To the Editor:

Re “Why Claudine Gay Should Go,” by John McWhorter (column, nytimes.com, Dec. 21):

Mr. McWhorter argues that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, should be held to the same academic standards as the institution’s undergraduates. If only that were true!

When I was a graduate student there in the late 1990s, I was warned by a senior professor not to pursue a case of plagiarism because it might lead to a lawsuit. The university, he confided, had recently lost a costly court case brought by the parents of a student accused of plagiarism.

Plagiarists are rarely brought to account, especially in academe, where it is often treated as a minor delict. How do I know? I’ve been plagiarized by at least two other academics, including a visiting professor at Harvard during my first year of graduate school. Neither she nor the other offender ever faced any consequences.

Andrew I. Port
Detroit
The writer is a professor of history at Wayne State University.

To the Editor

Re “Harvard Finds More ‘Duplicative Language’ of President” (news article, Dec. 22):

I find it quite odd for The Times to consistently lead the coverage of Claudine Gay’s academic work with an overemphasis that “conservative” voices have driven the claims of plagiarism.

The issue is not the political background of the whistle-blowers, but the actual charges. I (hardly a conservative if it matters) wrote articles, a master’s thesis, a Ph.D. dissertation and a book, and I can guarantee that in each case I knew my writing and what I got from other sources (primary and secondary).

Nothing bothered my mentor and friend, the late historian Stan Kutler, more than plagiarists who claimed, after getting caught, that their stealing was an oversight, a little mistake, a slight error, a problem in checking content. No, they simply got caught.