Plagerism

Kamala Harris has become embroiled in a second plagiarism row after she was accused of copying a Republican’s congressional testimony.

The vice-president was last week accused of taking more than a dozen sections of her book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer from other sources, including a story once told by Martin Luther King Jr.

Now, fresh allegations have emerged that the former prosecutor lifted more than 1,000 words from the testimony of a Republican state attorney when called as a witness before Congress.

Vice President Kamala Harris is under scrutiny due to allegations of plagiarism in a book that she coauthored in 2009.

According to a new report by Dr. Stefan Weber, Austrian "plagiarism hunter," Harris and co-author Joan O'C Hamilton had 27 "fragments of plagiarism" in the book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.

In the 49-page report, Weber and his team also allege that the Democratic presidential nominee and her coauthor copied and pasted from a Wikipedia article for the book.

New York Times’ plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey released his "full analysis" of the allegations against Vice President Kamala Harris and found them "more serious" than he initially believed. 

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo published claims on Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris had copied portions of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime,” citing five sections that he said were lifted from widely available sites including Wikipedia and news reports.

The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book. Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco.

Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” chant by a Hamas-praising guest speaker. The school made plans to segregate students by race for courses on left-wing ideology, and two of its psychiatry residents championed “revolutionary suicide.”

Harvard University has shed fresh light on the ongoing investigation into plagiarism accusations against former president Claudine Gay, including that an independent body recommended a broader review after substantiating some of the complaints.

In a letter Friday to a congressional committee, Harvard said it learned of the plagiarism allegations against its first Black female president on Oct. 24 from a New York Post reporter. The school reached out to several authors whom Gay is accused of plagiarizing and none objected to her language, it said.

It’s said that these days universities are echo chambers, but perhaps nobody expected it to be demonstrated quite so literally. At the beginning of the month, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned following weeks of plagiarism allegations. Some of these were unambiguous: whole paragraphs replicated with minimal alteration in a way that couldn’t easily be explained away as accidental.

American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as a cardinal sin. Accusations of academic dishonesty have ruined the careers of faculty and undergraduates alike.

The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.

The Associated Press was mocked on social media Wednesday after publishing an article blaming conservatives for using plagiarism as a new “weapon” after Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned amid extensive plagiarism allegations.