Excellent work, and well-researched.

This may sound like an idiotic question, but I’m wondering why this is only being discovered now, after Gay became the President of Harvard. Has no one at the most prestigious University in the country (although that claim is on increasingly shaky ground in recent years) heard of EasyBib, or any of the other programs that check an author’s work against others’?

It just seems to me that this should be a routine procedure, even before offering someone a position at an institute of higher education. Enter their work into a program that checks if they’ve cited their sources correctly.

This might have amounted to nothing. They could have pointed out any errors she might have made. Or, if these “errors” were too frequent, they might have decided not to offer her a job in the first place.

Why does Harvard not do what should be a fairly standard and simple procedure?