Saturday, January 06, 2024

Sloppy Attribution

 The Claudine Gay story keeps on wasting kilobytes.  Not much ink, but plenty of digital space.  During my brush with scholarship in the 70s and 80s, I learned a few things.  How to build a footnote, for example, or how to construct a bibliography. I admit that I didn't have many original thoughts, and had to learn to stand on the backs of others.

Without those cites, it become plagiarism.  If Gay was writing peer-reviewed articles, or even her dissertation, then either her peers who reviewed the articles, or the committee who reviewed her dissertation should have caught the sloppy citations and had her fix them.

Now, some are saying that the attack on Gay is an attack on DEI. (See what I did there?  That link is a digital attribution..)

If Gay's peers, or her dissertation committee had done their job, we would not have a problem.  We might disagrees with Gay's politics, but we could not attack her scholarship.  If Gay had good scholarship, we could not call her an affirmative action pick.

4 comments:

Andrew said...

https://i.imgur.com/LjksXcj.jpg

Justin_O_Guy said...

Al Capone should have offered Sloppy Attribution up to the IRS.

Old NFO said...

Good point!

Anonymous said...

But but but holding any minority to the same standards as anyone else is racist!! They get at least a 33.3% reduction. And when the job candidate can check 3 minority boxes that lowers the bar by 3 thirds! So Gay was totally qualified and then some, worth every penny of her $900,000 annual salary plus bennies. Demoting her was racist sexist and anti LGBTQ+ at least!! /sarc