
Graduating from Stanford in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Dr. Gay received the Anna Laura Myers Prize for her outstanding undergraduate thesis. In 1998, she earned her Ph.D. in government from Harvard, winning the Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. A quantitative social scientist specializing in political behavior, she held positions at Stanford before joining Harvard in 2006.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay has been a fellow at institutions such as the Public Policy Institute of California, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Currently, she serves on the boards of the Pew Research Center, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Dr. Gay is also part of the oversight committee for the new Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Plagiarism 101
@@Sieur_du_Helles bahahaha... Im am curious what the qualifications of the past Harvard presidents 🤔
@@YoungBillyKatastrophe they were rich like me, that’s the short of it!
They should be held to at least the same standard they hold their students to. Simple as.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said something like the following.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
This highlights one of the key issues of our society: People need rewards to live and to get these rewards they need to be acknowledged - the point isn't necessarily to accomplish or create, but to make sure others think that you have.
If we better distributed our resources, people wouldn't have to spend so much effort showing off (who cares who did/owns what) and could simply focus on doing stuff. Imagine how far ahead we could be.
The academics that Gray plagiarized only defend her because she's on the "right" political team. If any of their own students had done the same, they would've immediately turned them into the academic disciplinary board.
Exactly!
Yes. There is one lady who is upset with Gay but notice they don’t bring her up.
Claudine Gay deserved to be sacked for her atrocious and smug lack of leadership and general incompetence. If plagiarism had to be cited to get that result, I'm totally okay with that.
Love ya wisecrack
HELEN! yay 😁😁😁
I hope you guys mention Holdovers in this video
If she committed plagiarism as defined by the university she works for, she's guilty, case closed, end of argument. Let alone being unable to say that calling for the genocide of any group should not be tolerated.
Agreed
lol "actually its a republican conspiracy" is a hell of a take
nicd to have u back helen
Video misses the importance of hypocrisy in getting us all worked up. In these cases, it's someone who is taking a moral grand stand shown to be selective in their purity. It makes us angry and gleeful, because now we can attack our opponents character or otherwise found the kink in the armor of someone who's made us feel guilty.
It is worth remembering that we started this, long ago we started the trend of of pouring through output looking for 'problematic' content, it's just the RW have turned it into an industrial process .
YUP. The social norms for civilized discourse have been eroded for years by the same kind of malicious character assassination and cancelation campaigns by the other side of the aisle, and are now watching in horror as the monster they created turns against them. Hopefully this is a wake up call for both sides that this kind of mob mentality comes back around to hurt everyone eventually, and incentivizes deescalating the witch hunt rhetoric that has become a staple of modern life.
Yay I missed a Helen videos! Also omg I love the hair style
11:22 i mentioned before one of the people she stole from A retired Vanderbilt University professor called for the immediate firing of the embattled higher education leader to "steer the university back towards sanity."
"Fire Claudine Gay posthaste," Dr. Carol Swain posted Thursday on X
Maybe this is just a cultural difference, but I do not think anyone shed a tear when zu Guttenberg was kicked out as Defense Minister for academic dishonesty for his dissertation.
If you would not have gotten the job without the degree, the person should not have the position.
I still get mad every time Fareed Zakaria’s face comes on the TV
Whoever comes to equity must come with clean hands.
'nuff said
In the New Yorker, there is a very insightful article about her, antisemitism, and D E I money.
0:01, my immediate reaction: HELEN!
He is not wrong.
A lot of the controversy around plagiarism stems from how it reveals that so many societal systems are B.S. Is a student who plagiarizes Wikipedia for a report really going to be less prepared for the workforce? Coming from a former student that didn't... no. It's been a decade since I graduated, and outside of "generalized principles", my degree has been nothing more than a checkbox into an unrelated career.
In fact, capitalism is built around getting the most from the least effort; or ideally, from the effort of others and no effort of your own.
Love the change of face. Literally.
I think this is part of a larger question that is facing us down as a society. Namely, what should our views on ownership be going forward. Do we want to be a society where a media company can arbitrarily scrap a completed tv show for tax purposes? Do we want to be a society where a vaccine developed with public funding should be restricted in production to the company holding the patent? Do we want to be a society where farmers are criminalized for replanting seeds from crops they grew because the company that modified the seeds they planted says they can't? Do we want to be a society where hundreds of games that are no longer sold or supported in any form by their owners are allowed to disappear entirely rather than allow people to preserve them and provide access to them for free? Do we want to be a society where people are not allowed to repair their own property because the manufacturers built in systems that brick the machine if it's tinkered with? Do we want to be a society where the sole manufacturer of a medically essential drug is allowed to engage in rampant price hiking? Do we want to be a society where built-in functions of things you purchased are restricted by subscriptions and turned off if you don't pay?
These are questions of ownership, about where the boundaries of personal ownership, copyright, trademark, patent, and contract should be. I have my own views on these subjects, but ultimately, these are subjects we are all involved in to some degree, and we will have to find an answer for together.
Gay received everything she deserved. Hopefully a lesson to other Harvard Presidents but probably not.
How dare people I don't agree with use valid accusations of plagiarism. Plagiarism is just a thing man, it should be normalized.
Kleptomnesia was called "plagiarinspiration" by the band The Clash - they accidentally copied the album art style for London Calling from an Elvis Presley album. In my failed attempt to be a musician, we used this word whenever we accidentally pulled a George Harrison.
A couple of points: when Dr Gay was writing her dissertation standards were different. If you consider the standards of the time the paper was written there’s even less of a problem.
2. This was racially motivated and it’s a bit depressing that the vid never touches on it. This happened because of the inherent belief of a large group of Americans that any successful black person does not deserve their station. This prejudice has been weaponized at black people since the foundation of the United States.
As a teaching assistant, yeah it matters in academia. But there’s a lot more grace for undergraduates especially first and second years then you might think.
So good to see wisecrack weigh on the palworld controversy.
I'm so glad palworld exists lmao. F*** gamefreak
@@DharmaPunk111honestly, same.
I think calling plagiarism an “obscure academic issue most folks know nothing about” is a bit disingenuous. Most people learn about it from a very young age at school and it continues to be something wildly talked about and punished very harshly in university’s even at the undergraduate level. A decent amount of your audience is college educated. Why do you think you can trivialize it so easily?
I apologize for the run on sentences.
Someone repeating our joke louder getting all the laughs happened to way too many of us. It's that core childhood memory that gets us so pissed off at people plagiarizing. It's the feeling of injustice at someone who did less of the work being more rewarded for it than the one who did more of it that keeps turning up in our lives and pissing us off again and again as we grow up, usually in small ways but sometimes in larger ones. Citation is just our way of trying to share some of the benefit we'll (potentially) draw from someone else's work with the person who did the work. It's a conscious effort on the part of our society to impose justice on an inherently unjust part of our world. That's what makes it an increasingly precious cultural artifact to uphold as full originality becomes more and more impossible to achieve.
In college you could get kicked of college or receive and F for plagiarism or wrong citations. That was 15 years ago. Even 15 years ago I had teachers and professors say that plagiarism was not a big problem to them as long as you rewrote it and didn’t quote stats as your own. But they said their job wouldn’t allow it if found.
In plagiarism of stories, it’s been going on forever on the Internet you’ll see 5 to 10 to 15 articles that all say the thing. From left and right.
So it’s a do as I say and not as I do. I didn’t mind what she said on the hill. But she is held to a higher standard as she does her students
Thanks again
6:44 - "Printed, and are to be fold by Peter Parker."
Yeah, our boy Spiderman himself.
You always do a great job!
Love Micheal but seeing Helen is definitely a good news
We are doing more consuming than creating so novel ideals become harder to come by
While I respect and even laugh at your analysis of South Park and Rick and Morty; I cannot excuse this hall pass for Claudine Gay. This isn't just about a simple plagiarism hall pass; this is about holding adjunct professors to the same standard they should be holding their students. Giving Dr. Gay a pass for this destroys the good name of top IVY league schools, because even though I did not go to an IVY league school; my professors still kept my classmates and me to a zero plagiarism standard that is (or should be) the same across all universities; especially the top ones in the nation. Allowing this hall pass sets a precedent that diminishes the collegiate system's little creditability that they have left; after the implementation of DEI standards.
It’s a pattern for this channel. Straw man, ignore, obfuscate, misdirection. Forget about the plagiarism for a second. How about a look at Ms. Gay’s wafer thin resume and work experience. Especially following up a video about DEI where the same sleigh of hand was employed.
Helen is an amazing host! Love her.
Give her the proper Host credit? I hope Michael gets well soon.
I really enjoyed this essay and learned a lot, plus the amazing editing and video narration by lovely Helen made it even nicer!
Might be the biggest cope of the year... "she didnt profit".. she makes $700k a year
Wisecrack? More like Smokescrack
Helen, you're a fabulous presenter, and I for one wish we saw you in more videos!
Is it weird I’m thinking of Palworld and Pokemon lol
NOT AT ALL
I wish you did more of the videos
Plagiarism is a natural part of sentient existence. If your feelings are hurt by someone copying your work then you deserve it, because you narcisstically don't acknowledge that you have already done the same. If you have integrity then your feelings won't be hurt because you know that your plagiarism comes from appreciation, not desire to profit.
Gay should be the example, she should be the best of us… our leaders are failing us
When you put a price tag on art, priceless creativity becomes worthless and worthless creativity becomes priceless.
Kleptonesia? Does it even make sense? I dunno Let see if someone plagiarizes it.
It also feels relevant that, before the invention of the printing press, it was really difficult or basically impossible to attribute sources because most storytelling was oral, not written. Who are tou going crdit when you don't know who originally came up with the story you listened to, that is itself probably a ripoff of a story the teller listened to?
8:48 after seeing the clip in full context, I'm leaning towards A, with C still being a factor but not the primary driver.
B makes no sense.
💯
The Congressperson gave her own definition/interpretation of the words/phrases when she asked the question that doesn’t match up with the actual definitions. If Gay corrected it, some would call her a genocide sympathizer or say she’s trying to obscure the truth. If she disavowed it, she would have been criticized by her students and likely some faculty members for lying and not standing up for the students. Lose-lose situation either way.
If the people supposedly getting stolen from don't care, is it stealing? That's not how it works in my experience
Modern academic thought is a victim of its own rigorous emphasis on empiric evidence. Modern scientist: I have summarized the last 80 years of research in this field and we have demonstrated in our experiment with this slightly altered compound that it performs in a manner which is predictable through chemical principles and quantum theory. Plato: It came to me in a dream.
What a dishonest presentation of the Congressional hearing.
We showed the clip though.
OpenAI really said "Guys, or theft machine won't work if we don't steal!" Maybe don't steal? 🤔
Plagiarism is only a problem because we value the person saying it more than the message and that’s the root cause of the problem. Attribution and credit is a vain pursuit.
"Plagarism is an issue!"
"Laughs in ChatGPT"
I expect in 10 years the idea of plagiarism is going to be q lot vaguer
I'm glad the right has a tit-for-tat analogue for bringing up the use of no-no words from ten years ago