As an Editor-in-Chief of a journal for the past 20 years, I deal with plagiarism claims with some regularity and I'd love to know what these folks who dismiss this case think "actual plagiarism" looks like. https://t.co/QQmX4iW2vy Nobody is submitting Hawking's seminal paper on black holes and passing it off as their own work, wholesale. While you might see more egregious plagiarism among high school or college students, what Gay did (repeatedly in nearly half of her published work) is what plagiarism by graduate students and faculty looks like. What I posted 2 days ago is pretty much as bad as it gets. People who think this isn't plagiarism do not have a realistic view of what typical academic plagiarism looks like and I don't think they are being intellectually honest about how they would respond if someone they were not invested in did the same thing. Harvard has apparently expelled more than 50 kids in the last few years for plagiarism. I bet at least a few of them have transgressions that look just like Gay's. So do it as an undergrad and you get thrown out, but do it as a graduate student and you will get tenure and become president of the university? The standards that the most important university in the world keeps matters. Again, I'm not saying she should be fired over this. But the ground truth is that this is what it looks like when academics plagiarize and to not acknowledge that is absurd.