Not quite, and the specifics can matter a lot in cases like this. The way it was explained to me that made the most sense, was to imagine if there were two types of plagiarism: felony and misdemeanor. Felony plagiarism is taking someone else’s idea and claiming it as your own, or directly quoting an original idea without putting it in quotes, and pretending it was your idea all along. Misdemeanor plagiarism is not properly citing someone else’s idea, or simply misattributing a quote or well-established concept. Not that hard to do to be honest, and while the latter is careless and shouldn’t ever happen, Gay was accused of what would be a misdemeanor plagiarism. She didn’t steal anyone’s ideas, she just did a bad job at attribution. The distinction matters, though what she did still isn’t good, to be fair.
I challenge the idea that it is even possible to plagiarise an Acknowledgements section. It’s not a substantive section of the work and has no bearing on the work itself. In addition, boilerplate is not only extremely common for Acknowledgements, for a paper it’s essentially required. All of the acknowledgement sections of my papers are basically identical, and are basically identical to all of my colleagues on the same funding, because that’s how it works. Did we plagiarise each other or our supervisor by saying “This study was supported by ERC Horizon 2030 grant no. Xxxxxx, The Extremely Solid Study (TESS)”?
Without that article actually showing what was supposedly plagiarised in her acknowledgements, I don’t buy it.
"But her papers sometimes lift passages verbatim from other scholars and at other times make minor adjustments, like changing the word “adage” to “popular saying” or “Black male children” to “young black athletes.” - New York Times
In her PhD dissertation, and in around half of her journal articles she is alleged to have taken almost verbatim paragraphs from academic papers without acknowledging them as quotes or with proper attribution.
Plagiarism is no laughing matter, in academic circles. If a student did this they could not only flunk but be automatically expelled (depending on the rules of the University and/or Department involved), so why allow it from the literal President of the entire University?! Supposedly in at least one of these cases she later wrote to the journal and asked for it to be edited - but does that simply mean that she was caught and wanted to cover it up? Though it does not matter b/c regardless: why not be careful and precise and do the job correctly the first time, as is expected from a true professional, most especially an academic one? (correctness is kinda their whole schtick? at least usually)
This only gives the conservative media the win that they need to keep going, in pushing against DEI and other matters. It also subtly underscores another point that conservative media sometimes makes: how American universities have become profit-generation machines, at the expense of their prior role as sources of learning, i.e. since they apparently picked her over candidates who were legitimately qualified.
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