Claudine Gay messed up. She had a sweet deal as the least-qualified president to ever lead an Ivy League school. All she had to do in order to sustain her almost million-dollar-a-year, knowledge-free easy ride in perpetuity was to have enough sense to read an audience outside of the woke bubble of higher education.
You’d think that an easy task for almost any college president whose responsibilities include, in no small part, sizing up donors. But it was not for Gay, or, for that matter, her peers from MIT and UPenn, when they testified before Congress concerning antisemitism on college campuses. It was as close to a layup as one generally gets in congressional testimony. Yet this hearing was a debacle for higher education, revealing with crystal clarity how the deck is stacked when it comes to free expression in higher education.
In the aftermath of Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress, it came to light that Gay is actually good at something besides checking the right boxes on a DEI-written Ivy League hiring form—she has a genuine knack for academic dishonesty. In several papers, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay paraphrased or quoted over a dozen authors without proper attribution. There are, further, allegations of data manipulation in her published works.
A hastily created, under-the-radar review by an internal committee at Harvard cleared Gay of plagiarism. But when lawyers representing Harvard started aggressively threatening newspapers reporting on this with legal action, you knew that the circling of wagons was on.
I’ve looked at some of the papers written by Gay and the source material she used. In a few cases, I’d attribute the problem to sloppy attribution rather than outright plagiarism, but I’m more generous than Harvard’s plagiarism policy, of which she is in clear violation. But in several cases, she lifts entire paragraphs, nearly verbatim, from the source material without any attribution. There’s no getting around this. It’s blatant plagiarism.
When my students pulled anything like this, it was a bad day for them when I found out about it. It’s also a bad day for students at the institution for which Gay was the president, Harvard. But for Gay and others who exist in a parallel universe where merit and accomplishment matter less than woke DEI orthodoxy, for themselves, anyway, it’s become a litany of excuses for Gay (including redefining plagiarism) and vilification of her critics.
Are some of Gay’s critics out to get her at all costs just because they don’t like her and what she represents? Undoubtedly. But if there were no “there” there, they’d be out of luck.
You pick a profession beyond education: medicine, law, science, or business, and I’ll show you people at or near the top of it that make Claudine Gay look like Einstein. I and everyone else who’s been a part of any large professional organization where DEI had a foothold in the past two decades had front-row seats for the competition between merit and identity, which identity won.
That’s why the AMA, in ignorance of biology, has a woke policy on gender. It’s why Bud Lite had advertising executives who thought that it was a good brand move to trash their core consumers. It’s why university physics and math departments, representing two of the most rational and objective fields in academia, are awash with “scholars” who couldn’t explain string theory or quantum entanglement to save their lives but can spin up a mean yarn about the decolonization of light.
The real tragedy of the Claudine Gay saga isn’t plagiarism; it’s that she was the president of an Ivy League school in the first place.
The fact that her resignation, after a catastrophic turn before Congress, subsequent
revelations of plagiarism and data manipulation, a sham investigation conducted by the Harvard Corporation and many subsequent citation “adjustments” to her grand total of around a dozen publications still took several weeks, is embarrassing.
All that changed with her resignation was that Gay succeeded in finally doing something that she was inexplicably, for an Ivy League university president, unable to do in front of Congress: read the room.
Right up until the end, Ms. Gay still had many defenders, among them a few plagiarism “experts” and even a few from whom she had lifted work without attribution. This is as stunning as Ms. Gay’s missteps. It shows that we have a long way to go in cleaning up the mess that higher education has become.
The real problem here isn’t that Gay relied on a DEI crib sheet instead of common sense when discussing antisemitism on her campus before Congress, or that she’s a serial plagiarist. The problem is that she became president of one of the premier universities in all of the world based on stupors and vapors—a position for which she was eminently unqualified and completely out of her depth. The academy is on life support if Gay is, indeed, supposed to be among the cream of the crop.
Gay’s relevant academic experience, in addition to a paltry 11 publications (stunningly, not a book among them), largely consisted of using her position as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, for which she was also unqualified, to punish black scholars who didn’t toe the DEI line.
Scholars such as Roland Sullivan, Dean of Winthrop House, the first black faculty dean of a house at Harvard. Gay terminated Sullivan, an attorney because he chose to represent Harvey Weinstein. I guess Gay never read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If she had, she’d know that in America, even a werewolf is entitled to legal counsel.
Next, Gay went after Economics Professor Roland Fryer. Professor Fryer, a genuine Rags to Riches inspirational tale, a man supremely qualified and deserving of his tenured professorship, came into the crosshairs of Gay for having the temerity to publish scholarly research that ran against the prevailing narrative of racism driving the killings of unarmed black men.
Though tenure did what it was supposed to do in Fryer’s case, his lab was shut down, and his reputation was besmirched. Fryer’s travails echo the tale of David and Goliath, except in this rendering, David is a small and pitiful pinhead and Goliath a true giant.
Some bells you can’t unring. Getting rid of Gay does next to nothing to address the real problem here: the hostile takeover of higher education by DEI, its attendant postmodern nonsense, and its assault on merit. Until all of that is addressed, Claudine Gay is just the tip of the iceberg.
(1) comment
I would argue that students, professors, international sages have at one time or another, through carelessness, oversight or laziness, used other sources in their own papers without the proper citation. Karma has comeback to bite Ackman's wife for plagiarizing parts of her dissertation. He wo lives by the money sword shall suffer by the sword.
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